Mental Health

"Good News" Too Early Kills Happiness

By Christine Hsu | Update Date: Jul 28, 2014 04:00 PM EDT

Disrupting the process of achievement could result in a buzzkill, according to a new study.

Finding out the good news too soon could actually make people feel less positive emotions. Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business said that the latest findings suggest that the pinpointing the "right time" could heighten positive reactions.

"We basically show that people want to feel good at the right time - that is, when a goal is achieved and not before then," Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago, said in a news release.

Researchers conducted four experiments. They found that people were happier when good news followed the predetermined script. They also found that people made script-consistent errors in recalling an attained goal, and value goals less if they find out too soon that they will be achieving them. Knowing that achieving the goal was inevitable also blunted happiness when the goal was achieved.

"When people learn that a goal will be achieved before it actually is, they often try to suppress the positive emotion in order to feel it at the 'right time,'" Fishbach says. "The result is that people don't feel as happy when they get the news - because it's not the right time - as well as when the goal is officially achieved - because by then it's no longer 'news,'" Fishbach said.

Researchers explain that the findings suggest that dampening of positive emotions might occur because of the delicateness of positive emotion. People are significantly more likely to feel bad after feeling good than feel good after feeling bad.

"Once positive emotion is 'tampered with,' it appears to be difficult to reignite," researchers wrote in the study. "It appears that positive emotion can be dampened relatively easily, but reawakening it appears to be more difficult."

The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

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