While normally you wouldn’t link candy and colonoscopies, an NPR story by Shankar Vendatam does just that in trying to explain the mystery of happiness. In a nod to Daniel Kahneman’s classic study about the painful medical procedure, researchers used Halloween candy to prove that satisfaction isn’t dependent just on quantity but also on order of experience. An excerpt:

“What makes trick-or-treaters happy is candy. And more candy is better, right?

Well, it turns out that might not actually be the case. A few years ago researchers did a study on Halloween night where some trick-or-treaters were given a candy bar, and others were given the candy bar and a piece of bubble gum.

Now, in any rational universe, you would imagine that the kids who got the candy bar and the bubble gum would be happier than the kids who got just the candy bar. George Wolford, a psychologist at Dartmouth College, and his fellow researchers, Amy Doe and Alexander Rupert, found something quite different.

‘Those children that got both the full-sized candy bar and the bubble gum second, rated how delighted they were to get these treats lower than those people that got the candy bar only,’ Wolford says.”