Human happiness is an amalgam of many influences, ranging from good and bad personal events, to positive, or negative emotions. If you live in Finland, for example, you appear to have an advantage. When it comes to age, though, who is likely to be happiest?

Most people experience youth as a carefree period of relative happiness, although this certainly depends on where one grows up, whether it is Scandinavia or a war zone. However, happiness researchers often question whether the well of happiness runs dry as we age. Elderly people in some societies turned out to be remarkably happy. This is particularly true of places where older people play a key role in the community and interact with those of all ages, such as Sardinia, Singapore, and Okinawa, Japan – all places where life expectancy is unusually high.

Evidence has long suggested that both young and old are happier than the middle-aged. This idea is referred to as the inverted U-shaped relationship between happiness and age. Long controversial, the inverted U was confirmed in a recent large-scale,........

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