Actual Happiness Research Articles

Prosocial spending encourages happiness: A replication of the only experiment reported in Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008).

Spending money on one’s self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, often heightens one’s sense of happiness. It is therefore both surprising and important that people can be even happier after spending money on someone else. We conducted a close replication of a key experiment from Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) to verify and expand upon their findings. Participants were given money and randomly assigned to either spend it on themselves or on someone else. Although the original study (N = 46) found that the latter group was happier, when we used the same analysis in our replication (N = 133), we did not observe a significant difference. However, we report an additional analysis, focused on a more direct measure of happiness, that does show a significant effect in the direction of the original. Follow-up analyses shed new insights into people’s predictions about their own and others’ happiness and their actual happiness when spending money for themselves or others.

Econometric evidence on happiness and its determinants among rice farmers in leyte, Philippines

The study investigated the influence of socio-economic factors on rice farmers' subjective well-being in barangay Tabunok, Hilongos, Leyte, Philippines. A face-to-face interview was conducted among 177 randomly selected rice farmers and 50 purposive samples of wage workers for comparison. Descriptive statistics and econometric modeling was used to examine the determinants of happiness in farming. Results show that the farmers’ actual happiness is significantly lower than the expectations. Knowledge, skills, health, and farm owner make them more competent than the other farmers and increase their happiness level. An increase in income leads to an increase in household assets, giving benefits and comfort to the family and directly influencing their well-being. Furthermore, results reveal that farmers’ level of happiness is significantly lower compared to wage workers. Also, farmers are negatively affected by the price increase of agricultural inputs and low harvested output prices in the country.

Cuanto más, mejor. El sueño americano en La casa en Mango Street, una pesadilla material y extrínseca

Sandra Cisneros’s renowned novel The House on Mango Street (1984) approaches fundamental issues such as cultural identity, gender and ethnicity put in relation with the hopes and ambitions of Esperanza, a young Chicana living in a barrio in the 60s, with all this entails. Esperanza’s view on Mango Street is deeply enrooted in the endemic materialism that is a quintessential part of the American dream. With this in mind, this paper will aim to analyze The House on Mango Street by discerning the definitory principles of the American dream in the scope of economic status and the revisited concepts of psychological and economic well-being. Through this examination, the contrast between financial goals and actual happiness will be proven central in the development of its main character and her final reaffirmation as Chicana

Subjective Happiness Among Polish and Hadza People.

Life satisfaction and happiness were broadly studied in Western populations, whereas evidence from traditional societies remains surprisingly scarce. We collected data on the happiness from 145 Hadza, and compared it with data obtained from 156 Poles, representing Westernized society. Participants were asked to answer four simple questions from Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky and Lepper, 1999). Results indicate that Hadza report a higher level of happiness with their lives than do Polish people. Our findings also show that sex was not related to happiness in both populations, while age was a negative predictor of happiness, but only among Poles. Therefore, we hypothesize that positive perception of aging in societies may increase their actual happiness.

Midwifery matters: resilience and subjective wellbeing of midwives

Abstract Introduction Resilience is the ability to resist, cope with life positively after suffering a negative event. Midwifery has been defined as ’emotionally demanding’; midwives with an higher levels of resilience experience higher levels of subjective well-being (SWB). The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between resilience and SWB amongst midwives. Materials and methods Data were collected using a questionnaire, distributed between September 2018-January 2019 in hospitals in the Tuscany region (Italy). For evaluation of SWB, we used OECD scale (2013) evaluating three items: actual happiness (AH); emotive wellbeing (BE) composed of positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) and life satisfaction (LS). Also, job satisfaction (JS) was evaluated. Resilience (RS) was evaluated using the Italian version of the Resilience Scale by Wagnild and Young. All items were expressed on the Likert scale, statistical analysis was performed with Minitab 18. Results In total 123 questionnaires were analyzed. The average scores were: AH: 6.9±1.8; BE: 5.9±1.6; PA: 6.0±1.8; NA: 4.2±2.1; LS: 7.1±1.6; JS: 6.5 ± 2.4. Average R was 130.3±18.1. RS was correlated (p < 0.001) to AH (Coef=0.4), PA (Coef=0.4), BE (Coef=0.3) e LS (Coef=0.4). The sample was divided into three groups according to RS: low (LR)<116, medium (MR):116-139 and high (HR) ≥140. MR represented 44%, followed by HR (35%). AH, PA, BE values were significantly higher in the HR group (ANOVA; Tukey; p < 0.001). For NA the highest values were observed in the LR group, but the difference was not significant. LS resulted significantly lower in LR group (ANOVA; Tukey; p < 0.001) and JS was significantly higher in medium resilience group in confrontation to other two groups (ANOVA; Tukey; p < 0.001). Conclusions Our results confirmed, that the higher levels of RS influenced positively almost all components of SWB (AH, PA, BE, LS). On the other hand to achieve a higher level of JS the level of RS should not be nor too high, nor too low. Key messages Midwifery has been defined as ’emotionally demanding’, higher levels of resilience influenced positively almost all components of subjective wellbeing. The medium resilience was correlated to higher level of job satisfaction.

