Happiness Measurement
Although you choose your spouse but not your parents, people seem to enjoy spending time with their parents more than they enjoy spending time with their spouses.
On the other hand, married people claim to be happier than single people do. How satisfied you are with your life is not at all the same thing as how you feel while you are living it.
Researchers can attempt to measure overall satisfaction with life or they can use the “day reconstruction method,” which tries to measure the flow of emotion by asking people to think back over a recent day and reconstruct what they did & how they felt while they did it.
Norbert Schwarz has shown that when you ask people how happy they are, the answer you get will depend on whether the sun is shining or whether they have just found a dime on the floor. (He would plant coins where people would find them.)