- LifeTwo. We're all about midlife.
- Sign up for our newsletter ...
- Listen to a LifeTwo podcast ...
- Learn about midlife crisis ...
- Help someone ...
- ... or visit our homepage for more.
- LifeTwo: the destination for information about midlife.
... Midlife Improvement
|
|
||
Search LifeTwo:Get Our Newsletter!Stay up to date on midlife issues -- subscribe to our monthly email newsletter (you can easily unsubscribe later)! Your LifeTwoIn this area, registered users see recommendations, set bookmarks, and track what their buddies are up to. For more on the benefits of registering, go here.
User loginThings You Can Do On LifeTwo
Subscribe in a Reader:Use the icon above to subscribe to LifeTwo's Home Page in a reader like My Yahoo or Google Reader (see this page to learn more about RSS and for information on our other feeds). Or if you use one of the following services, just click on its icon:
|
|||
|
|
New On LifeTwo's HomepageRecent DiscussionsRecent Comments |
||
The Not-So-Surprising Link Between Sex and Happiness
Submitted by Greg on October 10, 2007 - 4:02pm.
LifeTwo just spent a week focusing on improving midlife happiness, but we missed one key driver: sex. In a 2004 paper, "Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study," Dartmouth's David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald of Warwick University (UK) conclude that data from surveys of some 16,000 people shows that "The more sex, the happier the person." They found that "Having sex at least four times a week is associated with approximately 0.12 happiness points, which is a large effect (it is, very roughly, about one-half of the size of the effect of marriage on happiness)." Having one sexual partner the previous year -- not none, and not many -- was linked to higher levels of happiness. Stereotypes aside, married people had "much more sex" -- and were happier -- than unmarrieds. But a little sex is the same as no sex at all -- at least as far as happiness is concerned. The authors write that "Celibacy and small amounts of sex have statistically indistinguishable effects on happiness." There's bad news as you age. One third of women over 40 did not have sex the previous year; for men over 40, the figure is 15% (the authors note that they and others suspect that males over-report their sexual activity in this interview-based survey). And despite decades of Hollywood plot lines from Dynasty to The OC, the researchers found that "Income has no clear effect. Money buys neither more sexual partners nor more sex." One element the authors didn't consider was what we'll call the Causal Caution: just because people who have more sex are happier does not mean that more sex is the cause. What if cause and effect runs the other way -- happier people are more sexually active? Yet another reason to improve your own happiness, courtesy of LifeTwo. --- The paper can be downloaded from Dartmouth here, as a pdf. Read Similar LifeTwo Stories:
Find More By Clicking On These Links:Actions »
|
|||
|   |   |   |   |
|
|
Post new comment