Do We Expect Women to Look Happier Than They Are? A Test of Gender-Dependent Perceptual Correction.

Feminine facial features enhance the expressive cues associated with happiness but not sadness. This makes a woman look happier than a man even when their smiles have the same intensity. So, to correctly infer the actual happiness of a woman, one would have to subtract the effect of these facial features. We hypothesised that our perceptual system would apply this subtraction for women, but not for men. This implies that this female-specific subtraction would cause one to infer a man to be happier than a woman if both are matched for facial appearance and expression intensity. We tested this using androgynous virtual faces with equal expression intensity. As predicted, happy men were inferred to be happier than happy women, but sad men were not inferred to be sadder than sad women, supporting our hypothesis of a gender- and emotion-specific perceptual correction.

Are You Smiling, or Have I Seen You Before? Familiarity Makes Faces Look Happier

It is clear that unreinforced repetition (familiarization) influences affective responses to social stimuli, but its effects on the perception of facial emotion are unknown. Reporting the results of two experiments, we show for the first time that repeated exposure enhances the perceived happiness of facial expressions. In Experiment 1, using a paradigm in which subjects’ responses were orthogonal to happiness in order to avoid response biases, we found that faces of individuals who had previously been shown were deemed happier than novel faces. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect with a rapid “happy or angry” categorization task. Using psychometric function fitting, we found that for subjects to classify a face as happy, they needed less actual happiness to be present in the face if the target was familiar than if it was novel. Critically, our results suggest that familiar faces appear happier than novel faces because familiarity selectively enhances the impact of positive stimulus features.

Subjective Well-Being and Policy

This paper analyses whether the aggregation of individual happiness scores to a National Happiness Index can still be trusted once governments have proclaimed their main objective to be the pursuit—or even maximization—of this National Happiness Index. The answer to this investigation is clear-cut: as soon as the National Happiness Index has become a policy goal, it can no longer be trusted to reflect people’s true happiness. Rather, the Index will be systematically distorted due to the incentive for citizens to answer strategically and the incentive for government to manipulate the Index in its favour. Such a distortion would arise even if the measurement of subjective well-being correctly reflected actual happiness before the intervention of government. Governments in a democracy should establish the conditions enabling individuals to become happy. The valuable and important results of happiness research should be introduced into the political process. Each person should be free to pursue happiness according to his or her preferences. This process is supported by obedience to the rule of law, human rights and free media, as well as by extended political participation rights, decentralized public decision-making, an open and effective education system fostering upward mobility and the possibility to find suitable employment.

Subjective Well-Being and Policy

This paper analyses whether the aggregation of individual happiness scores to a National Happiness Index can still be trusted once governments have proclaimed their main objective to be the pursuit – or even maximization – of this National Happiness Index. The answer to this investigation is clear-cut: as soon as the National Happiness Index has become a policy goal, it can no longer be trusted to reflect people's true happiness. Rather, the Index will be systematically distorted due to the incentive for citizens to answer strategically and the incentive for government to manipulate the Index in its favour. Such a distortion would arise even if the measurement of subjective well-being correctly reflected actual happiness before the intervention of government. Governments in a democracy should establish the conditions enabling individuals to become happy. The valuable and important results of happiness research should be introduced into the political process. Each person should be free to pursue happiness according to his or her preferences. This process is supported by obedience to the rule of law, human rights and free media, as well as by extended political participation rights, decentralized public decision-making, an open and effective education system fostering upward mobility and the possibility to find suitable employment.

Affective forecasting and individual differences: Accuracy for relational events and anxious attachment.

