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a) Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/health/research/01happy.html
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: May 31, 2010
It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old.
It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.
“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”
The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.
The survey also asked about “global well-being” by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.
Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal “hedonic well-being,” a person’s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.
The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old. On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.
In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.
Other experts were impressed with the work. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology at Warwick Business School in England, who has published several studies on human happiness, called the findings important and, in some ways, heartening. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s,” he said. “And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”
Dr. Stone, who is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that the findings raised questions that needed more study. “These results say there are distinctive patterns here,” he said, “and it’s worth some research effort to try to figure out what’s going on. Why at age 50 does something seem to start to change?”
The study was not designed to figure out which factors make people happy, and the poll’s health questions were not specific enough to draw any conclusions about the effect of disease or disability on happiness in old age. But the researchers did look at four possibilities: the sex of the interviewee, whether the person had a partner, whether there were children at home and employment status. “These are four reasonable candidates,” Dr. Stone said, “but they don’t make much difference.”
For people under 50 who may sometimes feel gloomy, there may be consolation here. The view seems a bit bleak right now, but look at the bright side: you are getting old.
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b) It's never too late to right your wrongs, big or small
The author of a new book offers advice on how to make amends.
by Lee Kravitz • May 30, 2010
Lee Kravitz, author of Unfinished Business: One Man's Extraordinary year of Trying to Do the Right Things, shares some lessons that he has learned. (Comstock, Getty Images)
After I lost my job in October 2007, I took stock of my life and didn't like what I saw. Working as hard as I had over the years, I had become disconnected from the people who mattered most to me.
My wife and three young children were afraid to approach me. My daughter told people, “Daddy never smiles.” I hadn't talked to some of my closest friends in more than a decade.
Instead of rushing back into the job market, I decided to spend a year reconnecting with my friends and relatives and making amends. I devoted myself to tending to what I called “my unfinished business.” That has helped me become a more attentive husband, father, son and friend — and a happier, more energetic person.
In the crunch of our lives, we lose touch with relatives and friends. Kindnesses don't get reciprocated and thank-yous never get said. Our grudges and rivalries persist when it would be better to forgive, heal and move on.
Most of us will never have the luxury of a full year to close circles and make amends. Still, you can keep your unfinished business from accumulating, even while leading a busy, stressful life.
Now that I've had ample opportunity to revisit my past mistakes — and experience the rewards of fixing them — I'd like to share some of the lessons I learned:
Take stock of your life.
Have you lost touch with people who were important to you? Are there things you've done or not done that gnaw at you? Are there people in your life who could die tomorrow without knowing how much they meant to you? Keep a list of your unfinished business and chip away at it.
Start small.
Instead of trying to put an end to the cold war dividing your family, begin with a project you can control. Apologize to your brother for not attending his Super Bowl party. Respond to an e-mail you should have answered a week ago. Write a note or make a call.
Identify your fears.
Unfinished business often is the result of an underlying fear that needs to be addressed. For example, I wasn't able to express my condolences to a friend whose daughter had been killed in Iraq until I realized how afraid I was of intruding on his grief.
Reach out and reconnect.
Thanks to the Internet, it has never been easier to locate and communicate with people. (It took me just a few minutes to track down a friend who had changed his name and become a monk.)
Be sincere.
No matter what the wrong, the most important ingredient in making it right is your sincerity. If you reach out with a genuine heart, your friends will be delighted to hear from you again.
Reflect on your experience.
This is key to learning and growing. Keep a journal, or summarize what you've learned in e-mails to friends.
The hurdles we face in tackling our unfinished business can seem impossibly high, but the first step in clearing them can be simple: Again, write a note or make a phone call. Once you identify your fears and reach beyond them, you'll become a more complete and contented person.
LEE KRAVITZ is author of the new book Unfinished Business: One Man's Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things. For more on how to right the wrongs in your life, go to www.MyUnfinishedBusiness.com.
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c) Moving frequently in childhood not good
ANI, Jun 4, 2010, 04.58pm IST
Moving frequently in childhood not good (Getty Images)
Frequent relocations in childhood are related to poorer well-being in adulthood, especially among people who are more introverted or neurotic, according to a new study.
The researchers tested the relation between the number of childhood moves and well-being in a sample of 7,108 American adults who were followed for 10 years.
"We know that children who move frequently are more likely to perform poorly in school and have more behavioural problems. However, the long-term effects of moving on well-being in adulthood have been overlooked by researchers," said the study’s lead author, Shigehiro Oishi, of the University of Virginia.
The study’s participants, who were between the ages of 20 and 75, were contacted as part of a nationally representative random sample survey in 1994 and 1995 and were surveyed again 10 years later.
They were asked how many times they had moved as children, as well as about their psychological well-being, personality type and social relationships.
The researchers found that the more times people moved as children, the more likely they were to report lower life satisfaction and psychological well-being at the time they were surveyed, even when controlling for age, gender and education level.
The research also showed that those who moved frequently as children had fewer quality social relationships as adults.
The researchers also looked to see if different personality types - extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism - affected frequent movers’ well-being.
Among introverts, the more moves participants reported as children, the worse off they were as adults. This was in direct contrast to the findings among extraverts.
"Moving a lot makes it difficult for people to maintain long-term close relationships. This might not be a serious problem for outgoing people who can make friends quickly and easily. Less outgoing people have a harder time making new friends," said Oishi.
The findings showed neurotic people who moved frequently reported less life satisfaction and poorer psychological well-being than people who did not move as much and people who were not neurotic.
Neuroticism was defined for this study as being moody, nervous and high strung. However, the number and quality of neurotic people’s relationships had no effect on their well-being, no matter how often they had moved as children.
In the article, Oishi speculates this may be because neurotic people have more negative reactions to stressful life events in general.
The findings are reported in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , published by the American Psychological Association.
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d) Want to be happy? Have a conversation
http://www.usaweekend.com/article/20100604/HOME/6060310/Want-to-be-happy-Have-a-conversation
Sharon Jayson • June 6, 2010
SMALL TALK doesn't cut it. What's important to a happy life are meaningful conversations, say psychologists at the University of Arizona in Tucson and Washington University in St. Louis.
Their study, published online in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, found greater well-being from spending less time alone and more time talking meaningfully to others.
To learn about differences in conversation, researchers had volunteers complete personality and well-being assessments. Then, over four days, they wore a recording device that sampled 30 seconds of sound every 121/2 minutes, providing more than 20,000 recordings. Researchers identified conversations as trivial or substantive. They found the happiest participants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talking than the unhappiest.
Researchers suggest deep conversations may give a sense of meaning in interactions with others, which may make people happier.
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