Thursday (yesterday) in Psych, we were talking about emotions and happiness, and the professor made the not-so-surprising statement that, for the most part, people tend to be generally happy despite major life events. The example he used was quadriplegia - that even a few months after their injury (so I assume he means quads with spinal cord injuries), they tend to rate their happiness as above neutral.

I pointed out after class that this sort of comparison is less than helpful. What I didn't have the words for at the moment was that SCI tends not to be a lasting trauma. That is, we talk about the grieving process that late-disabled people go through; they are, I think, essentially grieving the end of their life. "How will I work and support myself? What can I do for fun? Who will love me, sleep with me, settle down with me?" But then you pick up the pieces and you go on, and you discover that life isn't over, and the event itself doesn't necessarily stay in your memory as a tragedy.

A better example, in my opinion, would be the death of a significant other. Given enough time, people tend to rate themselves above neutral; but they still consider the event a tragedy. No one is going to look back and say, "yeah, my wife's death really changed my life for the better".

This, for me, raises the question: what idiot did this study? I can see someone saying, "we need a standard tragic event to study peoples' reactions to", but to pick an event where you obviously don't understand the reactions involved seems just stupid.