Screenshot from \"The Great Brain Try out\" app. Now

The cardinal to happiness could be low expectations — leastways, that is the lesson from a new equation that researchers wont to anticipate how blessed someone would equal in the future.

In a hot study, researchers found that it didn't matter so much whether things were going well. It mattered whether they were going better than expected.

"IT is often said that you will be happier if your expectations are lower," Dr. Robb Rutledge, the senior enquiry associate at University College London (UCL) who led the study, said in a statement. "We find that there is some truth to this: Lower expectations make it more likely that an outcome will exceed those expectations and have a positive encroachment on felicity."

Not that you should walk around gloomy all of the time. Having expectations at all — say, for a lunch date with a ally — can lift your spirits "as soon as you make the plan," Rutledge said.

But anticipating the sterling repast of your life could result in flavour pretty disappointed. No, this study was not meant to ruin your lunch plans. Instead, researchers welcome to work a way to give doctors a subjective, quantitative way to measure mood disorders.

The field of study involved two parts. First, 26 subjects made decisions that led to financial wins or losses, all spell being monitored by an MRI simple machine. Later, 18,420 people played a game called "The Great Brainpower Experimentation," which replicated the try out with points instead of money.

Ultimately, the researchers found that it was non the add up of total money or points won that mattered — it was how winning or losing stacked busy expectations formed during past experiences.

This is the happiness equation. Today

They even came up with a exact equation that could accurately predict how happy someone would atomic number 4 during the money experiment and while playacting the smartphone game. Eventually, researchers said, it might be able to help doctors predict how people with mood disorders power react to the humble wins and losses of everyday life.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Keith Wagstaff writes about technology for NBC News. Helium previously covered technology for TIME's Techland and wrote about government as a staff author at TheWeek.com. You can watch him connected Twitter at @kwagstaff and reach him aside email at: Keith.Wagstaff@nbcuni.com