By: Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press
Friday, January 07, 2005


When asked to rank daily activities in order of enjoyment, most parents put spending time with their kids at the top of the list.

It's not that they mean to lie, Norbert Schwarz says. It's just that when most of us think about doing things with our children, we think of prototypical activities (reading a bedtime story, going sledding together) rather than typical ones (checking homework, enforcing bedtimes or schlepping a young goalie and his gear to hockey practice).

"Those glowing reports of time spent with children miss a lot of time you actually spend with them," Schwarz, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, explains. When those forgotten moments are factored in, spending time with the kids loses ground in the rankings, slipping to somewhere between commuting to work (the least pleasurable activity) and watching television alone.

Remembering how it really was

Schwarz knows all this because he and four other scholars have devised a new way to measure our overall happiness and figure out which activities enhance or detract from it.

In an ambitious survey whose results appear in the Dec. 3 issue of Science magazine, they asked 1,000 working women in Texas to break their previous day into a series of episodes (preparing breakfast, commuting to work, etc.) and answer a series of questions about each episode: Where were you? Who were you with? How did you feel?

Respondents were also asked to record how long they slept the previous night, to disclose their marital and educational status and to complete a detailed personality survey.

Because the women who participated described specific experiences, rather than generic activities, Schwarz and his colleagues are convinced their survey yields a more accurate ranking of enjoyable activities.

Intimate relations topped the list, although only 11 percent of those surveyed recorded such an episode on the day they were asked to reconstruct. Lunching with coworkers, watching TV alone and shopping with a spouse also scored highly. Spending time with one's boss and commuting to work alone anchored the low end of the enjoyment scale, although even those activities gave the average participant some satisfaction.

"Most people," Schwarz observes, "feel slightly good most of the time."

Trading ZZZ for $$$

Schwarz's survey results closely track those of more expensive studies in which smaller numbers of participants were prompted throughout the day and asked to record their reactions to whatever they were doing in real time.

Schwarz's results also support previous studies suggesting that life circumstances such as income and marital status have surprisingly little impact on a person's enjoyment of a regular day. Time spent sleeping, on the other hand, matters a lot.

So, I asked Schwarz, is happiness any more complicated than figuring out what you enjoy most and making more time to do it?

"It really isn't any more complicated than that," he said. "But that's not what most people are doing."

Most people, for instance, would readily accept a job that increases their commuting time in exchange for a $20,000 salary hike, even though spending the same time sleeping (or engaged in other mattress-supported activities) would make them happier.

What we all need, Schwarz concludes, is better information about what we really enjoy.

And by the way -- have you hugged your remote control lately?

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Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or dicker@freepress.com.

A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method first appeared in the December 3, 2004 issue of Science and reports on the research subsequently appeared in the New York Times, The London Sunday Times, The Washington Post and many other news outlets. For a more complete listing, please visit http://news.google.com/news?q=Norbert+Schwarz&hl=en&lr=&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&filter=0.