What Drives Happiness? The Interviewer’s Happiness

Journal of Happiness Studies - Interviewers in face-to-face surveys can potentially introduce bias both in the recruiting and the measurement phase. One reason behind this is that the measurement...     

Level and Inequality of Happiness in Nations: Does Greater Happiness of a Greater Number Imply Greater Inequality in Happiness?

Utilitarians and egalitarians have different priorities. Utilitarians prioritize the greatest level of happiness in society and are prepared to accept inequality, while egalitarians prioritize the smallest differences and are willing to accept a loss of happiness for this purpose. In theory these moral tenets conflict, but do they really clash in practice? This question is answered in two steps. First I consider the relation between level and inequality of happiness in nations; level of happiness is measured using average responses to a survey question on life satisfaction and inequality is measured with the standard deviation. There appears to be a strong negative correlation; in nations where average happiness is high, the standard deviation tends to be low. This indicates harmony instead of tension. Secondly I consider the institutional factors that are likely to affect happiness. It appears that level and equality of happiness depend largely on the same institutional context, which is another indication for harmony. We may conclude that the discussion between utilitarians and egalitarians is of little practical importance. This conclusion implies that increasing income inequality can go together with decreasing inequality in happiness and this conclusion provides moral support for Governments developing modern market economics     

Is Reported Happiness Five Years Ago Comparable to Present Happiness? A Cautionary Note

In the United States reported happiness five years ago is not comparable to present happiness. The improvement in happiness over the last five years obtained by differencing current reports of happiness today and happiness five years ago is not significantly related to the actual improvement in happiness over the same period. The currently reported five-year change in happiness is highly sensitive to current economic conditions, varying inversely with both the inflation and unemployment rates.Ordinarily, happiness five years ago as currently reported is less than present happiness, but the worse the current economic conditions are, the better the past looks relative to the present. If current economic conditions get bad enough, past happiness will be rated higher than present. Reports of happiness five years ago are not telling us about the utility respondents actually experienced at that time; they are telling us, instead, about respondents' current decision utility–which situation, today's or that five years ago, they would opt for if given the choice today.     

Does Money Buy Immigrant Happiness?

The relationship between income and happiness for international immigrants has been relatively unexplored. A handful of cross-sectional studies has shown that income and happiness are positively correlated after migration, and that wealthier immigrants are more satisfied with their post-migration lives than are their less privileged peers. What is unclear is if the link between income and happiness remains positive as immigrants assimilate to life in a new country. This question is the focus of our study. Using longitudinal data from over 10,000 immigrants tracked up to 30 years in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, we set out to provide some insight into the long-term relationship between immigrants’ self-reported life satisfaction and the level of their income in its absolute form. Longitudinal analyses revealed that immigrants who experienced increases in income over time reported greater satisfaction with life and that the income-happiness link remained relatively stable over time. The effect of absolute income on immigrants’ happiness was, nevertheless, small. We also observed that country of origin played an important role in the post-migration association between income and happiness. Income was a stronger predictor of the life satisfaction of immigrants from poorer origins than it was for their wealthier counterparts.     

What Do Happiness Studies Study?

What do, or should, happiness studies study? Everything to which we refer with the word ‘‘happiness’’ is worth some study. But the study of subjective states covers only part of the ground covered by the word ‘‘happiness’’ and by no means all the ground central to understanding happiness. On the central use of ‘‘happiness,’’ to be happy is to be glad or satisfied or content, which suggests subjectivity, with having a good measure of what is important in life, which suggests objectivity. We find the same suggestion of both subjectivity and objectivity in the list of what enhances the quality of life. There are strong arguments in favour both of the subjectivity of what enhances life and of its objectivity. I argue that neither is right, that the story is more complicated. The conclusion of the story is that there is a list of several non-reducible features that contribute to the quality of a characteristic human life, and that anything that contributes to the quality of any human life will be one or other of these features. But there is a problem. When we speak of the quality of a human life, there may be no one thing we have in mind. Perhaps some of us are not disagreeing with one another over the nature of a ‘‘happy’’ life but speaking of different things.     

