Happiness360

A: Campbell and Brickman hypothesized that we live on a "hedonic treadmill" - that we react strongly to good events, but then come back to neutral. They called this a treadmill because one can never stay happy for long; one works for good things, but adapts to them once they are attained. In a sense, they contended that life is like an addiction -- that one gets pleasure from things at first, but after addiction one must obtain the thing just to avoid pain. Solomon's opponent process theory and Heady and Wearings' dynamic equilibrium model are based on similar assumptions.

In a classic set of studies, Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman found that lottery winners were only a tiny bit happier than nonwinners, and that people with spinal cord injuries were not as unhappy as one might expect. These early studies suffered from a number of weaknesses, but later research has generally supported the idea of adaptation. For example, Roxanne Silver found that people in a hospital because of a new spinal cord injury had moods that showed adaptation over the first two months after their injury. During this time their fear and sadness declined and their happiness increased. In other words, over time they experienced greater happiness and less of the negative emotions than they did one week after their injury. Similarly, in our laboratory Mark Suh found that most events (e.g., getting a raise at work) don't have much influence on people's SWB after two months.

One problem with the adaptation literature is that few studies have actually followed people over time. In a recent study with Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis, we examined adaptation over a period of many years. We find that people do adapt (react strongly at first and then return toward their baseline moods) to many conditions, but they do not adapt completely to all conditions, at least not within four years. Here are some examples: We find that men adapt to marriage - they are very happy at first, but then return to their premarriage baseline after a few years. However, women show only partial adaptation. They react strongly in the positive direction to marriage, and then return toward their baseline - but on average never return quite to their previous baseline. Similarly, unemployed men show only partial adaptation - they react strongly in the negative direction to loss of their job, they then return toward their baseline, but they never quite return to the level of SWB of when they were working.

So adaptation is a very important process. But some conditions do matter even in the long-run. People may partially adapt to them, but for some conditions people may never adapt completely.

Last updated on September 14, 2007 by Dr. Walt