经济学人06:拥有子女确实能让男人对生活更加满意

 　　Science and Technolgy.

　　科技。
　　The joys of parenthood.
　　为人父母的快乐。
　　Father's day.
　　父亲节。
　　Having children really does make a man more content with life.
　　拥有子女确实能让男人对生活更加满意。
　　WILL fatherhood make me happy? That is a question many men have found themselves asking, and the scientific evidence is equivocal. A lot of studies have linked parenthood-particularly fatherhood-with lower levels of marital 1 satisfaction and higher rates of depression than are found among non-parents.
　　父亲的身份能让自己幸福快乐吗？很多男人都会问自己这个问题，但是至今依然没有一个明确的科学解答。很多关于父母身份（特别是父亲）的研究都显示，有子女的父母有着更低的婚姻满意度和更高的忧郁症比例。
　　Biologically speaking, that looks odd. Natural selection might be expected to favour the progeny 2 of men who enjoy bringing them up. On the other hand, the countervailing pressure to have other children, by other women, may leave the man who is already encumbered 3 by a set of offspring dissatisfied.
　　从生物学角度来说，这有点奇怪，因为自然选择趋向于选择那些乐于带孩子男人的后代，反过来看，男性要和其他女性生育更多子女的压力可能会让那些已有子女的父亲感到不满。
　　To investigate the matter further Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, decided 4 both to study the existing literature, and to conduct some experiments of her own. The results, just published in Psychological Science, suggest parenthood in general, and fatherhood in particular, really are blessings 5, even though the parent in question might sometimes feel they are in disguise.
　　来自加州大学河滨分校的心理学家Sonja Lyubomirsky进行了更为深入的研究，她从现有文献和自己的实验同时入手，其结果发表在《心理学》上。研究表明，父母身份，特别是父亲的身份是相当重要的，尽管那些问题父母有时候可能并没有注意这一点。
　　Dr Lyubomirsky's first port of call was the World Values Survey. This is a project which gathers huge amounts of data about the lives of people all around the planet. For the purposes of her research, Dr Lyubomirsky looked at the answers 6,906 Americans had given, in four different years, to four particular questions. These were: how many children the responder had; how satisfied he (or she) was with life; how happy he was; and how often he thought about the meaning and purpose of life.
　　Lyubomirsky博士首先进行世界价值观调查，这个步骤要收集生活在世界各地的人的大量数据。为了达到研究目的， Lyubomirsky博士在四个不同的年份分别询问了6906个美国人四个不同的问题，这四个问题分别是：受访者有多少个孩子；他（或她）对生活有多满意；他有多幸福；他多久考虑一次生命的意义。
　　She found that, regardless of the year the survey was conducted, parents had higher happiness, satisfaction and meaning-of-life scores than non-parents. The differences were not huge, but they were statistically 6 significant. Moreover, a closer look showed that the differences in happiness and satisfaction were the result of men's scores alone going up with parenthood. Those of women did not change.
　　她发现，比起没有子女的父母，有子女的父母有着更高的幸福感、满意度和生活意义分数。虽然差距不算太大，但统计上很明显，此外，深入分析后发现，在幸福感和满意度上的差距主要来自于父母身份中父亲的分数，女人的分数对其影响不大。
　　Armed with this result, Dr Lyubomirsky conducted her own experiment. The problem with projects like the World Values Survey is that, because participants are asked to recall their feelings rather than stating what they are experiencing in the here and now, this might lead them into thinking more fondly in hindsight about their parenting duties than they actually felt at the time. Dr Lyubomirsky therefore gave pagers to 329 North American volunteers aged 7 between 18 and 94, having first recorded, among other things, their sex, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, marital status and number of children. She told them they would be paged at random 8, five times a day. When they were so paged, they were asked to complete a brief response sheet about how they felt, then and there. She did not, however, tell them why she was asking these questions.
　　根据这个结果，Lyubomirsky博士开始着手自己的实验。但是在调查世界价值观的时候还存在一些问题，因为受访者是被要求回忆他们当时的感受，而不是描述此时此刻正在经历的事，事后的觉悟可能会让他们把作为父母的责任想得更令人喜爱。所以Lyubomirsky博士在北美选择了329位18至94岁的志愿者，并给他们配备了寻呼机，此外，记录原始数据还包括他们的性别、年龄、种族、社会地位、婚姻状况和子女的数目。她告诉志愿者她会随机呼叫他们，每天5次，当他们被呼叫时，他们会被要求完成一份简短的回复表，这个表主要是关于他们当场感觉，但是她并没有告诉他们她为什么要问那些问题
　　The upshot was the same as her findings from the World Values Survey. Parents claimed more positive emotions and more meaning in their lives than non-parents, and a closer look revealed that it was fathers who most enjoyed these benefits. Moreover, further analysis revealed that this enhanced enjoyment 9 came from activities which involved children rather than those (such as watching television alone, or cooking) that did not.
　　实验结果和世界观调查结果一样，比起无子女的双亲，正常父母有着更加积极的情绪和更好的生活体验，并且父亲们更加享受这份关系。此外，深入研究还发现与子女相关的活动比没有子女父母的活动（比如独自看电视，做饭）更能增加快感。
　　It looks, then, as if evolution has bolted into men a psychological mechanism 10 to keep them in the family. At first sight, it is strange that women do not share this mechanism, but perhaps they do not need to. They know, after all, that the children are theirs, whereas the best a man can do is hope that is true. That, and a man's potential to father an indefinite number of offspring if he can find willing volunteers, might encourage him to stray from the bosom 11 of his family. Enjoying fatherhood, by contrast, will help keep him in the porch.
　　在这一点看来，就像进化论把男人带入了"融入家庭"的心理机制，女人们却没有分享到这个特性，乍看之下还有点奇怪，这或许是因为她们根本不需要，毕竟孩子总是她们的，而男人最多只能祈祷孩子确实是自己。此外，如果能找到情投意合的异性，男人总有与其产下更多后代的潜在欲望，这些都会驱使男性偏离家庭生活，所以还是让他好好享受为人之父的快乐，这才会让他乐意留在家里。