Happy Adolescence Leads to Happy Adulthood...and Divorce

So now when I look at pics like this, I know around 20%
of these excited kids will be divorced. Thanks science!
From English Subject Centre.

Apparently in keeping with this week's divorce theme, the Vancouver Sun reports that a happy adolescence increases the likelihood of a happy adulthood, but also increases the likelihood of divorce. This information comes from a study in the The Journal of Positive Psychology that analyzed data on 2,776 British citizens born in 1946. The data concerned teacher evaluations of students aged 13 to 15, rating them on their popularity, ease of making friends, energy levels, and overall happiness.

This interesting rating method revealed that around 20% of the kids who scored highly in multiple areas were divorced by age 53, compared to around 16% of the kids who scored poorly, even with no change in the likelihood of marriage. The difference of four percent appears small, but is significant enough to warrant further investigation. (For comparison, the divorce rate in the United States is somewhere around 43%, increasing to around 75% the more marriages a person has.)

The study, carried out by Felicia Huppert of the University of Cambridge and Marcus Richards of Britain's Medical Research Council, says, "The explanation for this is not immediately obvious and warrants further investigation. One possible factor might be that positive children have higher self-esteem or self-efficacy than their peers and are therefore more willing to leave a marriage if it is not meeting their needs."

HOWEVER, before you try to protect teenagers by making them sad, the study goes on to say that the benefits of a happy adolescence outweigh the downsides. Happy teenagers go on to become adults who are more satisfied with their jobs, more social, and 60% less likely to develop mental disorders. Whew!

Loving-Kindness Meditation Shown to Produce Longterm Results

Just find a sittin' rock in the middle of a lake
and you're good to go! From Meditations Online.

A somewhat-new Journal of Positive Psychology study that may have slipped through the cracks shows that loving-kindness meditation produces longterm benefits, even when the subject stops meditating regularly. The study comes from Michael A. Cohn at the University of California San Francisco and Barbara L. Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While the short-term benefits of meditation are well documented, this may be the first time beginning meditation students were followed up on over the long term (as far as I know).

Cohn and Fredrickson conducted their initial loving-kindness meditation experiment on 202 beginning meditators over two months in 2008. Then, after 15 months without communication, the researchers contacted the subjects again and had them fill out a survey of their current emotional state.

The results show that people who continued regular meditation after the initial study felt the most positive emotions during the follow up. However, even those who stopped meditating felt more positive than the control group, who never started meditating in the first place. This is significant because while feelings of happiness from certain events (buying a new car, getting a job promotion, etc.) dissipate rather quickly, feelings of happiness from meditation apparently endure.

The actual paper goes into much more detail, so you should read that if you're interested.