We examined whether accuracy of affective forecasting for significant life events was moderated by a theoretically relevant individual difference (anxious attachment), with different expected relations to predicted and actual happiness. In 3 studies (2 cross-sectional, 1 longitudinal), participants predicted what their happiness would be after entering or ending a romantic relationship. Consistent with previous research, people were generally inaccurate forecasters. However, inaccuracy for entering a relationship was significantly moderated by anxious attachment. Predictions were largely unrelated to anxious attachment, but actual happiness was negatively related to attachment anxiety. Moderation for breaking up showed a similar but less consistent pattern. These results suggest a failure to account for one's degree of anxious attachment when making affective forecasts and show how affective forecasting accuracy in important life domains may be moderated by a focally relevant individual difference, with systematically different associations between predicted and actual happiness.

The Hedonistic Paradox: Is Homo Economicus Happier?

The Hedonistic Paradox states that homo economicus, or someone who seeks happiness for him- or herself, will not find it, but the person who helps others will. This study examines two questions in connection with happiness and generosity. First, do more generous people, as identified in dictator experiments, report on average greater happiness, or subjective well-being (SWB), as measured by responses to various questionnaires? Second, if the answer is affirmative, what is the causal relationship between generosity and happiness? We find a favorable correlation between generosity and happiness (i.e., SWB is directly related to several measures of happiness and inversely related to unhappiness) and examine various possible explanations, including that material well-being causes both happiness and generosity. The evidence from this experiment, however, indicates that a tertiary personality variable, sometimes called psychological well-being, is the primary cause of both happiness and greater generosity. In contrast to field studies, the experimental method of this inquiry permits anonymity measures designed to minimize subject misrepresentation of intrinsic generosity (e.g., due to social approval motives) and of actual happiness (e.g., because of social desirability biases) and produces a rich data set with multiple measures of subjective, psychological and material well-being. The results of this and other studies raise the question of whether greater attention should be paid to the potential benefits (beyond solely the material ones) of policies that promote charitable donations, volunteerism, service education, and, more generally, community involvement, political action, and social institutions that foster psychological well-being.

The Hedonistic Paradox: Is homo economicus happier?

The “Hedonistic Paradox” states that homo economicus, or someone who seeks happiness for him- or herself, will not find it, but the person who helps others will. This study examines two questions in connection with happiness and generosity. First, do more generous people, as identified in dictator experiments, report on average greater happiness, or subjective well-being (SWB), as measured by responses to various questionnaires? Second, if the answer is affirmative, what is the causal relationship between generosity and happiness? We find a favorable correlation between generosity and happiness (i.e., SWB is directly related to several measures of happiness and inversely related to unhappiness) and examine various possible explanations, including that material well-being causes both happiness and generosity. The evidence from this experiment, however, indicates that a tertiary personality variable, sometimes called psychological well-being, is the primary cause of both happiness and greater generosity. In contrast to field studies, the experimental method of this inquiry permits anonymity measures designed to minimize subject misrepresentation of intrinsic generosity (e.g., due to social approval motives) and of actual happiness (e.g., because of social desirability biases) and produces a rich data set with multiple measures of subjective, psychological and material well-being. The results of this and other studies raise the question of whether greater attention should be paid to the potential benefits (beyond solely the material ones) of policies that promote charitable donations, volunteerism, service education, and, more generally, community involvement, political action, and social institutions that foster psychological well-being.

The Locke Marital Adjustment Test and Social Desirability

MARITAL happiness or marital satisfaction measures have been criticized on many grounds.1 One criticism suggests that since failure or unhappiness in marriage is such a deplorable occurrence in our society, respondents would be loath to admit it. This tendency to conceal marital unhappiness would not likely be uniformly distributed in the population. Probably it would be especially prominent in persons with a strong need for being socially approved or presenting themselves in a socially desirable light. The discovery of the social desirability response set among others has threatened an otherwise sophisticated testing movement with the charge that its tests all measure the same thing. Unfortunately, methodological studies of marital satisfaction instruments have been few in number. Thus, it is not known whether these instruments too are open to the charge that the subject, compelled by a social desirability response set, informs the researcher not of his actual happiness but instead informs him of the degree of happiness thought to be socially appropriate. This note supplies some data on such criticism of one marital happiness test, the Locke Short Marital Adjustment Test.2