J
jeremy
22 minutes
You Adapt to Most Bad Events, but Adaptation Is Partial and Uneven
The old hedonic-treadmill picture said that good and bad events knock happiness off course briefly and everyone returns to a neutral set point, which implied that trying to improve well-being is futile. Diener, Lucas and Scollon revised it in American Psychologist (2006) using long-running panel data, and their five corrections are the useful part. Set points are not neutral - most people sit above it. People differ in where their set point is, partly by temperament. One person has several set points, because life satisfaction, pleasant emotion and unpleasant emotion can move in different directions after the same event. Set points can change under some conditions. And individuals differ in how much they adapt to the very same event, so an average adaptation curve hides people who never return and people who overshoot. This is why 'you'll get over it' is both usually true and useless as a prediction about you. The job-loss-specific version of this finding - Lucas and colleagues' 15-year German panel showing that life satisfaction does not fully return even after reemployment - is covered separately in this path. What you can do with it: expect the sharp part to fade without expecting a clean return, and read a slow or partial recovery as within the normal range rather than as a failure of attitude.