Scientists Develop Mathematic Formula that May Accurately Predict Happiness
Researchers from the University College London developed a mathematic equation which accurately predicted the happiness of over 18,000 people worldwide. The said equation suggests that moment-to-moment happiness reflects not just how well things are going, but whether things are going better than expected.
According to the scientists, overall wealth accumulated during the experiment was not a good predictor of happiness. Instead, moment-to-moment happiness depended on the recent history of rewards and expectations. These expectations depended, for example, on whether the available options could lead to good or bad outcomes.
It is a known fact that life events affect an individual’s happiness. But scientists don’t know how exactly happy people will be from moment to moment as they make decisions and receive outcomes resulting from those decisions. But according to the UCL researchers, the new equation can predict it.
Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the relationship between happiness and reward, and the neural processes that lead to feelings that are central to our conscious experience, such as happiness. Before now, it was known that life events affect an individual’s happiness but not exact.
Scientists believe that quantifying subjective states mathematically could help doctors better understand mood disorders, by seeing how self-reported feelings fluctuate in response to events like small wins and losses in a smartphone game. They argued that understanding of how mood is determined by life events and circumstances, and how that differs in people suffering from mood disorders, will hopefully lead to more effective treatments.
For the study, 26 subjects completed a decision-making task in which their choices led to monetary gains and losses, and they were repeatedly asked to answer the question ’how happy are you right now?’ The participant’s neural activity was also measured during the task using functional MRI and from these data; scientists built a computational model in which self-reported happiness was related to recent rewards and expectations. The model was then tested on 18,420 participants in the game ’What makes me happy?’ in a smartphone app developed at UCL called ’The Great Brain Experiment’. Scientists were surprised to find that the same equation could be used to predict how happy subjects would be while they played the smartphone game, even though subjects could win only points and not money.
"We expected to see that recent rewards would affect moment-to-moment happiness but were surprised to find just how important expectations are in determining happiness. In real-world situations, the rewards associated with life decisions such as starting a new job or getting married are often not realised for a long time, and our results suggest expectations related to these decisions, good and bad, have a big effect on happiness.” said Dr Robb Rutledge, the lead author of the study.
"Life is full of expectations - it would be difficult to make good decisions without knowing, for example, which restaurant you like better. It is often said that you will be happier if your expectations are lower. We find that there is some truth to this: lower expectations make it more likely that an outcome will exceed those expectations and have a positive impact on happiness.”
Source of this article: A computational and neural model of momentary subjective well-being, PNAS
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