Psychology - OU Community Online

You might dream of a big salary and perfect house. The evidence is they won't bring happiness

If you've ever wondered what the recipe is for success, you might be interested in a survey published this week that asked 2,000 people in the UK to come up with the ingredients: take a £250,000 house, add a £50,000 salary, throw in laurels.

For those that see this as a route to nirvana, I'm afraid I have some bad news. A wealth of research into the psychology of success and wellbeing suggests that we're terrible at predicting what we need in order to feel we've made it. First, adaptation means that once we've bought that sports car we quickly get used to it. "It has to sit in traffic just the same as our old car," writes David Halpern in The Hidden Wealth of Nations, "and the novelty of racing down our road a few seconds faster soon wears off."

The other force at work is status anxiety – as soon as we buy the £34,000 sports car we start comparing our success in life with the drivers of £68,000 sports cars. So, much as we might think we can peg our success to a particular salary, the science suggests it's more about social comparison.

Richard Layard, author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, cites a 1998 experiment at Harvard University that asked students to choose between two imaginary worlds: a) being paid $50,000 a year where everyone else gets an average of £25,000 or b) getting $100,000 a year against an average of £250,000. Most went for the first choice.

If you genuinely think you'd feel a success with a higher salary, ask yourself why, according to quite a number of scientific studies, lottery winners don't end up much happier than everyone else. The other downside of pursuing a salary target is that it may come with obligations such as long hours, a BlackBerry for 24/7 contact and a punishing travel schedule. These in turn could limit your success in other areas of your life such as your relationships with partner, family and community.

Successful career people can be curiously isolated beasts. I recently met someone who, after years of yearning, finally bought his dream family home on an estate populated by successful business people. Within 18 months he had moved. "There was no sense of community," he told me. "People simply didn't mix. My neighbours were picked up at the crack of dawn by drivers and taken to work and if they were at home at all, they weren't back until late evening."

The more successful we are, the more remote we are likely to become from our community, an important source of wellbeing. In 2007 the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs published research into our satisfaction with domains of life such as health, future financial security and leisure. The results were split by socioeconomic group and, tellingly, the As and Bs came out as below average in just one of 11 domains – community.

Reassuringly most respondents of the survey, carried out by the Sea Cadets to mark their 155th birthday, seem to get this. Five out of six said they judged success on what they had achieved, rather than what they own. Half of the adults said being content meant simply being happy, living in a "nice house" and having few family arguments.

If you want to know what really determines whether you achieve satisfaction, the one-word answer is meaning. According to Carol Ryff of the University of Wisconsin, if we have a sense of purpose in our lives, personal growth, positive relationships, autonomy and self-acceptance, we are more likely to be not just satisfied with where we've got to, but also happy.

So next time you hear a car manufacturer purring that they "don't just make cars, they make joy", reflect for a moment on the elusive nature of success. As Albert Einstein famously said: "Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value."

• Psychology

This animated video explores a fundamental question: Does limitless choice lead to paralysing anxiety and dissatisfaction?

Does the freedom to be the architects of our own lives actually hinder rather than help us? Does our preoccupation with choosing and consuming actually obstruct social change? In this new RSAnimate, Professor Renata Salecl explores the paralysing anxiety and dissatisfaction surrounding limitless choice:

Renata Salecl is a Slovenian philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. Her work focuses on bringing together law, criminology and psychoanalysis. She has worked on the theories of punishment, and on the analysis of the relation between late capitalist insistence on choice and the increased feelings of anxiety and guilt in post-modern subjects. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana and has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics for several years. She will soon begin lecturing on the topic of emotions and law at Birkbeck College at the University of London. Every year, she lectures for a couple of weeks at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, on Psychoanalysis and Law. Renata Salecl is a leading scholar on this particular subject.

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) seeks to understand and enhance human capability so we can close the gap between today's reality and people's hopes for a better world -- a goal they've been pursuing for 250 years. The RSA is on facebook and on Twitter: @theRSAorg

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• Psychology

Moody period thinker or smutty, sex-obsessed farce? Lie back on the couch and give us your first impressions

For anyone who thought A History of Violence was one of the best films of the last decade and Eastern Promises, while not brilliant, was certainly pretty gamey, the prospect David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen's third consecutive collaboration is exciting.

Trouble is, Mortensen doesn't seem to feature a whole lot. Most of the running time for the first look at A Dangerous Method – billed, on IMBb at least, as a look at the intense relationship between Freud (Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) and how it spawned psychotherapy – appears to be devoted instead to the intense relationship between Jung and a spank-happy Russian patient, played by Keira Knightley.

Christopher Hampton's screenplay, adapted from his stage play The Talking Cure, wobbles – in this condensed format, at least – awfully close to Carry On Shrinking. For the first half, at least. Loaded lines such as "Perhaps she's the one for your experimental treatment?"; "There has been the most dramatic improvement!" soon give way to frank erotica: "I want you to punish me", "Never repress anything", etc.

It does look gripping, in a Kinsey-meets-The-King's-Speech kind of way. But are they flogging the sex angle a touch too hard?

• Viggo Mortensen
• David Cronenberg
• Sigmund Freud
• Psychology