 34. Personality and Subjective Well‑Being 735
Georgellis, & Diener, 2004). Finally, for 
events such as marriage and widowhood, 
a great deal of adaptation occurred, with 
average levels of happiness returning to 
pre-event levels (Lucas et al., 2003; but see 
Anusic, Yap, & Lucas, 2014a, 2014b; Yap, 
Anusic, & Lucas, 2012).
Third, there are considerable individual 
differences in the amount of change that oc -
curs following life events. Because pre-event 
levels of SWB are known in these studies, it 
is possible to examine both average change 
and variability around this average level. 
Analyses show that the amount of variabil -
ity is often quite large. For instance, Lucas 
and colleagues (2003) showed that, on av -
erage, people adapt to marriage. Within 
approximately 2 or 3 years after marriage, 
participants who got married were no hap -
pier than they were before they got married. 
However, the amount of variability in the 
change scores was almost as great as the 
variability that existed in pre-event baseline 
levels. Thus, many people reported lasting 
positive changes in happiness following the 
marriage, but there were also many people 
who reported lasting negative changes. Im -
portantly, results showed that those people 
who had very positive initial reactions to 
marriage were also still far from baseline 
many years later. Thus, the fact that hap -
piness levels are not greater after marriage 
than they were before marriage does not 
mean that adaptation is inevitable. Instead, 
the results from this study of marriage show 
that the same event may affect individuals 
in different ways, and these differential re -
actions may hide the amount of true change 
that occurs.
Finally, research using panel studies 
highlights the difficulty in clarifying how 
life events affect well-being. For instance, 
our research on divorce highlights the fact 
that life event research that does not use a 
prospective design has the potential to con -
clude that life events have an effect, even 
though the effect that is identified results 
from preexisting differences. Lucas (2005) 
found that although those who experienced 
divorce ended up less happy than they had 
been during the happiest portions of their 
marriage, there was also evidence that these 
to-be-  divorced participants were less happy 
than those who would remain married, even before the marriage occurred. Thus, any 
differences between those who have experi -
enced an event and those who have not after 
the even has occurred could be due to such 
preexisting differences.
Furthermore, even when prospective panel 
studies are used, it is not always easy to iso -
late the effects of the life event under inves -
tigation. For example, although our earliest 
studies showed that people adapt fully to the 
event of marriage (Lucas et al., 2003), later 
work with more sophisticated models sug -
gested that the marriage may protect against 
declines that participants might have ex -
perienced had they not gotten married. By 
using propensity score-  matching techniques, 
we attempted to match those who eventu -
ally married with similar others who did 
not. Results from these models suggest that 
marriage protected against declines that oc -
curred among the unmarried (Anusic et al., 
2014a, 2014b; Yap et al., 2012). Of course, 
conclusions about the causal effect of mar -
riage depend on the adequacy of the match -
ing procedure. Thus, additional work using 
a variety of designs is needed to determine 
whether these events causally affect well-
being outcomes.
Future research will be required to iden -
tify the factors that promote or hinder ad -
aptation, both to positive and negative life 
events. Again, prospective studies can help 
in this regard. Anusic and Lucas (2014), for 
instance, looked at whether social support 
buffers the effects of widowhood on life sat -
isfaction. Most work examining this ques -
tion only looks at the buffering effects of 
social support that people report after the 
event has occurred. However, the protective 
effect of social support is ambiguous when it 
is measured after the event has occurred— 
it is possible that those who bounce back 
quickest following a loss are more likely to 
perceive, seek out, or attract more social 
support than those who are more strongly 
affected. Indeed, Anusic and Lucas showed 
that although social support in the years 
after the loss of a spouse was associated with 
life satisfaction, the social support that a 
person reported having before the event oc -
curred did not seem to buffer the effects of 
the loss. Additional work has examined the 
role that personality plays in moderating the 
effects of life circumstances, and this work 