Book description
How happy are you? This naive question proved to be so powerful as to shake up social sciences and attract the attention of media and policy makers around the globe. Everybody wants to be happy. Thanks to the recent progress in measuring subjective well-being, social sciences have asserted that people's own evaluation about their well-being must be taken seriously. The opportunity of measuring happiness in a consistent and reliable way provides new impulse to a joint effort from a variety of disciplines to improve people's quality of life and potentially change the way modern societies are organized.
“The Happiness Compass” provides a reference tool to understand current developments. It provides an overview of the evolving body of happiness research and draws some of its future trajectories. This book collects the contributions of scientists from psychology, sociology, economics, political science and other scientific domains sharing the quest for improving people's quality of life. Building on this expertise, the book provides a compass to orient the reader in a burgeoning literature to document, inform and suggest ideas for future research.
Preface
The pursuit of happiness is one of the most primitive goals in human history. Philosophers from ancient Greece, the US Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Constitution of Bhutan of 1972, Kennedy’s words on what makes a good life as well as the more mo dern programmes such as the “Better Life Initiative” of the OECD show that the quest for improving the human quality of life has been the object of an unremitting debate about what makes a happy life and how to achieve it. The leitmotiv that accompanied this debate through the centuries has been how to measure well-being. Various disciplines have proposed different approaches, but the economic one, based on the idea that material wealth is a good proxy of well-being, has probably been the most influential for modern societies. However, recent development of social sciences – coupled with the historical and political transformations of last decades – has showed the limits of the economic approach and, remarkably, highlighted some alternatives for measuring well-being that for a long time have been constrained in their niches. Among these alternatives, the one that got considerable attention in recent years, both in the public and the academic debate, is subjective well-being.
Originally developed in the frame of positive psychology, subjective wellbeing is generally referred to as an evaluation of one’s own life regarded as a whole and is commonly observed through questions or batteries of questions about individual’s “happiness” or “life satisfaction”. This information, relatively easy and cheap to collect, proved to be a powerful tool for social sciences. The availability of large international surveys collecting information on people’s well-being along with figures from the social, political, cultural and economic domains allowed an impressive development of social sciences including, but not limited to, sociology, economics and political science.
The reason why subjective well-being became so popular is that its measurement provides reliable information about the quality of life in modern societies. Its reliability has been corroborated by experimental evidence from several disciplines. For example, subjective well-being correlates with objective measures of well-being such as the heart rate, blood pressure, frequency of genuine smiles and neurological tests of brain activity (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004; van Reekum et al., 2007). Moreover, subjective measures of well-being are strongly correlated with other proxies of subjective well-being (Schwarz and Strack, 1999; Wanous and Hudy, 2001; Schimmack et al., 2010) and with the judgements about the respondent’s happiness provided by friends, relatives or clinical experts (Schneider and Schimmack, 2009; Kahneman and Krueger, 2006; Layard, 2005). Another important feature is that the increasing availability of this data – even in less developed countries – allowed to explore many social and economic aspects revealing interesting stories about contemporary societies.
This is why the number of scientific articles, conferences and journals dealing with people’s well-being increased significantly over the last years. Media, politicians and the scientific community have been paying increasing attention to people’s subjective well-being and – more generally – to “happiness studies”. In 2007 the European Commission and other organizations hosted a conference titled “Beyond GDP” to promote a debate on how to complement the traditional measures of well-being.
This event led – two years later – to the commitment of the Commission to improve Europeans’ quality of life (European Commission, 2009). In the same vein, the French Economic Commission directed by Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi Stiglitz et al. (2009) published a report recommending the development of indices of well-being to integrate the more commonly used income-based measures. Finally, to collect internationally comparable measures of well-being and to inform about how well people are doing in modern societies, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2011 launched the “Better Life Initiative” (OECD, 2011).
Such intense ferment produced a remarkable innovation and advancement of the studies on subjective well-being attracting the attention and cross-fertilizing a growing number of disciplines. This extensive, joint effort promises to deeply change the way modern societies are organized. Starting from the way jobs, education, healthcare, cities, and democracy are organized, the studies on subjective well-being provide ideas for policies that can effectively change the quality of life of millions of people.
However, great powers require big responsibilities, hence a constant and consistent monitoring of these new tools is desirable as they serve not only to inform, but also to plan and evaluate possible policies. Modern social research is rapidly progressing in this direction and this is why it is necessary to organize these contributions, fostering the debate and the exchange of ideas and information among different disciplines. The idea of “The Happiness Compass” comes from the need to provide a reference tool to understand the current development, to organize and coordinate an evolving body of research and to draw some of the lines of its future development. A book to inform experts, but also a learning tool for those who desire to have a glimpse on the recent achievements of the studies on well-being and on their perspective directions. A book collecting the contributions of psychologists, epidemiologists, sociologists, economists and other scientists sharing the quest for improving people’s quality of life.
