According to a recent study, we confuse feeling happy with feeling better. Our current sense of happiness or ill-being interferes with memories of our past well-being.
- Nearly eight out of ten French people (78%) say they are happy, according to a study by Elabe and the Institut Montaigne carried out in 2021.
- 57% of French people view their personal future with optimism, even if pessimism about the future of French society remains the majority (60%).
Have you ever felt happy? This question, you will not answer it in the same way according to your emotions of the moment. This is suggested by a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. According to the two researchers behind it, our current feelings can interfere with memories of our past well-being.
Happy people exaggerate the improvement in their satisfaction over time
“Happy people tend to exaggerate the improvement in their satisfaction with life over time, while unhappy people tend to exaggerate the deterioration in their level of happiness. This indicates some confusion between feeling happy and feel better”explained the two authors of the study, Alberto Prati (University College London and University of Oxford) and Claudia Senik (Sorbonne), in a interview. The latter analyzed data from four different surveys to investigate how feelings in the present influence memories of past happiness.
First, Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik analyzed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel’s ongoing survey of the well-being of German citizens, focusing on responses from 11,056 participants between 2006 and 2016. Each year, respondents reported how satisfied they were with their life on a scale of 1 to 10. At the end of the survey, respondents selected one of nine line graphs that best reflected the trajectory their satisfaction with their lives over the past decade.
Happiness: we tend to mix our memories with our present feelings
People who reported higher current life satisfaction were more likely to select a graph depicting continuous improvement. People with average satisfaction were more likely to select a graph showing slight improvement, and people who reported lower current life satisfaction were more likely to select a graph showing continued declines in their well-being. “People are able to remember how they felt about their life, but they also tend to mix that memory up with how they are currently feeling”said the two researchers.
In addition to this, Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik also used data from a survey of 20,269 UK participants from 1997 to 2009. Respondents had indicated their current satisfaction with life on a scale of 1 to 7 and the sense of satisfaction he remembered feeling the previous year. As with the German data, these memories seemed to be influenced by current satisfaction. These results were confirmed by another INSEE survey of more than 18,000 French respondents and by a series of American polls with 4,000 respondents.
“Feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday”
“So it seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday”wrote the two scientists. “This could have implications for motivated memory and learning and could explain why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks as lower, and are more open to new experiences.”they added.
In their future work, Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik plan to study how biased memories influence behavior, including people’s willingness to take risks, to undertake and to have new experiences.
