Our happiness levels are not constant throughout our lives
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The commonly kept belief that Lykke follows a U-shaped curve-with-top at the beginning and the end of the lifeman is wrong.
The pattern was popularized in a usual paper by scientists David Blachflower and Andrew Oswald in 2008, based on data from half a million people. Since then it has been kept as a common faith and has even been the subject of mainstream books.
But Fabian Kratz and Josef Brüderl – both at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany – claim this belief may be wrong.
Kratz says he was motivated to revise the claim ”because [the U-curve] Did not reflect my personal experience with older people. ”
Instead of shaping a U-shaped curve, they found that happiness generally falls slowly through adults until people’s late 50s, when it begins to cross upwards until 64, and then fall dramatically.
One of the reasons why Kratz believes previous investigations have come to what he sees as wrong conclusions is that they surpass the Happy of Happiness, partly by ignoring deaths B3 “You get the impression that happiness after a certain age would only rise because the unhappy people are already dead,” says Kratz.
“There has been a lot of debate in the social sciences about unplanned find results that disappear when new data is collected,” says Julia Rohrer at the University of Leipzig. “But there is another, less valued performed: Researchers sometimes analyze their data in systematically defective ways. This can produce results that replicate the limit, yet is still misleading.”
Others say the results come up with a new set of questions. “This paper is great at thinking about what we are really trying to know in research,” says Philip Cohen at the University of Maryland, but he points out that we now have to try to learn why happiness is changing throughout our lives and if the troughs can be avoided. Kratz and Brüderl themselves are eager to avoid speculating why the changes they observed occur.
Oswald says the paper “has been interested in results and that all research should be welcomed”, but he adds that the couple does not control factors such as marriage and income, which can.
He out of this study only looked at one country, so we don’t know if the results apply otherwise. Kratz says this would be an interesting opportunity for future research, especially as the conclusions could have consequences for the policy. “Former scholars claimed that we need affirmative action policies to help individuals tackle their midlife crisis,” says Kratz. “I would not say that this is not urgent, but our results suggest that the most new thing is to add happiness in old age.”
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