Summary: A large international study shows that happiness comes only from external circumstances or internal attitudes, but varies considerably between individuals. The happiness of some people is mainly shaped by areas of life such as income and relationships, while others draw the happiness of internal qualities or a mixture of the two.
For many, these factors interact in a complex way or fail to fully predict the overall satisfaction of life. These results suggest that policies and interventions aimed at stimulating happiness should be adapted to individual needs, by attacking both external and internal contributors.
Key facts:
- Different paths towards happiness: People vary considerably – some are motivated by external factors, some by interns, and many by both.
- Bidirectional influence: Happiness often comes from the interactions between the circumstances of life and the personal state of mind.
- Political implications: Effective well-being strategies should be individualized, not a single size.
Source: UC Davis
What is the secret of happiness? Does happiness come from the inside, or is it shaped by external influences such as our jobs, our health, our relationships and our material circumstances?
A new study published in Nature Human behavior shows that happiness can come from external influence or external influences, both or both – and which is true differs from people.
People have long considered sources of happiness. In recent years, efforts such as World Happiness Report are looking to improve well-being around the world.
“We must understand the sources of happiness to build effective interventions,” said Emorie Beck, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California in Davis and the first author of the newspaper.
There are two main models of happiness. The “ascending” perspective maintains that global happiness comes from our satisfaction with the fields of our life, such as wealth, pleasant work and satisfactory relationships.
Investigations such as World Happiness Report tend to follow this model, suggesting that we improve happiness at the societal level, for example by policies that improve people’s income or environmental quality, rather than targeting intrinsic factors to an individual.
“But we all know people in our lives who live traumatic events but seem to be happy,” said Beck.
Surveys have shown that in populations, part of the gap of happiness between groups of people can be assigned to factors such as wealth and life expectancy.
This suggests a “top to bottom” perspective, where happiness does not come from external circumstances, but attitudes and personal qualities, which implies that we can improve happiness by improving our mental states through practices such as mindfulness meditation or therapy, rather than targeting external factors.
A third model is bidirectional: ascending and descending influences interact with each other to generate general happiness. From this point of view, targeting intrinsic or external factors should improve well-being.
Surveys on life satisfaction
Beck and the co -authors Joshua Jackson from Washington University in St. Louis; Felix Cheung from the University of Toronto; And Stuti Thapa from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma examined what determines the individual happiness of a group of more than 40,000 people.
These were panels of representative respondents at the national level who had participated in separate surveys on the satisfaction of life in Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Australia several times for 30 years.
The surveys have captured both global satisfaction of life over time and satisfaction in five areas: health, income, housing, work and relationships.
“What comes out is that we see roughly equal groups that demonstrate each model,” said Beck.
“Some are from bottom to top; some are at the top, the domains do not affect their happiness; some are bidirectional and some are not clear.”
In this last group, the researchers could not find any clear link between the five sub-domains and the world’s well-being.
Although these individuals can feel satisfied with their lives as a whole as well as certain areas, they do not seem to influence each other in time.
One possibility is that other things in their lives, wider structural problems for specific events, can prevail over these influences, said Beck.
The results imply that the measurement of subjective well-being at the level of the population does not really reflect the experience of individuals.
If the objective is to improve happiness throughout society, policies must address both external factors such as health, income, housing and jobs as well as individual qualities such as personal resilience and the objective of life.
Above all, the most effective policies will be adapted to the individual himself, said Beck. The targeting of external factors for individuals whose happiness is not determined by them would probably be ineffective.
“These things are treated separately, but they are not really so. They feed on each other at a personal level,” said Beck.
Funding: The work was partly supported by subsidies from the National Institute of Aging.
About this news of research in psychology
Author: Andrew fell
Source: UC Davis
Contact: Andrew Fell – UC Davis
Picture: The image is credited with Neuroscience News
Original search: Closed access.
“Towards an approach to personalized happiness to capture the change of satisfaction” by Emorie Beck et al. Nature Human behavior
Abstract
Towards an approach of personalized happiness to capture the change of satisfaction
Contemporary approaches examining the determinants of happiness have applied that happiness is determined to be halves by processes of satisfaction of the world and from bottom to top.
We propose a perspective of personalized happiness, suggesting that the determinants and the consequences of happiness are idiographical (that is to say specific) to each individual rather than supposed to be the same for all.
We have shown the usefulness of a personalized happiness approach by testing associations between life and satisfaction of the field both in the population and personalized levels using representative data at the national scale of 40,074 German, British, Swiss, Dutch and Australian participants followed up to 33 years.
The majority of participants (41.4 to 50.8%) shown mainly unidirectional associations between field satisfaction and life satisfaction, and only 19.3 to 25.9% of participants showed mainly bidirectional associations.
In addition, population models differ from personalized models, which suggests that aggregated research at the level of the population does not capture individual differences in personalized happiness, showing the importance of a personalized happiness approach.
The models of individual differences are robust, but the distinction between models at the individual level and random errors is difficult, highlighting the need for future work and innovative approaches to study personalized happiness.
