Happiness

Young  woman looking  shocked

Image: iStock photo

Sex apparently is like income: People are generally happy when they keep pace with the Joneses and they’re even happier if they get a bit more.

That’s one finding of Tim Wadsworth, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, who recently published the results of a study of how sexual frequency corresponds with happiness.

As has been well documented with income, the happiness linked with having more sex can rise or fall depending on how individuals believe they measure up to their peers, Wadsworth found.

His paper, “Sex and the Pursuit of Happiness: How Other People’s Sex Lives are Related to Our Sense of Well-Being,” was published in the February edition of Social Indicators Research.

Using national survey data and statistical analyses, Wadsworth found that people reported steadily higher levels of happiness as they reported steadily higher sexual frequency. But he also found that even after controlling for their own sexual frequency, people who believed they were having less sex than their peers were unhappier than those who believed they were having as much or more than their peers.

“There’s an overall increase in sense of well-being that comes with engaging in sex more frequently, but there’s also this relative aspect to it,” he said. “Having more sex makes us happy, but thinking that we are having more sex than other people makes us even happier.”

Wadsworth analyzed data from the General Social Survey, which has been taking the “pulse of America” since 1972. All respondents in all years are asked whether they are “very happy, pretty happy or not too happy.”

The survey has included questions about sexual frequency since 1989. Wadsworth’s sample included 15,386 people who were surveyed between 1993 and 2006.

After controlling for many other factors, including income, education, marital status, health, age, race and other characteristics, respondents who reported having sex at least two to three times a month were 33 percent more likely to report a higher level of happiness than those who reported having no sex during the previous 12 months.

The happiness effect appears to rise with frequency. Compared to those who had no sex in the previous year, those reporting a once-weekly frequency were 44 percent more likely to report a higher level of happiness. Those reporting having sex two to three times a week are 55 percent more likely to report a higher level of happiness.

But while personal income can be inferred by a neighbor’s flashy new car or home renovation, sex is a more cloistered activity. So how do, say, men or women in their 20s know how frequently their peers have sex?

Though sex is a private matter, the mass media and other sources of information provide clues. For instance, Wadsworth noted, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal and The AARP Magazine — with a combined circulation of 30 million—frequently report the results of their own or others’ sex surveys.

Television and film depictions might also play a role, and, Wadsworth writes, “there is plenty of evidence that information concerning normative sexual behavior is learned through discussions within peer groups and friendship networks.”

As a result of this knowledge, if members of a peer group are having sex two to three times a month but believe their peers are on a once-weekly schedule, their probability of reporting a higher level of happiness falls by about 14 percent, Wadsworth found.

Wadsworth is also a research associate at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Behavioral Science and his research interests include the general study of happiness.

He noted that the data do not necessarily prove that social comparisons cause the effects he observed. However, “I can’t think of a better explanation for why how much sex other people are having would influence a person’s happiness,” he said.

The way most people engage in social comparison can be problematic, he noted. “We’re usually not looking down and therefore thinking of ourselves as better off, but we’re usually looking up and therefore feeling insufficient and inadequate.”

On the other hand, people are social creatures and any sense of self or identity is dependent on others. In his introductory sociology classes, Wadsworth asks students to write three adjectives, any adjectives, to describe themselves.

“And then I ask them, ‘Do your adjectives have any meaning whatsoever if you’re alone on a desert island, in the sense that there’s no one to compare yourself to?’ ”

Regardless of the adjective — attractive, smart, funny, poor — “these things are meaningful only if there’s some sense of what other people are like,” he said. “As such, we can only be wealthy if others are poor, or sexually active if others are inactive.”

University of Colorado Boulder

By Paul Frijters, University of Queensland and Tony Beatton, Queensland University of Technology

older happy overweight couple

Image: istockphoto

People are at their happiest at retirement age and their most miserable in their geriatric years, according to a study we published recently in the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation. Our findings effectively debunk the myth of middle-aged blues and show how happiness levels vary widely over a person’s lifespan.

 

We all strive towards happiness to achieve a sense of fulfilment in our lives. But there is also an economic reason to advocate this goal. Happier people tend to be healthier than those who are unhappy; and mentally unhealthy people are costly.