Happiness No Matter the Cost? An Examination on How Efficiently Individuals Reach Their Happiness Levels

Happiness measures, reflecting individuals’ well-being, have received increasing attention by policy makers. Policies could target absolute happiness levels when aiming at increasing a society’s well-being. But given upper bounds of happiness measures, as well as the possibilities of decreasing returns to happiness resources, we argue that an important measure of interest is the efficiency with which individuals convert their resources into happiness. In order to examine the effects of policies on this efficiency and to better understand the trajectories of human well-being over time, we suggest an efficiency measure that is calculated via a nonparametric order-m approach borrowed from the production efficiency literature. Our approach is exemplified using micro level data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Between 20 and 27% of the British populace are efficient in attaining happiness during our sample period. A negative influence on “happiness efficiency” is being unemployed while a positive influence is cohabitation with a partner. Our results are robust with respect to using a more comprehensive subjective well-being measure, but there are gender differences, for example in the (positive) influence that retirement has on males’ efficiency, or the (positive) influence of maternity leave on females.     

Happiness Inducing Behaviors in Everyday Life: An Empirical Assessment of “The How of Happiness”

The frequency of Happiness Inducing Behaviors (HIB) was assessed in a survey of 903 university students; measures of Big Five personality traits and happiness were also obtained. Students reported engaging in many HIBs about 1–3 times per week. Analysis of HIB yielded three factors: Positive/Proactive Behaviors; Spiritual Behaviors; and Physical Health Behaviors. Positive/Proactive behaviors predicted significant additional variance in happiness beyond the variance predictable from Big Five personality traits. Mediation analysis suggested that effects of Big Five traits on happiness may be mediated to varying degrees by engagement in Positive/Proactive Behaviors and Physical Health Behaviors. Additional analyses examined possible moderation of the association between HIB and happiness by gender and Big Five traits; the strength of association between behavior and happiness did not differ between women and men, or across people with different scores on Big Five traits. This study provides additional evidence that naturally occurring behaviors are predictive of happiness in everyday life and confirms earlier findings about the degree to which behaviors mediate effects of Big Five traits on happiness.     

Are Happiness and Life Satisfaction Different Across Religious Groups? Exploring Determinants of Happiness and Life Satisfaction

This study explores whether different religions experience different levels of happiness and life satisfaction and in case this is affected by country economic and cultural environment. Using World Value Survey (from 1981 to 2014), this study found that individual religiosity and country level of development play a significant role in shaping people’s subjective well-being (SWB). Protestants, Buddhists and Roman Catholic were happier and most satisfied with their lives compared to other religious groups. Orthodox has the lowest SWB. Health status, household’s financial satisfaction and freedom of choice are means by which religious groups and governments across the globe can improve the SWB of their citizens.     

What Does “Happiness” Prompt in Your Mind? Culture,Word Choice,and Experienced Happiness

What three words come to your mind in association with “happiness”? We analyzed the 1563 words reported by 521 Korean and American participants in this free association task. The most frequently endorsed word was “family” in Korea, whereas the most popular word among Americans was “smile.” The overall frequency of social words (e.g., relationships, social emotions) reported by Koreans was higher, and the most often mentioned relationship type differed between the two groups (family in Korea; friend in the US). Nonetheless, both in Korea and the US, individuals who mentioned more social words were significantly more satisfied with their lives. The amount of social support provision mediated the link between the number of reported social words and experienced happiness. Regardless of culture, a simple count of social words associated with happiness appears to offer a reasonably good clue for how happy the person actually is.     

Happiness in a Flux? The Instability Problem

In the recent discussion of happiness it has become popular to claim that being happy means having a certain positive attitude towards your life. This attitude involves both a judgement that your life measures up to your standards and a feeling of satisfaction with your life. In this paper, I am going to discuss a serious problem inherent in this account that has important ramifications for the normative question of how we ought to pursue happiness. If happiness is in part determined by your standards, how shall we determine whether you are happier in one life than in another when your standards change across these lives? Perhaps you will judge a life as a parent as better than a childless life, if you were to become a parent, but judge a childless life as better than a parenting life, if you were to remain childless. Which standard should determine the comparative happiness of the two lives? In this paper, I shall argue that some innocent-looking answers to this question will generate inconsistencies. To find an acceptable resolution, we need to make a difficult choice between what on the face of it look like two equally valid principles of happiness.     

What Affects Happiness Inequality? Evidence from Japan

This paper examines the determinants of happiness inequality in Japan using unique data from the “Preference Parameters Study” of Osaka University, a nationally representative survey conducted in Japan. By estimating Recentered Influence Function regressions, we find that household income has a negative and significant effect on happiness inequality, as found for other advanced economies, though people’s perception of their relative standing in the income spectrum also matters for the dispersion of happiness. Moreover, the regression results show that the insecurity faced by people about their jobs and life after retirement is also significantly associated with the widening of happiness inequality. Such findings are cause for grave concern given that the share of irregular jobs, which tend to be low paid and insecure, in total employment significantly increased in Japan during the Lost Two Decades and that this increasing trend has not yet been reversed.     

