Hedonic capital, adaptation and resilience

The paper sets out a theory of hedonic adaptation and resilience. By distinguishing between stocks and flows of psychological resources, it suggests a new way to think about the dynamics of human well-being or ‘happiness’. Central to the analysis is a concept we refer to as hedonic capital. We build on the idea that the evolutionary function of happiness is as a motivating device. Our model successfully replicates the patterns routinely found in well-being data – particularly the empirical regularity of an approximately stable level of well-being and the adaptive tendency to return towards that level. The formal model provides a number of testable empirical predictions.