Why It’s Difficult to Remember Our Happiness in the Past

The pursuit of “happiness,” a level of fulfilment that is more difficult to attain for some people than others, consumes a large portion of our life. Research in Psychological Science suggests that happiness can seem elusive because our current feelings can interfere with memories of our past well-being.

“People who are happy tend to exaggerate how much their life satisfaction has improved over time, whereas people who are sad tend to exaggerate how much their level of happiness has declined.,” according to researchers Alberto Prati (University College London and the University of Oxford) and Claudia Senik (Sorbonne University), “This suggests a certain misunderstanding between feeling cheerful and feeling healthier. “

Prati and Senik looked at data from four long-term surveys to learn how our sentiments at the time affect our memories of previous happiness.

First, Prati and Senik looked at the replies from 11,056 participants between 2006 and 2016 in the German Socio-Economic Panel’s continuing study of German people’s well-being. On a scale of 1 to 10, individuals indicated how satisfied they were with their lives each year. In 2016, participants were also asked to pick one of nine line graphs that best depicted their life satisfaction’s ten-year trend.

According to Prati and Senik’s findings, participants’ graph choices were typically indicative of their prior replies. People were more likely to choose a chart showing continual development if their current life satisfaction was higher. People who reported moderate life happiness were more likely to choose a graph showing a little improvement, while those who indicated lower current life satisfaction were more likely to choose a graph showing drops in well-being.

According to Prati and Senik, “people can recollect how they once felt about their lives, but they also tend to combine this memory with the way they currently feel.”

The researchers further examined this pattern using data from 20,269 individuals in the British Household Panel Survey conducted from 1997 to 2009. In the poll, participants were asked to rate their present level of life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 7, as well as whether they felt more, less, or about the same amount of satisfaction as they remembered feeling the previous year.

A little more than half of respondents correctly recalled how their level of life satisfaction has changed over the past year. But, just like the German findings, it seems that current contentment had an impact on erroneous recollections.