If you can't buy happiness, can you win it?

Money, if won, can cause and increase in one's happiness.  Or so says a study by Professor Andrew Oswald:

Winning just £1,000 [about $1,900] can be enough to change a person's outlook on life.

However, less than £1m is unlikely to have a lasting effect on personal happiness and experts found a strong marriage and good health were more likely to make people feel content than money.

The researchers looked at 9,000 families in Britain throughout the 1990s.

They observed the impact of windfalls on individuals using standard strain indicators to gauge their levels of happiness.

The BBC report on the 2002 study went on to note that

Professor Oswald advised that money was not the only factor affecting good mental health and happiness.

He said:  "There are lots of other factors in life, especially personal things like getting married and so on."

The research found that women tended to be happier than men, and people in their 30s were least likely to be content.

Professor Oswald said happiness followed a U-shaped pattern, with people beginning life happy but becoming discontented in their early 30s, before their happiness recovered and continued, increasing into their 60s.