The impetus for the present study was the finding that,
although happiness is associated with success in many domains
of life, it is not related to academic performance in college. Such
discrepancies were anticipated by Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) who
cautioned that being happy is not always associated with better
functioning. They suggested that the benefits and costs associated
with dispositional happiness could, in certain domains, lead to
similar levels of performance between happy and unhappy people.
The present study sought to identify the mechanisms that can account
for the null relation between dispositional happiness and
college GPA.
Consistent with previous research (Lyubomirsky & Lepper,
1999), we found that the bivariate association between the measure
of dispositional happiness and cumulative GPA was small
and not statistically significant (r = .07) as was the direct effect
of dispositional happiness on cumulative GPA (p > .25). Furthermore,
as hypothesized, the sum of the indirect effects of dispositional
happiness on cumulative GPA was not significant.
O’Connor and Paunonen (2007) called for the use of structural
equation methods to examine mediators of the associations between
personality traits and academic performance in college.
Building on this suggestion, we proposed that some of the affective
resources of happy people (such as experiencing more positive affect
and being more satisfied with their informal social interactions)
that appear to be advantageous in many domains of life
might be disadvantageous in an academic context. We found some
support for this notion insofar as dispositional happiness exerted a
negative indirect effect on cumulative GPA via satisfaction with
peer relationships. Perhaps, relative to unhappy freshmen, happy
freshmen build a greater fund of social capital and spend more
time engaged in informal social interaction in non-academic contexts.
Time spent in non-academic informal social interaction
may adversely affect grades by detracting from time that could
be allocated to academic pursuits (