Can money buy happiness? Psychologists and behavioral economists have been pondering this question for years. Or in other words, will a trip to the theater make someone happier than buying the latest gadget or vice versa?

Research over the last decade or so has sent out a resounding message: If you want to be happier, invest in experiences rather than things. In their groundbreaking work, psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich conducted a series of surveys and found that experiences made people happier than goods. Their findings were summarized in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Then in 2010, Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, showed why.

Gilovich’s study found that when people buy things, they are more likely to suffer buyer’s remorse. They also tend to compare their material assets with those of others. On the other hand, it’s more difficult to compare other people’s experiences with your own.

Moreover, the excitement of buying something new wanes overtime. “We buy a pair of shoes. It’s great at first. But then we get used to them,” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness. “We adapt. And then we want to buy another pair of shoes.” Several other studies by researchers at San Francisco State University have also linked happiness with experiences.

There is no denying that new challenges, travels, and thrills can provide deep satisfaction and meaning to a person, but let’s not write “things” off completely. It turns out that they can make us happy, too. “Most people are spending a little bit too much on material possessions,” says Michael Norton, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and a co-author of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that all material goods that you buy don’t make you happy. Some things make us happier than others.”

New studies have provided compelling evidence that there is real value in some kinds of material purchases. In a study that was published in Psychological Science in April, researchers found that people were happier if they spent on things that matched their personality. The researchers looked at bank transactions of more than 600 individuals, all of whom anonymously filled out a questionnaire about their personality type and life satisfaction. The happiest people in the study seemed to be ones who spent more on things or services that were in sync with their personality type. For example, an outgoing person would love to blow his cash at a pub, but a more introverted person is likely to be happier spending that kind of money on books.

An object like a bicycle or a book can provide a lifetime of valuable experiences.

Joe Gladstone, a co-author of the study and a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, Cambridge, says that this work does not assume, like some of the studies that have compared experiences with material goods, that there is one rule to happiness. “I think it’s more likely that for some people experiences would make them especially happier and for some people, they wouldn’t,” says Gladstone.