According to the Department of Health and Ageing and beyondblue, depression treatment costs the Australian community more than $600 million each year. It’s expected depression will be second only to heart disease as the leading medical cause of death and disability within the next 20 years.

Existing ideas of happiness

The notion that happiness is U-shaped over a person’s lifetime has gained a lot of momentum over the past decade. The U-shape of the happiness myth goes something like this: we were happy in our youth, became more miserable in our mid-40s, only to have happiness return in our late-50s. We then confront an inevitable happiness decline as our health fails in our late-70s and beyond.

Previous research supporting the U-shape model of happiness incorrectly assumed that life factors (such as level of income, education, marital status and health) remained constant over a lifetime. And rather than following an individual over many years to see how happy they are at different ages, researchers studied various groups of people at different stages of their lives whilst inappropriate presuming they shared the same characteristics.

New research

Our research interrogated the U-shape of happiness theory by examining how happiness levels changed in a sample of 60,000 people in Australia, Britain, and Germany, over many years.

stooped old man

Happiness levels drop quickly as death approaches for people between the ages of 80 and 90. Flickr/rubybgold

We accounted for statistical limitations such as character traits and availability. This is important because being part of a study isn’t a random event: those who are busier (and perhaps happier in their middle-aged years) are less likely to take part in these studies. But happier (and therefore healthier) older people who have more time on their hands are more likely to be involved.

Hence the previous economic studies over-estimated the misery in mid-life and under-estimated it for very old people who were too sick to respond.

Unexpectedly, there was also the matter of increased honesty: Germans who were surveyed ten years in a row were significantly less happy than Germans interviewed at the beginning and end of the same period. The more a German talked, the unhappier she seemed to become; the dominant interpretation is that she became more honest about her true feelings and kept up a facade earlier on.

A similar thing occurs in Britain, but to a lesser degree. Australians had no such tendency. Correcting for both selectivity and dishonest reporting, we arrived at the wave-like profile below (click on the magnifying glass to zoom).

graph

A comparison of happiness in relation to age in Australia, Germany and Britain.

Our findings appear more in the line with the large body of psychological literature on the issue: there are no middle-age blues. Happiness is level through from about the age of 20 to retirement age (55 to 60), peaking at age 65 to 70 for Australians, then dropping increasingly fast as death approaches (80 to 90).

The same was found in Britain and Germany, though the happiness wave among the retired was far more pronounced there than elsewhere.

What’s next for happiness research?

One of the frontiers is how to promote happy personalities, which turn out to be extroverted personalities. Extroverts cope better with life shocks and are thus less stressed.

But how do we increase extroversion?

The short answer is we don’t know. Though the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) of Professor Martin Seligman and his team at the University of Pennsylvania have been experimenting with telling school children how great they are, stimulating them to be open and extroverted. There are no results yet from these studies, but the idea is to look at whether we can educate children to be extroverted, and therefore happier, by stimulating their creativity and willingness to speak out.

Happiness policy is a relatively new concept in our society and we are only just getting used to the idea that it is something valid for our governments to worry about. We want our children to grow up as happy adults so we need to promote happy personality traits.

Meanwhile it is comforting to know that the happiest years come after retirement! Something to look forward to rather than dread.

Paul Frijters received ARC funding to do this work.

Tony Beatton does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

The Conversation

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Does Marriage Really Make People Happier?

brideandgroomA new study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family reveals that married couples experience few advantages for psychological well-being, health, or social ties compared to unmarried couples who live together. While both marriage and cohabitation provide benefits over being single, these reduce over time following a honeymoon period.

“Marriage has long been an important social institution, but in recent decades western societies have experienced increases in cohabitation, before or instead of marriage, and increases in children born outside of marriage,” said Dr Kelly Musick, Associate Professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology. “These changes have blurred the boundaries of marriage, leading to questions about what difference marriage makes in comparison to alternatives.”

Previous research has sought to prove a link between marriage and well-being, but many studies compared marriage to being single, or compared marriages and cohabitations at a single point in time. This study compares marriage to cohabitation while using a fixed-effects approach that focuses on what changes when single men and women move into marriage or cohabitation and the extent to which any effects of marriage and cohabitation persist over time. [continue reading…]