In the ever-changing landscape of our lives, events such as marriage, childbirth, and even the unfortunate experiences of unemployment or the loss of a loved one undeniably shape our happiness and general well-being. But what life events have the biggest impact? A recent study published in the European Journal of Personality has shed light on how these significant life events impact our life satisfaction, offering new insights that challenge and refine our understanding of human happiness.
Previous research on life satisfaction in relation to life events has often been compartmentalized, with research focusing on single events in isolation. This methodological approach, while useful, has limitations, particularly in its inability to account for the interconnected nature of life events. Life does not happen in isolation; events such as cohabitation, marriage, and childbirth often occur in sequences and can have compounded effects on our well-being.
Recognizing this gap, the current study set out to address these complexities by analyzing life events both individually and collectively, thereby offering a richer, more comprehensive understanding of their impacts.
“There is a long debate in psychology, sociology, and economics how important life events affect our happiness, which is often measured as life satisfaction,” said study author Michael Dominik Krämer, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich.
“For example, one theory claimed that life events only affected life satisfaction temporarily for a couple of years and people eventually always returned to their individual set-point level. Here, we included a lot of different life events in the same model and investigated whether there is interdependence between certain types of events.
“In a person’s life course, events are often grouped together or occur in a sequence such as moving in together followed by marriage followed by childbirth. This has not really been accounted for in previous models.”
Methodology
For their study, the researchers analyzed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Initiated in 1984, the SOEP is designed to be representative, collecting data annually from thousands of households across the country. The SOEP gathers a diverse array of data, including information on income, employment, education, health, and life satisfaction, among other topics.
By asking the same individuals and households a wide variety of questions year after year, the SOEP enables researchers to track changes over time and study the dynamics of social and economic life in Germany.
The sample for the current study included 40,121 individuals, encompassing 41,402 occurrences of various life events. This substantial dataset allowed for a robust examination of a wide range of life events, including marriage, childbirth, unemployment, and the loss of a partner or child, among others.
Positive Impacts on Life Satisfaction
The study found that forming new romantic relationships and advancing them through cohabitation and marriage positively affects life satisfaction. This increase begins from the anticipation phase, peaks around the occurrence of the event, and extends, albeit at a diminishing rate, over the following years.
Childbirth, too, was associated with a significant uplift in life satisfaction, with effects that were more pronounced for women, especially around the birth of their first child. These findings suggest that the formation and solidification of close personal bonds play a crucial role in enhancing an individual’s overall sense of well-being.
Negative Impacts on Life Satisfaction
On the flip side, the study illuminated the negative impacts on life satisfaction stemming from the dissolution of relationships, loss of employment, and bereavement. Separation from a partner was shown to lead to a notable decrease in life satisfaction, a trend that was slightly more pronounced for the first event occurrence than for subsequent separations.
Unemployment also led to a significant reduction in life satisfaction, with women experiencing a steeper decline than men. “For unemployment, we found relatively small and transient decreases to happiness. Some of the model comparisons also indicated period effects in that unemployment decreased happiness more in the 90s and early 2000s where unemployment rates in Germany were much higher. Nowadays, it was probably much easier to find a new job afterwards.”
The death of a partner or child marked the most substantial decreases in life satisfaction, underscoring the profound effect of loss and bereavement on individual well-being.
Neutral Impacts on Life Satisfaction
The researchers found neutral or unclear impacts for events such as divorce, the commencement of a first job, retirement, children leaving the household, and the deaths of a parent. These findings suggest a complex relationship between life events and overall well-being, indicating that not all significant life transitions have a straightforward impact on life satisfaction.
“For some of the life events where we found no or ambiguous effects, I was somewhat surprised that we did not find more pronounced and clear effects,” Krämer told PsyPost. “However, for divorce, this also makes sense because we included it as a separate event from separation and most of the decreases in happiness happen earlier when people separate and the legal process of divorce is then seen as ambiguous.”
The Importance of Event Sequences and Interconnections
A unique contribution of this study lies in its examination of sequences of life events. The research demonstrates that the impact of individual events on life satisfaction cannot be fully understood in isolation, as life events often occur in close succession and are linked through common causes. This interconnectedness can compound or mitigate the effects of individual events on life satisfaction.
For instance, the positive impact of childbirth on life satisfaction might be influenced by preceding events such as marriage or cohabitation, highlighting the importance of considering the broader sequence of life events.
“In the combined models that considered all events jointly, we found interdependence within the domains of romantic relationships and childbirth,” Krämer said. “Here, it makes a difference whether life events are modelled individually or jointly and we argue (based on the causal inference literature) that researchers should consider any other, preceding life events in their models.”
Limitations and Future Directions
The study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of life satisfaction, but — like all research — it includes some limitations. Its focus on the German population may limit the applicability of its insights to other cultural and socio-economic contexts. The study’s methodological approach, although robust, cannot fully eliminate the possibility of time-varying confounds that might influence life satisfaction alongside the examined life events.
“We tried to be transparent about some of the assumptions that our conclusions rest on,” Krämer told PsyPost. “For example, for a causal interpretation of the temporal effects, we have to assume that no other time-varying variables confound the associations. This could be something like being promoted at work, which might affect both the probability of finding a new romantic partner and happiness.
“In addition, we presented average results across all participants. In reality, there is probably quite a lot of variation in how these events affect each person. Still, the average effects of multiple life events are a good starting point!”
What does the future for this line of research hold? “One goal I have is to run similar analyses but with personality traits as outcomes. With personality, there is a similar debate on how life experiences such as life events affect our personality over time,” Krämer said.
“More recent evidence indicates that life events probably only have very small effects on personality but no one has jointly modelled all life events yet which might produce different results. I would require a very large sample, though, which more of a problem with personality assessments than with happiness.”
The study, “Life events and life satisfaction: Estimating effects of multiple life events in combined models,” was authored by Michael D. Krämer, Julia M. Rohrer, Richard E. Lucas, and David Richter.
