It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old.
It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.
“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”
The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.
The survey also asked about “global well-being” by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.
Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal “hedonic well-being,” a person’s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.
The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old. On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.
In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.
Other experts were impressed with the work. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology at Warwick Business School in England, who has published several studies on human happiness, called the findings important and, in some ways, heartening. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s,” he said. “And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”
Dr. Stone, who is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that the findings raised questions that needed more study. “Theseresults say there are distinctive patterns here,” he said, “and it’s worth some researcheffort to try to figure out what’s going on. Why at age 50 does something seem to start to change?”
The study was not designed to figure out which factors make people happy, and the poll’s health questions were not specific enough to draw any conclusions about the effect of disease or disability on happiness in old age. But the researchers did look at four possibilities: the sex of the interviewee, whether the person had a partner, whether there were children at home and employment status. “These are four reasonable candidates,” Dr. Stone said, “but they don’t make much difference.”
For people under 50 who may sometimes feel gloomy, there may be consolation here. The view seems a bit bleak right now, but look at the bright side: you are getting old.
人的衰老无可避免：肌肉松弛、听力视力下降、满脸皱纹、直不起腰，跑步甚至步行都不如从前那么轻盈快捷了。我们身体上某些部位出现了之前未曾感觉到的各种疼痛。我们变老了。
这听起来似乎非常不幸，但显然并非如此。一项大规模盖洛普民意调查发现，几乎不管从何种角度来衡量，人是越老越快乐，而研究人员对此难以作出解释。
“或许是因为人所处环境的变化，”该调查的一份最新研究报告主要作者亚瑟·斯通(Arthur A. Stone)说，“或许可能是我们在看待世界的方式上出现了心理层面的变化，甚至或许可能是出现了生物层面的变化——比如，大脑的化学组成物质或者内分泌的变化。”
这项民意调查是2008年进行的一次电话调查，调查对象是全美年龄介于18岁至85岁的34万多人，涉及年龄及性别、时事、个人理财、健康及其他事项等各类问题。
该调查还对“全球幸福感”进行了提问：让每一位调查对象用0至10分对总体生活满意度进行评估。许多人可能会偶尔对生活满意情况暗自加以评估(或许这不算正式方式)。
最后，调查问卷中还有六个需回答“是或不是”的问题：你昨天大部分时间里有没有经历过如下情绪：愉快、幸福、紧张、忧虑、愤怒、悲伤?研究人员表示，对这些问题的回答能揭示个人的“快乐幸福感”——即一个人在这些心理状态方面的直接感受，不受有关总体生活满意度询问可能会诱发的记忆改变或主观判断的妨碍。
这份调查研究报告于5月17日发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)的网络版上。对于老年人及即将迈入老年的人来说，该研究结果的确是一个好消息。从全球来看，人从18岁开始就自我感觉良好，然后，显然就要开始承受生活的各种变化。他们的自我感觉越来越差，直到年至50岁。这时候，便会出现急剧逆转，人开始越老越快乐。到85岁时，他们的自我满意程度超过了18岁时的程度。
在衡量当前幸福感——即昨天的情绪状态方面，研究人员发现，紧张感从22岁开始减少，至85岁时达到紧张感的最低点。忧虑感在50岁之前保持相当稳定，然后急剧降低。愤怒感从18岁起便稳步减少，而悲伤感在50岁时上升到峰值，然后下滑，直至73岁，再然后略微上升，直至85岁。愉快感和幸福感的变化曲线类似：两者都先逐渐减少，直至50岁，然后在随后的25年里稳步增长，最后略微下降，但不再会达到50岁时的最低点。
其他专家对此研究成果印象深刻。英国华威商学院(Warwick Business School)心理学教授安德鲁·奥斯瓦尔德(Andrew J. Oswald)曾发表过几篇有关人类幸福的研究报告，他认为此项研究成果具有重大价值，而且在某些方面令人鼓舞。“我们可以期望在80岁时比在20岁时更加快乐，这是一个非常令人鼓舞的事实，”他说，“而且这基本上不受生活中所发生的事情所左右。起主导作用的似乎是某种深层次的、人类本性的因素。”
斯通博士在美国纽约州立大学石溪分校(State University of New York at Stony Brook)担任心理学教授，他说此项研究结果提出了一些需要进一步研究的问题。“这些研究结果表明，存在一些独特的变化模式，”他说，“值得花些功夫研究一番，看看到底是怎么一回事。为什么50岁的时候，某些影响情绪的因素会开始发生变化?” 更多信息请访问：https://www.24en.com/
这项研究并不是为了探究使人类快乐的相关因素而设计的，而且该调查问卷中提出的有关健康的问题也不够具体，不足以在疾病或伤残对晚年幸福感的影响问题上作出任何有效结论。但研究者确实探究了可能影响人快乐的四个因素：受访者的性别、是否有配偶、家里是否有孩子以及就业状况。“有四个合乎情理的可能因素，”斯通博士说，“但是这些因素并没有对快乐产生太大的差别。”
对于那些有时情绪忧郁的50岁以下的人来说，该研究或许给他们一些安慰。目前你似乎有点感觉沮丧无助，但是，想想高兴的事吧：你正逐渐变老，向幸福的老年期迈进呢。