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Study: Happiness Won't Extend Your Life After All

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: December 11th, 2015, 1:00am UTC

schwit1 writes with good news for fans of living a long and ultimately unfulfilling life. Happy people live longer, a relationship that's been documented in a variety of research studies. But a new paper published in the medical journal Lancet comes to the sad conclusion that happiness isn't responsible for this observed longevity. Instead, the things that make people happy, particularly their good health, are the same things that shield them from premature death. "Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality," the study authors wrote.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Study%3A+Happiness+Won't+Extend+Your+Life+After+All%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1NQZIAR"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fidle.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F12%2F11%2F006220%2Fstudy-happiness-wont-extend-your-life-after-all%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://idle.slashdot.org/story/15/12/11/006220/study-happiness-wont-extend-your-life-after-all?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://idle.slashdot.org/story/15/12/11/006220/study-happiness-wont-extend-your-life-after-all?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/7M-laFA3kuk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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