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The term for this is ‘hedonic adaptation’. The data indicates that the biggest wellbeing boosts come from marriage, childbirth and financial gain, but that those sparks of happiness are ...
- Arianne Cohen
- Happiness Across The World Today
- Happiness Over Time
- The Distribution of Life Satisfaction
- The Link Between Happiness and Income
- Health and Life Satisfaction
- Life Satisfaction Through Life Events
- Life Satisfaction and Society
- Data Quality and Measurement
The World Happiness Report is a well-known source of cross-country data and research on self-reported life satisfaction. The map here shows, country by country, the ‘happiness scores’ published this report. The underlying source of the happiness scores in the World Happiness Report is the Gallup World Poll—a set of nationally representative surveys...
Findings from the Integrated Values Surveys
In addition to the Gallup World Poll (discussed above), the Integrated Values Surveysprovides cross-country data on self-reported life satisfaction. These are the longest available time series of cross-country happiness estimates that include non-European nations. The Integrated Values Surveys collect data from a series of representative national surveys covering almost 100 countries, with the earliest estimates dating back to 1981. In these surveys, respondents are asked: “Taking all things...
Findings from Eurobarometer
The Eurobarometersurvey collects data on life satisfaction as part of their public opinion surveys. For several countries, these surveys have been conducted at least annually for more than 40 years. The visualization here shows the share of people who report being ‘very satisfied’ or ‘fairly satisfied’ with their standards of living. Two points are worth emphasizing. First, estimates of life satisfaction often fluctuate around trends. In France, for example, we can see that the overall trend...
More than averages — the distribution of life satisfaction scores
Most of the studies comparing happiness and life satisfaction among countries focus on averages. However, distributional differences are also important. Life satisfaction is often reported on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 representing the highest possible level of satisfaction. This is the so-called ‘Cantril Ladder’. This visualization shows how responses are distributed across steps in this ladder. In each case, the height of the bars is proportional to the fraction of answers at each score....
Economic growth and happiness
In the charts above, we show that there is robust evidence of a strong correlation between income and happiness across and within countries at fixed points in time. Here, we want to show that, while less strong, there is also a correlation between income and happiness across time. Or, put differently, as countries get richer, the population tends to report higher average life satisfaction. The chart shown here uses data from the World Values Survey to plot the evolution of national average in...
Life expectancy and life satisfaction
Health is an important predictor of life satisfaction, both within and among countries. In this visualization, we provide evidence of the cross-country relationship. Each dot in the scatterplot represents one country. The vertical position of the dots shows national life expectancy at birth, and the horizontal position shows the national average self-reported life satisfaction in the Cantril Ladder (a scale ranging from 0-10, where 10 is the highest possible life satisfaction). As we can see,...
How do common life events affect happiness?
Do people tend to adapt to common life events by converging back to a baseline level of happiness? Clark et al. (2008)12use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to identify groups of people experiencing significant life and labor market events and trace how these events affect the evolution of their life satisfaction. The visualization here shows an overview of their main findings. In each individual chart, the red lines mark the estimated effect of a different event at a given point in...
Does disability correlate with life satisfaction?
A number of papers have noted that long-term paraplegics do not report themselves as particularly unhappy when compared to non-paraplegics (see, for example, the much-cited paper by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman, 1978).13 This assertion has received attention because it tells us something about the very meaning of well-being and has important consequences for policy. It is, for example, considered in courts of law with respect to compensation for disability. However, comparing differenc...
Culture and life satisfaction
Comparisons of happiness among countries suggest that culture and history shared by people in a given society matter for self-reported life satisfaction. For example, as the chart here shows, culturally and historically similar Latin American countries have a higher subjective well-being than other countries with comparable levels of economic development. (This chart plots self-reported life satisfaction as measured in the 10-point Cantril ladder on the vertical axis against GDP per capita on...
Sense of freedom and life satisfaction
A particular channel through which social environment may affect happiness is freedom: the society we live in may crucially affect the availability of options that we have to shape our own life. This visualization shows the relationship between self-reported sense of freedom and self-reported life satisfaction using data from the Gallup World Poll. The variable measuring life satisfaction corresponds to country-level averages of survey responses to the Cantril Ladder question (a 0-10 scale, w...
The link between media and gloominess
A number of studies have found that there is a link between emotional exposure to negative content in news and changes in mood. Johnston and Davey (1997),18, for example, conducted an experiment in which they edited short TV news to display positive, neutral, or negative material and then showed them to three different groups of people. The authors found that people who watched the ‘negative’ clip were more likely to report a sad mood. This link between emotional content in news and changes i...
Can ‘happiness’ really be measured?
The most natural way to attempt to measure subjective well-being is to ask people what they think and feel. Indeed, this is the most common approach. In practice, social scientists tend to rely on questions inquiring directly about happiness or on questions inquiring about life satisfaction. The former tends to measure the experiential or emotional aspects of well-being (e.g., “I feel very happy”), while the latter tends to measure the evaluative or cognitive aspects of well-being (e.g., “I t...
Is ‘life satisfaction’ the same as ‘happiness’?
In this topic page, we discuss data and empirical research on happiness and life satisfaction. However, it is important to bear in mind that “life satisfaction” and “happiness” are not really synonyms. This is, of course, reflected in the data since self-reported measures of these two variables come from asking different kinds of questions. The Integrated Values Surveys asks directly about happiness: “Taking all things together, would you say you are (i) Very happy, (ii) Rather happy, (iii) N...
Are happiness averages really meaningful?
The most common way to analyze data on happiness consists of taking averages across groups of people. Indeed, cross-country comparisons of self-reported life satisfaction, such as those presented in ‘happiness rankings’, rely on national averages of reports on a scale from 0 to 10 (the Cantril Ladder). Is it reasonable to take averages of life satisfaction scores? Or, in more technical terms, are self-reports of Cantril scores really a cardinal measure of well-being? The evidence tells us tha...
- Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser
- 2013
Feb 24, 2024 · The study, “ Life events and life satisfaction: Estimating effects of multiple life events in combined models,” was authored by Michael D. Krämer, Julia M. Rohrer, Richard E. Lucas, and David Richter. A new study reveals how life's pivotal moments—from the joy of marriage and childbirth to the challenges of unemployment and loss ...
Many researchers classify life events according to their hedonic valence or desirability by distinguishing negative, positive, and neutral events (e.g., Filipp & Aymanns, 2009; Taylor, 1991) and propose that negative events should have stronger effects on SWB than positive events (e.g., Baumeister et al., 2001; Fredrickson & Loewenstein, 1999). In our meta-analysis, however, desirability does ...
May 28, 2020 · A greater understanding how life events impact wellbeing, and how long it takes to adapt, can help government and policy makers better target resources to improve the happiness and welfare of society.
Sep 28, 2007 · In particular, the so called ‘Major Life Event’ BHPS data (see appendix of this article and Taylor et al. 21 for a detailed description of all event categories) were utilized in order to investigate the degree to which these events affect subjective well-being by using simple cross-tabulations of ‘Major Life Events’ and ‘Subjective Happiness’. A multiple regression equation was ...
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Feb 11, 2019 · People are evidently no good at predicting their own happiness or unhappiness: key life events such as marriage, invalidity or the death of a partner affect well-being for less time than those ...
