A CHEERFUL disposition is just as effective as talent, hard work and commitment in helping people to reach the top, according to research showing that consistently happy people are more likely than others to be successful in life and love.

The finding, published today by the American Psychological Association, turns on its head the academic orthodoxy that it is success that makes people happy, and not the other way round. The lead author of the paper, Sonja Lyubomirsky, of the University of California, Riverside, said that it was clear that happy people were, in general, more successful than less happy people in many aspects of life.

She said: “This may be because happy people frequently experience positive moods, and these positive moods prompt them to be more likely to work actively toward new goals and build new resources. When people feel happy, they tend to feel confident, optimistic and energetic, and others find them likeable and sociable. Happy people are thus able to benefit from these perceptions.”

Dr Lyubomirsky and her co-authors, Laura King, of the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Ed Diener, of the University of Illinois and The Gallup Organisation, reviewed 225 research papers on happiness that cover 293 samples and 275,000 people and computed 313 significant findings.

Although many definitions of happiness are used in research literature, ranging from “life satisfaction” to “momentary feelings of pleasure”, the authors defined happiness as “the frequent experience of positive emotions”. They found that what mattered most was the length of time that people experienced happiness, not necessarily the intensity of their happiness.

The authors found that cheerful job applicants were more likely to secure interviews and to be evaluated more positively once they got a job. They also were less likely to show burn-out and more likely to have jobs with autonomy, variety and meaning.

One study included in the research found that happier cricket players had higher batting averages, and another indicated that happy sales forces had the most satisfied customers. Happy workers were less likely to take time off work and, in general, earned higher incomes. They were shown to have more friends and better personal relationships and health.

However, the study also found that happiness could sometimes be a handicap. For example, cheerful people could be worse at problem solving, partly because they did not always learn from trial and error, as they were so laid back that the “error” part of their actions sometimes eluded them. Because they were more likely to think that everything was always going well, they could also be worse at critical thinking and error checking.

Another potential drawback of consistent happiness was the danger that happy people could slip into hedonism or inappropriate risk taking. The authors noted that mildly depressed people were most likely to excel in jobs such as monitoring a nuclear power plant, where constant vigilance for possible problems was essential.

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