“The Happiness Compass” can be imagined as a discussion forum and deals with three main thematic pillars comprising works to refine the concept of subjective well-being identifying its salient features and determinants; to point out strategies and pathways to effectively improve people’s quality of life; to indicate the new lines of research on well-being and its chances for progress.
Organization of the book
Accordingly, the book is organized in three parts: 1. “Psychology of well-being”, 2. “Actions for well-being” and 3. “New insights and future perspectives for well-being”. Within each part the chapters are organized by topic and disciplinary commonalities. In Part I the six chapters build on the theory and evidence from the psychological literature to explore people’s well-being and its main correlates, with emphasis on the importance of social relationships. Part I includes contributions of scholars from various disciplines dealing with actions to improve people’s well-being. The main subjects of this part are the well-being of children and teenagers at school, the well-being of people on the workplace and the strategies to enhance people’s well-being through urban planning and priming. Part II provides an overview of the main applications and the new frontiers of happiness studies. This part depicts how the new evidence on people’s well-being is contributing to reconsider available knowledge, to cross-fertilize different scientific domains and to inform policy makers complementing the traditional tools for measuring well-being and the progress of societies.
In the lead chapter, McMahan and colleagues present a research examining, first, whether hedonic and eudaimonic dimensions of individual conceptions of well-being predict both psychological and subjective well-being and, second, whether individual conceptions of well-being predict unique variance in psychological and subjective well-being beyond the part predicted by the Big Five personality traits. Their findings complement a growing body of literature suggesting that eudaimonic approaches to well-being can be relevant for positive psychological functioning.
The analysis of psychological type and its correlation with individual differences in happiness is the subject of the work by Francis and colleagues. Chapter two describes the results from the analysis of a sample of 201 Israeli students. The authors find support for the thesis that extraversion and introversion, along with thinking and feeling, are significantly related to happiness scores, while judging, perceiving, sensing and intuition are unrelated to happiness.
In chapter three, Fisher and Francis further the research on personality and well-being reporting evidence from three Australian samples of people responding to the Oxford Happiness Inventory. Their results are discussed in terms of Eysenck’s theory and support the conclusion that happiness is located within the personality quadrant defined as stable extraversion.
The remaining chapters of the first part shift the attention towards the importance for well-being of relationships with oneself and with others. In chapter four, Uusiautti and Maatta build on their studies on love to discuss the role of various forms of love in human happiness. The authors argue that the combination of love skills – involving positive emotions, joy, strength, and the feeling of being capable – lead mental energy towards the desired goal and lay the foundation of happiness.
In chapter five, Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek introduces the concept of “love of life” in the subjective well-being domain and explores its association with personality dimensions. Collecting data from a convenience sample of 227 Kuwaiti college students, the author identifies a predictable association between love of life and Eysenck’s personality dimensions.
Demir and Dogan, in chapter six, explore how different types of friendships contribute to people’s happiness in different cultures. After controlling for the influence of personality traits, the two authors investigate the role of same- and cross-sex friendships for happiness in an American and a Turkish sample of adults. The results point out that Americans declare to have higher levels of same- and cross-sex friendship quality and happiness compared to Turks. However, in both samples personality emerged as a major predictor of well-being explaining about 60% of the total variance.
Chapter seven opens the second part of the book on actions for well-being. In this chapter, Lotta Uusitalo-Malmivaara investigates the global and school-related happiness of a large sample of Finnish sixth and ninth graders. The author finds that both global and school-related happiness decreased since the sixth grade, in particular among girls. Problems with peer and stress at school seems to be the main drivers of this change, whereas more success at school is the most desired factor to increase happiness among the sixth and ninth graders. Remarkably, money is particularly relevant for happiness among the ninth graders. Given the long-term impact of unhappiness in childhood, this study calls for actions to promote well-being at school such as paying attention to positive aspects of the youths’ development, actively fostering their social relationships and lowering excess stress in school.
In chapter eight, Vigil and colleagues extend the analysis of happiness in childhood focusing on how different types of childhood adversity affect life satisfaction in adulthood. The authors adopt data from the 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a survey of non-institutionalized adults in Florida and find that exposure to victimization, but not nonviolent forms of parental dysfunction during childhood, has protracted and deleterious consequences on life dissatisfaction.
Bartolini and Sarracino shift the focus to well-being in another important domain of people’s life: the workplace. In chapter nine, the authors build on the available psychological and sociological literature and on some evidence from economic studies to argue that promoting the well-being on the workplace does not undermine productivity and economic prosperity. They discuss the economic literature on work organization in the light of the motivation crowding-out theory and conclude that the fostering of intrinsic motivations and of well-being on the workplace can enhance the work performance of employees. They conclude their chapter illustrating two successful cases of companies in which the culture and the organization of work demonstrate that stressful jobs are not necessarily the price to pay for economic prosperity.
