From influence of happiness

Max Planck researchers study effects of subjective well-being

How do perceived well-being and factors such as income, marital status, health and professional success interact? Martin Binder and Alex Coad from the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena investigated this question. Your result: Increased well-being leads, among other things, to better health and greater professional success.

The Max Planck researchers examined a British longitudinal data set in which people regularly reported their subjective (psychological) well-being using a detailed psychometric scale over a period of 15 years. The questions asked were how happy individuals felt, as well as the occurrence of stress, depression or anxiety, for example. The respondents also provided information on factors such as income, marital status, health or professional success.

With the so-called "Panel Vector Autoregressions", the Jena scientists used a special statistical procedure to visualize the joint development of the subjectively perceived well-being with the other factors. The co-evolution of these variables was therefore important: How can this complex network of "You need a global perspective for this: Factors do not work individually and independently of each other, all factors also influence each other," explains Martin Binder: "and that over different periods of time." find a job and/or subsequently increase their income.

The analysis of the data showed two robust results in particular:

After an increase in their own well-being, people also experience positive changes in other factors. Happier people consequently also increased their income or reported better health. Conversely, however, positive changes in income, for example, led to declining well-being in the years that followed. “This phenomenon is known as 'hedonic adaptation': people adapt to positive or negative events; these events do not necessarily have a lasting effect on their well-being,” explains Binder.

The study is part of a larger research project for which Martin Binder was recently awarded the 2010 German Study Prize by the Körber Foundation.

Original work:

"An examination of the dynamics of well-being and life events using vector autoregressions" by Martin Binder, Alex Coad. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 76 (2010) 352-371 doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2010.06.006

Source: Jena [ Max Planck Institute for Economics ]