Being Too Happy Can Make You More Sad

From the University of Virginia comes a new study that shows being too happy can make it hard to accept the situation when things go wrong. In other words, the more good things that happen to a person, the more they feel the effects of any negative events and dwell on it so much, that they can't overcome it.

The lead researcher, Shigehiro Oishi, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia psychology gave this scenario as an example. He says it is like someone who always travels first class and gets up set if there is a short delay in takeoff and the person who is used to traveling economy, and is used to things going wrong, accepts the delay as just another event.

Professor Oishi, is a social psychologist who was born and grew up in Japan and came to the United States as a young man. Because of his experience with both cultures, he has had an interest in the different ways people from East Asia and the United States respond to positive and negative events.

The study surveyed more than 350 college students in Japan, Korea and the United States. For three weeks, they kept records of their daily state of satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction with life and the actual number of events, both positive and negative.

The results show that American of European descent claim to be to have a happy outlook on life, on average, more then
Asian Americans, Koreans or Japanese. However, they are more likely to become less happy when they are faced with negative events, and recover slower from these events than those who live in Asia or Americans with an Asian ancestry.

Conversely, those who live in Korea and Japan and to a lesser extent, Americans with an Asian ancestry, have a less happy general outlook, but tend to recover better and faster from negative events. They found that the European-Americans need to experience two positive events after a negative one to be able to return to their usual level of happiness. With the Koreans, Japanese and Asian-Americans only took one positive event to bounce back from a negative one.