Money can't buy happiness

It's official: money cannot buy you happiness and people should instead focus on spending more time with their family, experts claimed today

A conference at Brunel University's School of Social Sciences concluded that subjective factors, such as time spent with family, tended to have a greater impact on people's sense of wellbeing than objective factors such as their income.

But it warned that people tended to place greater emphasis on the things that would not bring them happiness when they made life changing decisions.

Wellbeing

It said people's sense of wellbeing was achieved as a trade-off between satisfying their intrinsic needs, such as time spent with their family, against satisfying their extrinsic desires, including income and status.

The research found that when it came to decision making, such as taking a new job that offered a much higher salary but involved a longer commute, people tended to place far more importance on the salary than the fact that they would have less time to spend at home.

Family time

This is even though having more time to spend with their family is likely to boost someone's happiness in the long-run.

The conference also looked at people's ability to adapt to changes in their life, which produced some unexpected results.

It found that people who had high levels of job satisfaction and were generally happy were quicker to adapt to being unemployed than those who had enjoyed their job less.

Job satisfaction

It said this may be because happier individuals were more determined to get a new job than those who had been unhappy before they lost their previous job.

Dr Yannis Georgellis, senior lecturer at Brunel University's School of Social Sciences, said: "Examining whether events or changes in life circumstances have a lasting impact on subjective well-being is not a new area of psychological research.

A change can do you good

"However, for the first time, this selection of research explores sophisticated methodologies to assess patterns of adaptation to these changes that exist across varieties of events and groups of individuals.''

He said the research could be used to help people understand how the decisions they made impacted on their long-term happiness, while it could also help businesses learn how to nurture the wellbeing of their employees.