Happiness is associated with successful living across cultures

Abstract

ABSTRACT We explored in three cultures (the United States, Korea, and Costa Rica) the association between subjective well-being (SWB) and behaviors often described as positive or beneficial. In two studies we found that three forms of subjective well-being (positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction) were associated with several categories of behavior (health behavior, supportive behavior, citizenship behavior, and creative behavior). Most of the associations were significant in three nations and not significantly different between nations. Furthermore, we examined whether there exists a significant association between common variance across types of SWB and common variance of categories of behaviors. We found that there was a significant common pathway between a latent SWB factor and a latent behavior factor, along with unique associations between individual SWB and behavior categories. We conclude that the SWB and behavior associations are widespread across the three distinct cultures.