Recession Not As Depressing As It Seems

Other studies have shown that an individual's level of happiness tends to be relatively stable in both good times and bad. Even when people are hit by big negative surprises, say a diagnosis of cancer, most generally optimistic people remain optimistic. "There is a piece of happiness that comes and goes with daily life," says David Robinson, a finance professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. "But there is a much larger piece of happiness that is stable."

That finding seems to be holding up in this economic downturn as well. At the beginning of the year, polling firm Gallup started asking 1,000 people every night how they felt. Gallup has found that moods do jump around a lot. People are happier on the weekends. Holidays are also big mood boosters. But in general, Gallup has found that the nation's mood has remained relatively stable the whole year, bouncing within the same range even as the economy has deteriorated.

Still, this economic downturn has the potential to put a bigger dent in happiness than the past few. Unemployment is expected to rise higher than it did in the recessions earlier in the decade and in the 1990s. And economists and psychologists, not surprisingly, agree that unemployment is a big downer.

But even the effects of job losses on the general mood of the country may be mild. A study that came out last month about how your happiness affects friends and neighbors — and even friends of friends and friends of neighbors — showed that the downer effect of some portion of the population's losing their jobs will have only limited reverberations on the mood of the rest of the country.

The reason: sorrow does not spread nearly as readily as joy. Nicholas Christakis, one of the study's authors, says happy people form groups and socialize. Unhappy people spend more time alone, not always by choice. "Do you want to hang out with an unhappy person?" says Christakis, who teaches sociology at Harvard. "My feeling is that happiness declines during recessions, but I am not sure how much."