Academic Abstract People want to pursue happiness but often fail, a phenomenon known as the paradox of pursuing happiness. The mechanisms underlying this paradox remain elusive. Age differences in happiness—specifically that older adults appear more successful in pursuing happiness (the emotion paradox of aging)—provide valuable insights into effective happiness pursuit. Drawing on this literature, we propose an intergoal compatibility account to interpret both paradoxes through the lens of intergoal interactions, an intuitively critical yet underexplored factor in existing interpretations. This account asserts that greater compatibility (fewer conflicts and greater facilitation) between happiness pursuit and other important personal goals enhances the effectiveness of happiness pursuit, and such compatibility can be enhanced through contextual influences (e.g., age-graded developmental tasks) and strategic self-regulation (e.g., goal adjustments). This account generates testable predictions and practical implications for enhancing happiness pursuit across the lifespan. Public Abstract Why do people often struggle to achieve happiness? And why are older adults happier than younger adults, even though they face more losses in life? While these questions have drawn extensive attention, they remain puzzling. A crucial yet insufficiently explored factor in successful happiness pursuit is intergoal compatibility —the extent to which the pursuit of happiness aligns or conflicts with other important personal goals. For younger adults, the demands of age-related developmental tasks (e.g., educational and career aspirations) often create conflicts with the pursuit of happiness, diminishing its effectiveness. Conversely, in older adults, happiness becomes more prioritized and compatible with other important personal goals, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of pursuing happiness. A lesson we can learn from older adults is to pursue happiness in ways compatible with other important personal goals.
Why older people are happier and what we can learn from them | Psyche Ideas
Around the world, happiness tends to peak later in life. It has more to do with balancing priorities than elderly wisdom
Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead
Whether its our careers, health or relationships, we often set the bar too high and end up feeling disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Try this new way of thinking … and you may just see some real results
Adult age differences in monetary decisions with real and hypothetical reward
Abstract Age differences in monetary decisions may emerge because younger and older adults perceive the value of outcomes differently. Yet, age‐differential effects of monetary rewards on decisions are not well understood. Most laboratory studies on aging and decision making have used scenarios in which rewards were merely hypothetical (decisions did not have any real consequences) or in which only small amounts of money were at stake. In the current study, we compared younger adults' (20–29 years) and older adults' (61–82 years) decisions in probabilistic choice problems with real or hypothetical rewards. Decision‐contingent rewards were in a typical range of previous studies (gains of up to ~4.25 USD) or substantially scaled up (gains of up to ~85 USD per participant). Reward type (real vs. hypothetical) affected decision quality, including value maximization, switching between options, and dominance violations (choices of an option that was inferior to another option in all respects). Decision quality was markedly better with real than hypothetical rewards in older adults and correlated with numeracy in both age groups. However, we found no evidence that reward type affected people's risk preferences. Overall, the findings portray a fairly positive picture regarding the use of hypothetical scenarios to assess preferences: With carefully prepared instructions, people from different age groups indicate preferences in hypothetical scenarios that match their decisions with real and much higher rewards. One advantage of using real rewards is that they help to reduce decision noise.
Mindful Judgment and Decision Making
A full range of psychological processes has been put into play to explain judgment and choice phenomena. Complementing work on attention, information integration, and learning, decision research over the past 10 years has also examined the effects of goals, mental representation, and memory processes. In addition to deliberative processes, automatic processes have gotten closer attention, and the emotions revolution has put affective processes on a footing equal to cognitive ones. Psychological process models provide natural predictions about individual differences and lifespan changes and integrate across judgment and decision making (JDM) phenomena. “Mindful” JDM research leverages our knowledge about psychological processes into causal explanations for important judgment and choice regularities, emphasizing the adaptive use of an abundance of processing alternatives. Such explanations supplement and support existing mathematical descriptions of phenomena such as loss aversion or hyperbolic discounting. Unlike such descriptions, they also provide entry points for interventions designed to help people overcome judgments or choices considered undesirable.
Want to Be Happy? Think Like an Old Person (Published 2017)
In a series update, we catch up with a group of New Yorkers over age 90: warm, cranky, funny and three years older than when we first met them.
The Case for Lowering Your Expectations
It may be the key to happiness and sustainable performance
The Principles of Getting Ahead.
Two people can start from almost the same place. Same age. Similar intelligence. Same 24 hours in a day. Five years later, their lives can look completely different. 1 One has built valuable skills
Ten Steps Towards Happiness - Hintjens.com
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Life insurance, loss aversion, and temporal orientation: a field experiment and replication with young adults
Young individuals rarely seek information about life insurance—a product that offers long-term benefits that might not motivate a desire to act now. Framing life insurance messaging as a gain in the present (e.g., “ensure your loved ones are protected today”) is thought to motivate younger individuals to seek information about insurance policies. A field experiment with a large life insurance issuer and a pre-registered experiment reveal that loss aversion and temporal orientation frames influences whether individuals aged 25–49 years shop for life insurance. Specifically, the results suggest that the superiority of gain frames over loss frames requires positioning the benefits well in the future, despite the need to act now. This study thus also contextualizes the realities and practical difficulty of framing financial products in ways that might interest a potentially vulnerable population.
A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning.
Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
Employee well-being and happiness are surprisingly powerful predictors of performance.
How your bank balance buys happiness: The importance of “cash on hand” to life satisfaction.
The downside of being happy
Nobody likes to be sad, but it can have a powerful and positive effect.
A Deceptively Simple Way to Find More Happiness at Work (Published 2019)
You don’t need to change everything about your job to see major benefits. A few changes here and there can be all you need.
Over nearly 80 years, Harvard study has been showing how to live a healthy and happy life
For nearly 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been producing data and lessons on how to live longer, happier, and healthier lives.
