Abstract
The aim of the study is to explore links between happiness, optimism, resilience and meaningfulness, and socio-demographic factors in 25 European countries. Research methods. Experts-generated single-item questions from European Social Survey round 6 were used to assess happiness, optimism, resilience, meaningfulness in life. Results. Greater number of years of completed education relates to higher scores of happiness, optimism, meaningfulness and resilience in most European countries. However, in Western Europe and Scandinavian countries age does not relate or positively relates with psychological aspects of well-being, however in most Post-Soviet countries this relationship is negative.
 Conclusions. Happiness, optimism, meaningfulness and resilience in most European countries were related to age and years of completed education with no specific differences between regions.
 
 Keywords: optimism; resilience; happiness; meaningfulness; demographics
 
 
 
 
Highlights
It is widely accepted that higher levels of education relate to higher levels of psychological well-being and better health (e.g. Ryff, 2014), some studies show that over-education is linked with depressive symptoms which, in turn, are associated with lower levels of well-being (Bracke, Pattyn, dem Knesebeck, 2013). These findings demonstrate that the links between education and well-being are not apparent
Purpose of the Study The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among happiness, optimism, meaningfulness, psychological resilience, as aspects of psychological and subjective well-being, and socio-demographic variables in 25 European countries
The dataset is composed of questions measuring happiness (“Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?”) where 0 – “extremely unhappy”, and 10 – “extremely happy”, optimism (“Always optimistic about the future”) and meaningfulness (“Feel what I do in life is valuable and worthwhile“), resilience (“When things go wrong in my life it takes a long time to get back to normal”), where 1 means that a subject agrees strongly with that item and 5 - disagrees strongly
Summary
The concept of well-being, including psychological and subjective well-being, is widely used in current research studies in the context of quality of life, physical or mental health, satisfaction with life, etc. Well-being can be divided into the subjectively perceived and the objective one. The socalled objective well-being is usually understood as the amount of gross domestic product per person (GDP per capita) – it is assumed that greater GDP means greater well-being. GDP concept as a measure of wellbeing is usually used by economists (NEF, 2014). Such definition of well-being, based on material issues, is not appropriate – research findings had shown that the increase of GDP was not related to the increase of life satisfaction Attention has to be paid to subjective aspects of well-being as well, to objective ones
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