"Teens strive to be unhappy, study says"

"Teens strive to be unhappy, study says"

Source: The Vancouver Sun

By: Misty Harris

When you look around teens are always in a funk, moody, or just have a negative attitude in general. Researchers discovered that teens try to maintain a bad mood 25 per cent of the time. People who are 60 years or older try to maintain a positive attitude showing a greater desire and higher frequency to boost their attitude and emotions. "Our study suggest that some of the age-related differences in everyday emotional well-being may be brought about by differences in how individuals wish to influence their feelings," says Michaela Riediger, research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany. The experiment went as follows, 378 participants ages 14 to 86 carried mobile phones for three weeks. Over that time, they were signalled to answer question about their moods in 54 different situations. Participants were to indicate what activity they were engaged in, who they were with, and whether they wished to dampen, enhance, maintain or not influence at all each of the six listed feelings: joyful, content, interested, angry, nervous, or downhearted. Those 14 to 18 expressed a desire to either maintain or enhance negative emotions, or suppress positive ones.

What I learned from this article is that teenagers always carry a negative attitude. I am a teenager so I know what Harris is talking about in the article. We put too much pressure on ourselves and make everything seem worse than it really is. Instead of trying to be happy and create a positive attitude for ourselves we decide that we want to be depressed and unhappy instead for no reason at all.

I really enjoyed this article and the way that Misty Harris wrote it. I haven't seen an article about this before and when I came across it in the paper I went "Hey this seems interesting." I enjoyed how she got the experts to speak about the results from the experiment as well as informing us to what the experiment was. Overall this was an interesting piece and I enjoyed it very much.