Feeling Good Is Feeling Better

Abstract

Can people remember their past happiness? We analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany spanning from the 1970s until the present, in which more than 60,000 adults were asked questions about their current and past life satisfaction. We uncovered systematic biases in recalled happiness: On average, people tended to overstate the improvement in their well-being over time and to understate their past happiness. But this aggregate figure hides a deep asymmetry: Whereas happy people recall the evolution of their life to be better than it was, unhappy ones tend to exaggerate their life’s negative evolution. It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday. This recall structure has implications for motivated memory and learning and could explain why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower, and are more open to new experiences.

The WELLBY: a new measure of social value and progress

“…It corresponds more with the story humans tell about their lives than some notion of "life as it was experienced at the time". Lastly, although arguments based on logic (Layard and De Neve, 2023), joint language use (Kapteyn, 1977), test-retest reliabilities (Krueger and Schkade, 2008;Prati and Senik, 2022), cross-rater validities (Sandvik et al, 1993;Schneider and Schimmack, 2009), or different modelling approaches (Frey and Stutzer, 2000;Frijters and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, 2004) suggest that respondents treat life-satisfaction responses as cardinal, there exists no (known) method for being certain about cardinality in the absence of a measure one does consider infallible.…”

Determinants of life satisfaction among migrants in South Africa: an analysis of the GCRO’s quality of life survey (2009–2021)

“…This re-categorised variable was kept solely for description; the ordered categorical variable (i.e., the 0 to 10 ordinal measurement) was used as Lowest (0), Middle (5) and Highest (10) in the multivariate analysis using the statistical methods of ordered logit model to calculate the life satisfaction by gender. The work on SWLS conducted by Diener et al [ 48 ], Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Ladder of Life Satisfaction scale [ 50 ], and Gallup [ 51 ], are reliable and valid tools for measuring life satisfaction in several related studies [ 53 , 54 ].…”

Go with your gut! The beneficial mood effects of intuitive decisions.

“…The ease of a given decision mediated this effect. Given the retrospective nature of these reports, alternative explanations such as motivated memory effects on recall due to layperson theories about well-being and mood (Prati & Senik, 2022) or retrospective confusion between ease and positivity cannot be ruled out. Also, because decision mode was not actively manipulated in that study, it is likely that positive versus negative incidental affect actually triggered intuitive versus analytical decisions; thus, positive mood was actually the cause rather than the result of intuition.…”