“Sure, money can’t buy you love, but it’s hard to imagine that winning rewards won’t make us happy.

It does, researchers say, but only if our immediate expectations aren’t bigger than the size of the payoff. Disappointment squelches happiness.

“Your happiness increases only if you do better than you expected,” says Robb Rutledge, a neuroscientist and senior research associate at University College London. “Just having a bigger salary isn’t enough to make you happy.”

Rutledge and his colleagues are trying to figure out how the brain calculates the determinants of happiness, which they think could be useful in diagnosing and treating depression and other mood disorders. To find this out, they first had 26 students play a decision-making game with small financial rewards.” * Cenk Uygur (http://www.twitter.com/cenkuygur) and Ana Kasparian (http://www.twitter.com/AnaKasparian) break it down on The Young Turks.

*Read more here from http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/08/06/338306510/do-you-want-to-be-happy-dont-set-your-expectations-too-high