Feeling ‘young happy’ or ‘old happy’?

What does ‘happiness’ mean to you? Is it the thrill of having fun with family and friends, or perhaps its feeling ‘content’ with who you are and the journey life has taken you on?

A new study has revealed younger and older people experience completely different emotions when they say they are ‘happy’.

For young people, about 60% of happiness is all about excitement, say scientists, while as a person grows older, 80% of their happiness is linked to ‘contentment’.

Researcher, Professor Cassie Mogliner, of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests there are at least two different kinds of ‘happiness’.

“We’re talking about two distinct types of happiness, one associated with peacefulness and one associated with being excited,” she says.

“Where younger people are more likely to associate happiness with excitement, as they get older they will more likely associate happiness with peacefulness,” she claims.

Researchers ran five studies involving different groups of people – one aged in their teens, one group in their 20s, and others in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

Professor Mogliner and her team used a complicated computer program, which reviewed words related to happiness, to analyse millions of blogs written by people in each of the age groups. Participants were also asked to define happiness using words and also listened to a calm or energetic song and then indicated how they felt.

Participants were also given the scenario of if they were given money as a gift, how they would spend it. Researchers coded those responses based on whether they were excitement-focused, such as a Nintendo Wii, or ‘calming-focused’, such as a “bubble bath”.

Researchers conclude the difference appears to come from the varying degrees of importance placed on the future compared to the present.

While young people are generally more interested in the future, older people place a higher value on the present, and so “contentment tends to be a greater source of happiness” for them.

Despite the findings, the research does not determine a relationship between age and levels of happiness, Professor Mogliner says. “However, it does identify a relationship between age and the meaning of happiness…when a 20-year-old and a 60-year-old express feeling ‘happy,’ they are likely feeling quite different things,” she says.

Professor Mogliner says it is important to consider how people of different ages define happiness when trying to improve their wellbeing.

“We should also bear in mind how our age affects the way we view happiness and not confuse it with becoming unhappy. People should expect the things that make them happy and their experience of happiness to change.

“They should not be surprised or attribute these changes to life becoming less happy,” she says.