Happiness

About: Happiness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 22093 publications have been published within this topic receiving 728411 citations. The topic is also known as: joy & happy.

Happiness is best kept stable: positive emotion variability is associated with poorer psychological health.

Abstract: Positive emotion has been shown to be associated with adaptive outcomes in a number of domains, including psychological health. However, research has largely focused on overall levels of positive emotion with less attention paid to how variable versus stable it is across time. We thus examined the psychological health correlates of positive emotion variability versus stability across 2 distinct studies, populations, and scientifically validated approaches for quantifying variability in emotion across time. Study 1 used a daily experience approach in a U.S. community sample (N 244) to examine positive emotion variability across 2 weeks (macrolevel). Study 2 adopted a daily reconstruction method in a French adult sample (N 2,391) to examine variability within 1 day (microlevel). Greater macro- and microlevel variability in positive emotion was associated with worse psychological health, including lower well-being and life satisfaction and greater depression and anxiety (Study 1), and lower daily satisfaction, life satisfaction, and happiness (Study 2). Taken together, these findings support the notion that positive emotion variability plays an important and incremental role in psychological health above and beyond overall levels of happiness, and that too much variability might be maladaptive.

Happiness, health, and religiosity: Significant relations

Abstract: The aim of the present work was to test for an association between, and gender differences in, happiness, physical health, mental health, and religiosity. Four separate self-rating scales of these variables with good retest reliability were used. The sample comprised 2,210 male (n = 1,056) and female (n = 1,154) volunteer Kuwaiti undergraduates. Males had a significantly higher self-rating mean score of happiness and mental health than females, while females had a significantly higher religiosity mean score than their male counterparts. All the inter-correlations between the four self-ratings were significant and positive. They yielded one high loaded factor. Though the loadings were all high (>0.51), the ratings for happiness and mental health had the highest loadings (>0.82). Multiple regression revealed that the main predictor of happiness was mental health. Mental health accounted for 60% of the variance in predicting happiness, while religiosity accounted for around 15% of the variance in predicting ...

Facial Appearance, Gender, and Emotion Expression.

Abstract: Western gender stereotypes describe women as affiliative and more likely to show happiness and men as dominant and more likely to show anger. The authors assessed the hypothesis that the gender-stereotypic effects on perceptions of anger and happiness are partially mediated by facial appearance markers of dominance and affiliation by equating men's and women's faces for these cues. In 2 studies, women were rated as more angry and men as more happy-a reversal of the stereotype. Ratings of sadness, however, were not systematically affected. It is posited that markers of affiliation and dominance, themselves confounded with gender, interact with the expressive cues for anger and happiness to produce emotional perceptions that have been viewed as simple gender stereotypes.

Why Inequality Makes Europeans Less Happy: The Role of Distrust, Status Anxiety, and Perceived Conflict

Abstract: Are more equal societies 'better' societies? This article addresses the question as to whether and why income inequality lowers the degree of Europeans' subjective well-being. While in broad international comparisons typically no clear-cut link between income inequality and (un)happiness exists, we can demonstrate that Europeans are somewhat less happy in more unequal places. We further discuss and empirically test three explanations as to why Europeans are inequality-averse, namely (dis)trust, status anxiety, and perceived conflicts. Each of these three potential mediators is hypothesized to be shaped by the extent of a nation's income inequality, and in turn to result in lower subjective well-being. A multilevel mediation analysis with data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2007 for 30 countries reveals that distrust and status anxiety are important mediators of inequality aversion, whereas perceived conflict is not. We can further show that trust is the crucial mediator among affluent societies, whereas status anxiety is crucial among the less affluent societies. The results are discussed with reference to the Spirit Level theory developed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.