Rich people experience happiness differently than the poor, study suggests

Rich people are different from the rest of us — and that includes the way they experience happiness.

Instead of feeling positive emotions that involve connections with other people, their happiness is more likely to be expressed as feelings that focus on themselves, new research shows.

However, this difference doesn’t necessarily mean that high-income people have more total happiness than people who earn less.

The findings were published this week in the journal Emotion, and they seemed to fit a larger pattern, according to the psychologists who conducted the study.

After all, they wrote, people with money are more insulated from social and environmental threats.