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In interviews with the experimenters, the two groups were asked, among other things, to rate the amount of pleasure they got from everyday activities: small but enjoyable things like chatting with a friend, watching TV, eating breakfast, laughing at a joke, or receiving a compliment. In 1978, a trio of researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Massachusetts attempted to answer this by asking two very disparate groups about the happiness in their lives: recent winners of the Illinois State Lottery - whose prizes ranged from $50,000 to $1 million - and recent victims of catastrophic accidents, who were now paraplegic or quadriplegic.
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What happens to a person’s emotional life after winning the lottery, literally or metaphorically? But let’s say some other massive upswing in good fortune comes your way this year. Someone could win the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot tonight, though as killjoys across the internet have already noted, that someone will likely not be you. A woman buys a Powerball lottery ticket at a newsstand in New York City on January 12, 2016.