What brings us happiness?
There has been an explosion of research dedicated to the issue in the past decade. Some researchers now believe that our emotional buoyancy is genetically set within a range, which acts as an anchor to our enthusiasm in good times and as a balloon in bad.
One of the first studies into set ranges of happiness, by researchers at Northwestern University in 1978, showed that lottery winners and spinal-cord-injury victims both fall back to their original happiness ranges within a year of either event -- a raft of research since has backed their findings.
This creates a happiness paradox: We may imagine we couldn't survive the end of a marriage or death of a family member, yet our innate "psychological immune system" is well equipped to greet these disasters when they occur, says Daniel Gilbert, a researcher at the department of psychology at Harvard University. The flip side is that things we imagine will make us happy -- a new car, a new career or a new spouse -- may give some temporary elation, but eventually the exhilaration fades.
Within our set ranges, however, there is room to maneuver, says Gordon Parker, psychiatrist and executive director of Black Dog Institute, a Sydney-based facility for treating mood disorders.
Happier people, he says, tend to have a few key traits in common: they believe in causes larger than themselves; they are more optimistic; they don't look to material wealth for fulfillment; and they have many meaningful relationships. "They tend to be more resilient ... more flexible and more focused on the present and the future, not the past," says Dr. Parker.
Simply being in a job for the money doesn't deliver happiness. Research by Richard Easterlin, professor of economics at the University of Southern California, supports that: His 2003 study of 1,500 people in the U.S. over three decades found that as incomes increased, happiness didn't.
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