WASHINGTON, Apr 23: It’s official. Hope makes people happier, say researchers.
Two studies, conducted in Australia and China by an international team, led by the University of Queensland, have found that having high expectations for the future is the key to being happy in the present day.
Prof Paul Frijters, one of the authors of the two studies, said a sample of over 10,000 Australians over nine years showed that people seemed to be better off if they expected good things to come.
“People systematically over-estimate how rosy the future should be and this is crucial for their wellbeing.
“People are much less affected by regret than previously thought, and they do not tend they tell themselves the future will be bad so that the future will turn out to be a pleasant surprise,” he said in a university release.
The researchers found that Australians over 35 and women tended to place more importance on “future imagined health” than men and under-35s. For the latter, future imagined health was not seen as important for happiness.
The study also surveyed over 17,000 Chinese people in 2002, on happiness and optimism for the future.
“We found that the poorest group was the happiest. People in the countryside had incomes less than a third of that of people in the cities, but still 62 per cent of the rural respondents said they were happy or very happy, while only 56 per cent of the urban respondents were at least happy.
“The most miserable group in China were the migrants who had come to the cities from the countryside. While they were earning more than double what those ‘back home in the countryside’ were earning, 44 per cent of them were happy.
“Despite this, on average, the Chinese were about as happy as individuals from a European middle-income country like Croatia,” Prof Frijters said, adding the most important factor behind the high levels of happiness in China could be attributed to “extremely high” expectations of future incomes.
The findings are to be published in an upcoming edition of the ‘Journal of Economic Psychology’. (PTI)
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