People often display a remarkable ability to adapt to adversity, bouncing back to their usual levels of happiness despite extreme hardships. But people don’t always rebound, and scientists have long wondered what factors might account for the difference. In a talk at Harvard in September, a team of researchers suggested that one obstacle to emotional recovery, oddly enough, is hope — the belief that your current hardship is temporary.
From the beginning, the investigators suspected that hope might sometimes be counterproductive: prisoners with life sentences but with the possibility of parole adapt less well to prison life, for example, than prisoners with life sentences without the possibility of parole
It might seem strange that patients who are better off objectively were less satisfied with their lives, yet the finding makes sense
“If your condition is temporary,” Ubel explains, “you’re thinking, I can’t wait until I get rid of this.”
clipped from: www.nytimes.com