The determinants of the well-being of employees through work engagement is explored in chapter ten, in which Nakamura and Otsuka use longitudinal data on manufacturing workers in Japan to test the Job Demands Resources model. In particular, the authors analyse the effects of job resources on work engagement – a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption – identifying several possibilities to increase people’s well-being on the work place.
In chapter eleven, Silva and Caetano try to identify the main sources of well- and bad-being on the workplace. Using the affective events theory and the cognitive appraisal theory, the two authors identify the main hassles and uplifts at work and the emotional reactions they evoke, the levels of intensity, and the perceived effects on people’s well-being. Using a qualitative and exploratory study, Silva and Caetano single out six general categories of daily uplifts and seven general categories of daily hassles providing clear indications to promote the well-being of the employees.
The last two chapter of the second part of the book deal with two different strategies to enhance people’s well-being. Chapter twelve deals with the idea of promoting happiness through urban planning. Crawford and Holder argue that adopting a salutogenic approach to design buildings and spaces would encourage individuals to thrive. In other words, the two authors suggest that a culturally and socially relevant planning that encourages interaction from all the community’s residents would result in an environment of social engagement, positive living, and community satisfaction ultimately benefiting people’s well-being.
Chapter thirteen tests the efficacy of affective priming in promoting happiness. In this essay Timoney and Holder move from the idea that happiness is associated with many benefits and wonder about intentional activities to attain enduring increases in well-being. Research has already identified some interventions liable to enhance positive well-being. In this chapter the two authors review the available techniques and describe one of the first attempts to increase people’s well-being using priming. The idea is that priming individuals with words related to positive well-being would increase happiness and life satisfaction, including behaviors such as altruism. While the conclusions support a limited efficacy of priming for well-being, the chapter provides some useful guidelines for future research.
The third part of the book starts with a contribution by Andrè Van Hoorn who reviews the uses of subjective well-being in current economic and political debate. The first part of chapter fourteen elaborates on the meaning and the indicators adopted to measure subjective well-being, whereas the second part identifies and discusses several possible uses of subjective wellbeing for policy making. Overall, the author convincingly argues that the measures of subjectivewell-being promise to contribute to the progress of modern social sciences and to the design of new public policies.
In chapter fifteen Malgorzata Mikucka shows how happiness data can contribute to rethinking work and employment. The author draws from the results of her recent research to document that subjective well-being data can provide some new insights about work organization. Her main message is that, despite the mainstream economic belief, there is much more to happiness than money and that people attach considerable importance to other aspects of a job such as freedom, self-esteem and motivations.
In chapter sixteen Nadezhda Shilova adopts the perspective of personal emotions, a concept strictly linked to people’s perceptions of their own wellbeing, to illustrate a model of political manipulation. In particular, the author concentrates on the mechanisms used by politicians to transfer personal emotions into political actions to recall a “politicized identity” and gain consensus. The author then adopts this interpretative scheme to identify similarities and differences among political manipulations in totalitarian regimes and democracies.
Another perspective on the uses of subjective well-being data in modern research is provided by Belianin and colleagues in chapter seventeen. The authors propose an innovative framework for multidisciplinary evaluation of clinical and psychological determinants of well-being of the patients who suffer from chronic diseases focusing on people affected by multiple sclerosis. Belianin and colleagues convincingly argue that patients’ experience with the disease depends, among others, on the personal perception of the disease itself. The implication of this study is that incorrect perceptions about an illness might lead a patient to adopt a sub optimal and detrimental coping strategy. Results show that patients who actively resist the disease and continue normal life for as much as they can, register a slower disease progression than obsessive and abstinent patients.
In chapter eighteen Drakopoulos and Grimani adopt Maslow’s theory of hierarchical needs to further investigate the relationship between income and reported happiness levels. The two authors adopt the 2007 European Quality of Life Survey to test the hypothesis that individuals have a priority approach to happiness. In other words, the authors investigate whether people have a ranking of needs. The results show that for low income households income and happiness are strongly and positively associated, whereas this relationship vanishes for high income households group.
The final chapter, titled “Happiness of economic man” and authored by Martinas and colleagues, deals with the fundamental issue of rethinking the economic concept of homo oeconomicus. This concept has been introduced at the outset of economic theory to describe the way people take decisions on trade, production and consumption. However, recent results have demonstrated the limits of this approach raising the issue of how to re-formulate the concept of homo oeconomicus. Martinas and colleagues seize this challenge proposing a new model of human behaviour driven by the happiness concept of eudaimonia, the Homo Sapiens Oeconomicus.
Collectively, this book is a proof of how subjective well-being has become a domain common to many disciplines interacting and informing each other. The hope is that the reader might find it enjoyable and useful as it documents and informs providing several suggestions and ideas for future research. Moreover, building on the expertise of many researchers, it provides a knowledge-base to fully and reliably monitoring subjective well-being and to improve people’s quality of life through tangible actions. If this book inspires the research on people’s well-being to foster the quality of life of future generations, it will reach its goal.
References
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