Happiness may buy money, professor says

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- If you think getting that promotion at work, an "A" on your algebra test or a 290 game at the bowling alley will make you happy, you may be looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Personal and professional success may affect happiness, but the effect appears to work the other way as well, with happy people more likely to achieve favorable life circumstances, say a University of Illinois psychology professor and his colleagues.

Happy people are more likely to work actively toward goals and build resources to achieve them. They also tend to be more confident, optimistic, energetic and sociable and better able to cope with difficult situations, which can help lead to success.

On top of that, happy people apparently have better personal relationships overall, are healthier and maybe even live longer.

The findings by UI Professor Ed Diener and his collaborators are somewhat contrary to a commonly held idea that happiness naturally follows from successes.

"In most domains ... there's some effect going the other way," Diener said. "It looks like when you're happy, your immune system's stronger, for example. Happy people tend to get married, happy people tend to stay married."

"The whole thing is sort of surprising," he said.

One study measured the happiness of thousands of college students nationwide in the 1970s and then checked back with them in the '90s. Those who had been rated as cheerful in school were making $15,000 a year more on average when other influences, such as family income, gender and academic major, were factored out, an effect Diener characterized as huge.

Other research showed that happy people were more productive at work, rated higher by their bosses, more likely to help other employees and less likely to steal from the company.

"You can pay people more and you won't get as big effects," Diener said.

The old saying that "money can't buy happiness" may be correct, too. Diener surveyed people on the Forbes 200 list and found them only marginally happier than the average Joe. A lot of them cited things such as feelings of accomplishment in their business and family as being bigger factors in their happiness than the money they had made.

A study looking at lottery winners yielded similar results, although Diener noted that winning the lottery can have negative as well as positive consequences, including the stress from all manner of people looking to borrow money from you.

Diener and colleagues Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California at Riverside, and Laura King at the University of Missouri reviewed more than 225 studies examining happiness from various perspectives both in lab experiments and real life. Their findings were outlined last month in Psychological Bulletin from the American Psychological Association.

The bottom line: The review provides strong support that happiness, in many cases, leads to successful outcomes rather than merely following from them, according to Lyubomirsky, the study's lead author, King and Diener.

And not just in the workplace, classroom and bowling alley.

A long-term study of nuns, which gauged their happiness at a time when they averaged 22 years old, later found that the happy participants tended to live nearly a decade longer. That's a bigger positive effect than smoking or alcoholism are negative, Diener said.

But Diener said he and his colleagues aren't implying that happiness alone is enough to yield success, simply that it can play a role.

"Happiness is only one factor," he said. "We would never be saying that intelligence and hard work and these other things don't matter."