Re-Examining Adaptation and the Setpoint Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status

Richard E. Lucas, Andrew Clark, Yannis Georgellis () and Ed Diener

DELTA Working Papers from DELTA (Ecole normale supérieure)

Abstract: According to adaptation theory, individuals react to events, but quickly adapt back to baseline levels of subjective well-being. To test this idea, the authors use data from a 15-year longitudinal study of over 30 000 individuals to examine the effects of marital transitions on life satisfaction. On average, individuals reacted to events and then adapted back towards baseline levels. However, there were substantial individual differences in this tendency. Individuals who initially reacted strongly were still far from baseline years later, and many people exhibited trajectories that were in the opposite direction to that predicted by adaptation theory. Thus, marital transitions can be associated with long-lasting changes in satisfaction, but these changes can be overlooked when only average trends are examined.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 2003, 84, pp. 527-539.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.delta.ens.fr/abstracts/wp200208.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.delta.ens.fr:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:del:abcdef:2002-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DELTA Working Papers from DELTA (Ecole normale supérieure) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).