The Mystery of Chinese People’s Happiness

The great improvement in economic wealth and social welfare over the decade doesn’t promote the Chinese people’s happiness. We construct a theoretical framework which covers economic wealth, social welfare, individual functional capability to explore the impact factors and determinants of the Chinese people’s happiness. Based on a national wide questionnaire survey in China, we test and modify the framework by the method of structural equation model. The empirical findings indicate that there are direct and indirect effects on the formation of happiness. For the direct effect, both the increasing of economic wealth and social welfare improves the national happiness, while the individual functional capability reduces it. For the indirect effect, the individual functional capability also reduces happiness by negatively affecting economic wealth and social welfare. The negative effect that played by individual functional capability overwhelms the positive effect played by economic wealth and social welfare. This causes the Chinese people’s happiness goes down while the economic wealth and social welfare are improving. Finally, we conclude that the Chinese people’s happiness is more about individual functional capability rather than social welfare or economic wealth.     

Modernity and Happiness – The Case of Germany

The question asked in this article is whether modern societies enable the individual to lead a happier life. It was hoped during the Age of the Enlightenment that rationally designed social conditions would lead in the future to greater prosperity, more security and increased happiness for all. Only a little of this optimism has survived into the twentieth century. In their studies on anomie, sociologists such as Durkheim, Merton and Sennett have drawn attention to the darker sides of progress. Current theories of anomie – explicit social critiques – entirely ignore the successes of modernity and discuss only its crises. In these theories, anomie is described as a structural feature of modern societies, whose destructive consequences are manifested by growing alienation, increasing social isolation and rising suicidality. Empirical analyses of data from Germany show, however, that these theses diverge from the reality. Despite rapid processes of modernisation, anomic patterns of perception and behaviour have not become more widespread over the last 20 years; on the contrary, in some areas anomie has decreased significantly. Proceeding from this insight, this article proposes a correction of those models of anomie that are blind to progress. The crises of modernity are confronted with its successes, which have helped considerably to reduce anomic reactions and to stabilise subjective well-being at a high level. Finally, the article points out that this is not a stable equilibrium, rather that temporal and structural imbalances may occur in the course of modernisation processes, whose magnitudes may, however, be curbed – albeit not entirely or in every respect.     

Lay Understanding of Happiness and the Experience of Well-Being: Are Some Conceptions of Happiness More Beneficial than Others?

The aim of the study was to understand aspects of life that men and women associate with happiness and to explore the connections between these associations and well-being (measured as positive affect, negative affect and life satisfaction) in different periods of life. Participants were 785 people who were asked to list associations that came to mind on hearing the word ‘happiness’. The moderating roles of gender and period of life (adolescence/adulthood, transition/no transition) were analysed. Participants associated happiness mostly with health and relationships. Other categories included knowledge, work, material goods and freedom. Those who associated happiness with work had higher levels of positive affect. Associating happiness with relationships predicted greater life satisfaction, whereas associating it with material goods predicted lower satisfaction. Gender moderated the relationship between associations and positive affect: associating happiness with material goods decreased positive affect among men but no such effect was observed among women; associating happiness with relationships was beneficial for women but unbeneficial for men. Additionally, associations with material goods predicted lower positive affect, especially in times of transition. Associating happiness with knowledge decreased positive affect in adolescents and increased it in adults. Some ways of understanding happiness improved life satisfaction but none were related to negative affect. The relationship between concepts of happiness and positive affect is complex; some concepts are unbeneficial only for some people and during certain periods of life.     

