Posthumous events affect rated quality and happiness of livesPaul Rozin and Jennifer Stellar Judgment and Decision Making, 2009, vol. 4, issue 4, pages 273-279 Abstract: Diener and colleagues (2001) illustrated that individuals rely heavily on endings to evaluate the quality of a life. Two studies investigated the potential for posthumous events to affect rated life quality, calling into question the intuitive ``ending'' of a life at death. Undergraduates read a series of short life narratives to assess the consequences of posthumous reversals of fortune on judgments of the goodness and happiness of the life. In a 2x2 within-subjects design, lives positive and negative in valence were displayed twice: once from birth to death and once each life was followed by a posthumous event of opposite valence. Results demonstrated that posthumous reversals of fortune shift judgments of the goodness and happiness of the life in the direction of the valence of the posthumous event. These effects were not related to an individual's religiosity or the degree to which the life made an engaging story. We suggest that the posthumous happy effect may be a case of a more general process, which we call retroactive re-evaluation. Keywords: endings; quality of life; happiness; positive psychology; subjective well-being; death; posthumous events; happiness. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jdm:journl:v:4:y:2009:i:4:p:273-279 Access Statistics for this article Judgment and Decision Making is edited by Jonathan Baron More articles in Judgment and Decision Making from Society for Judgment and Decision Making |
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