Science says that giving gifts makes you happy than receiving them
Presentation: A selfish reason to be a little selfless.
Scientific research on what makes people happy is always in its infancy, but one thing is certain: when it comes to longevity, at least, always giving beats still receptors.
In October, aStudy revealed that Boughing has as much benefits for health for the Hugger As for the Huggee. Now a new study to come inPsychological scienceshowed that the joy of giving occurs the joy of getting.
It is known thatThe Great Barrier to Perpetual Happiness is the hedonic adaptation (otherwise known as hedonic treadmill), which described the observed trend that humans seem to have to return to a relatively stable state of happiness after positive or negative events. (If you have already received a new car or a new TV or Xbox and you felt briefly envisaged before yielding your phenomenon yourself.)
But this new study of researchers in psychologyEd O'Brien from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business andSamantha Kidière The School of Management of Northwestern University Northwestern seems to indicate that giving gifts, rather than getting them, seems to be a bit free of the rule.
In the first experience, 96 university students received $ 5 daily for five days and were randomly assigned to spend money on themselves or spending it on someone else and then evaluated on their levels of happiness. The results clearly shown that those who spent money on themselves reported a constant decline in happiness during the five-day period. Those who had, say, left the money in a peak pot or made an online gift to a charity, on the other hand, took as much joy in the act on the fifth day, as they 'have done on the first, even if they were spending the money in the same way again and again.
In the second experience, researchers asked 502 participants to play ten tours of an online word puzzle game. They won five cents per turn and gave the choice to keep the money or give it to a charity of their choice. Once again, the self-lodging levels of those who have abandoned the money lasted much longer than those who kept it for themselves.
"If you want to support happiness over time, past research tells us that we have to take a break from what we currently consume and experience something new. Our research reveals that the kind of thing may be of greater importance that supposed: to give repeated, even in an identical way to identical ideas, can continue to feel relatively fresh and relatively pleasant as we do, "O'Briensays in a press release.
Even when other variables have been controlled, they have always found that people seemed to record gifts-giving a new and unique experience that they continued to give the same thing again and again to the same recipient.
"We have considered many opportunities and measured on a dozen between them," O'Brien said. "None of them could explain our results; there were very few incidental differences between" Get "and" give "conditions, and the key difference of happiness remained unchanged when ordering these other variables in the analyzes "
At present, it is difficult to know why this is the case, but the researchers feel that it is possible that when we grant ourselves, we focus more on the action itself and less on comparisons (that is, I'm so happy withdonates this relief organization," versus "The Christmas present of my sister is better than mine, hmpph! "). When it comes to giving, at least, it seems that it is really the thought that counts.
And for a complete summary of all that science knows about what makes people happy (and what does not mean), here'sAll I learned about Yale's happiness.
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