Happiness360

A: For many years the results of surveys have indicated that people in some societies say they are happier and more satisfied than people in other societies. For example, Diener, Diener, and Diener (1995) report a strong correlation between the wealth of nations (which goes along also with having more human rights, equality, and freedom) and the SWB reported by their citizens.

Thus, conclusions about the happiness of societies, based on broad survey measures, suggests that countries do differ substantially in SWB. Another reason that nations seem to differ in SWB is because of the norms (beliefs about what is right) they have for feeling emotions. We find that in Latin nations (South America, Spain, etc.), there is a belief that positive emotions are mostly all good and negative emotions are mostly all bad. In the Confucian nations of the Pacific Rim (e.g., Korea, China, and Japan), there is a belief that negative emotions are as good as positive ones. Thus, there is not a high value placed on SWB and being happy. We find that these nations differ in SWB, especially when income is controlled. The Latin nations are much happier than we would expect based on their income, and the Pacific Rim countries are less happy. Thus, we see two primary forces determining how happy on average people in a nation are: the wealth (and concomitant human rights, equality, and freedom) of nations, and the norms governing the desirability of positive emotions.

However, we might question the validity of the broad survey measures, and only recently have we begun to take a deeper look across nations, using a multimethod measurement approach. In this approach, we employ, in addition to the global survey measures of SWB, experience sampling (the Palmtop method of obtaining moods at random moments over time), informant reports (friends and family tell us how happy the target respondent is), and memory measures (can the individual quickly remember more good things than bad things from his or her life). We also use broad and narrow measures, in order to pick up response tendencies. At the gross level, we find that the survey measures perform OK - we can distinguish the happiest from unhappiest nations. But the additional measures also show that one can get different results with the different measures when one takes a more fine-grained analysis. And also, positive affect measures can produce different results from negative affect measures - that is, how much joy a people in a country feel on average is not the opposite of how much sadness people feel there. There are nations where lots of both positive and negative are felt, and there are nations where not much emotion of either type is experienced.

Last updated on September 14, 2007 by Dr. Walt