The folk psychology of happiness in Korea

Abstract

Happiness research has primarily been conducted based on the American model of happiness. The agentic concept of happiness in the West emphasizes the positive feeling state stemming from individual achievement and positive interpersonal relationships. However, previous studies on lay theories of happiness in other East Asian countries, such as China and Japan, have suggested that these meanings of happiness differ from those of the Western cultural context. The present study examined the lay theory of happiness among Koreans using qualitative and quantitative approaches. Furthermore, the authors compared the Korean model of happiness with that of the Japanese and Americans from Uchida and Kitayama (2009). The findings from the present research indicate that the Korean model of happiness involves both positive and negative states and consequences of happiness, unlike the uniformly positively connoted happiness in Western cultural contexts. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the current findings on happiness research in the Korean culture.