Title: How Does Valuing Money Affect Your Happiness?
Headings: 
Society Articles & More
How Does Valuing Money Affect Your Happiness?
Two new studies find that tying your self-worth to financial success hampers happiness and well-being—even for the well-off.
What money can and can’t do for you
Affirming Important Values
Why community beats money
About the Author
Jill Suttie
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Content: The researchers found that doing so made people engage in more social comparisons, experience more stress and anxiety, and feel less autonomy than those who didn’t tie their self-worth to income, regardless of their actual economic status. “People in this society are often focused on pursuing money, and they don’t think there is anything bad about that,” says Park. “ But in terms of your psychological well-being, there are all kinds of negative consequences.” It also might affect your problem-solving ability. Park and her colleagues randomly assigned participants to write about their dissatisfaction with either an aspect of their financial situation—like not having enough money to pay rent—or their academic performance, like getting a bad test grade. Afterwards, they reported on what coping strategies they would use in response to the situation. Research assistants analyzed the essays and found that participants who scored high in FCSW used more emotionally negative words and reported more disengagement strategies—like giving up or avoiding solutions—when writing about a financial stressor versus an academic stressor than people scoring low in FCSW. None of the results were affected by the actual income of the students. People who are facing a problem should, logically, be focused on figuring out ways to solve it, says Park. “ But what we found is that high financial contingency of self-worth somehow blocks that response.”