Development as Happiness: The Subjective Perception of Happiness and UNDP’s Analysis of Poverty, Wealth and Development

This paper examines to what extent the concept of happiness is complementary to the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) human development approach in the evaluation of poverty, wealth and development. The deconstruction of UNDP's discourse on and its measurement of these concepts show that its perspective is highly arbitrary. Poverty is exclusively defined as lack and state of ill-being, inferior to wealth regarded as a state of abundance and well-being. Development then becomes a teleological process trying to promote well-being through abundance. Yet, this external perspective of UNDP on well-being is questioned by the subjective perception of the individuals themselves. Happiness studies—which define happiness as the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his life-as-a-whole favorably—prove that higher levels of UNDP's development indicators are not necessarily better for subjective well-being. Despite methodological and conceptual problems, happiness studies discover that the individuals' perception of poverty, wealth and development can differ considerably from UNDP's perspective. Increased income, better objective health and higher levels of education do not automatically lead to greater happiness. Furthermore, additional dimensions essential for human happiness are detected by the research, yet not taken into account by UNDP. A country ranking comparison between the two approaches confirms the different visions of well-being. The integration of a happiness indicator in its analysis of poverty, wealth and development is thus indispensable for UNDP in order to correct its analytical and also practical approach to development.     

Does Happiness Pays? A Longitudinal Family Life Survey

Most of the research on happiness has documented that income, marriage, employment and health affect happiness. Very few studies examine whether happiness itself affect income, marriage, employment and health. This study does so, benefiting from data drawn from the panel longitudinal Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) 2007 and 2014. The survey includes 23,776 individuals from 15,067 households living in about 262 neighborhoods between 2007 and 2014. The findings show that happier Indonesians in 2007 earned more money, were more likely to be married, were less likely to be divorced or unemployed, and were in better health when the survey was conducted again seven years later. Policy makers may consider that increasing citizen happiness is vital to achieve citizen success on labor markets, to improve their job performance and to maintain their health.

     

Children’s and Adolescents’ Conceptions of Happiness

Previous research on children’s and adolescents’ happiness has mainly focused on the different variables that may contribute to it. However, very few studies have investigated the beliefs that children and adolescents hold about happiness. It is important to study developmental and gender differences in the conceptions of happiness as beliefs affect people’s emotions and behaviors, and they may help explain how children and adolescents strive for their own (and potentially others’) happiness. To that aim, we conducted two different studies. In Study 1a 20 people (lay judges) completed two categorization tasks to obtain categorization systems that may include all the relevant content categories identified in previous literature with adults, adolescents and children. In Study 1b, we asked 162 children and adolescents to define—in their own words—what happiness meant for them. Their responses were coded according to two different systems derived from previous finding with adults and children and to an alternative coding system derived from the qualitative analyses of children’s and adolescents’ responses. Overall, results showed that hedonic conceptualization of happiness were mainly present in late childhood; whereas eudaimonic conceptualizations were mainly present in adolescence. No significant gender differences were found.     

Does Higher Education Increase Hedonic and Eudaimonic Happiness?

An increasing number of studies suggest that the relationship between higher education and subjective well-being (SWB) is either insignificant or negative. Most of these studies, however, use life satisfaction as a proxy for SWB. In this study, using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey, I examine the link between higher education and three different measures of subjective well-being: life satisfaction and its different sub-domains (evaluative), positive and negative affect (hedonic), and engagement and purpose (eudaimonic). Three substantial results emerge: (1) people with higher education are more likely to report higher levels of eudaimonic and hedonic SWB, i.e., they view their lives as more meaningful and experience more positive emotions and less negative ones; (2) people with higher education are satisfied with most life domains (financial, employment opportunities, neighborhood, local community, children at home) but they report lower satisfaction with the amount of free time they have; (3) the positive effect of higher education is increasing, but at a decreasing rate; the SWB gains from obtaining a graduate degree are much lower (on the margin) compared to getting a college degree.     

Happiness on the Political Agenda? PROS and CONS

This paper provides a critical analysis of the application of happiness research into policy domains. An overview of the current debate on the politics of happiness is elaborated by focusing on its promising perspectives as well as the potential problems it raises. Arguments of proponents and opponents are confronted with each other in discussing the following central issues in the debate: (1) the state of progress of the happiness research; (2) the value of happiness and its promotion by political means; (3) the possibility of promoting happiness; (4) paternalism versus autonomy and (5) a fair distribution of happiness. It is concluded from this that pragmatic issues do not pose insurmountable obstacles for the realization of a politics of happiness, although further research is definitely recommendable. The ideological or ethical issues however require further debate and research before the actual realization of a politics of happiness is possible. More specifically, the science of happiness needs to give more attention to analyzing the value of happiness and the desirability of increasing happiness by political means. Also the weighing of the value of happiness against other values and goals is an important issue to be put on the agenda. This paper thus explicates the moral choices and challenges that politicians would be confronted with if they want to put the increase of happiness on the political agenda.