Journal of Happiness Studies

The ways in which parents socialize positive emotions have important implications for youth wellbeing, though little is known about parental goals and responses to adolescents’ happiness in culturally diverse families. Using an open-ended qualitative methodology, we explored parent and adolescent views about situations leading to happiness, responses and justifications to the expression of happiness, and what parents would like to teach their children about happiness in a sample of 209 parent (56.3% fathers; Mage = 42.79 years) and adolescent (85.2% girls, Mage = 14.95 years) dyads in Bengaluru, India. When prompted to identify adolescents’ recent experiences of happiness, both parents and adolescents primarily described academic and extracurricular achievements, followed by special events and receipt of tangible items, social interactions, and overcoming difficult situations. The two most common parent responses to adolescents’ happiness were responding with appreciation or encouragement of the achievement and providing further instruction or advice, with fewer responses focusing on enhancing/maintaining the emotional state of happiness itself. A substantial proportion of participating parents reported that their child should focus on task improvement when feeling happy, followed by affect maintenance (i.e., the child should “be happy”), or express their emotion with restraint. The findings contribute to developing a culturally-informed understanding of socialization of happiness in diverse families.

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal survey (N = 10,744) that examined how the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 affected the hedonic and eudaimonic well-being of young people in Japan outside of the afflicted area. Our dataset consists of Japanese citizens in their 20 and 30s from all non-afflicted prefectures. We conducted two surveys on well-being, one before the earthquake (December 2010) and one after (March 2011). The results suggested that people who were thinking about the earthquake when they completed the second survey had slightly increased general well-being after the earthquake as compared to before, showing that reflecting on the earthquake had prompted them to reevaluate their lives and increased eudaimonia. However, they experienced temporary negative emotional reactions more frequently, which shows that their sympathy for those in the afflicted area decreased their hedonic well-being. After the earthquake, Japanese youth were likely to value social connectedness and ordinary life. Moreover, this mindset promoted prosocial behaviors such as making donations and volunteering.

To get happiness forget about it; then, with any luck, happiness will come as a by-product in pursuing meaningful activities and relationships. This adage is known as the paradox of happiness, but actually it contains a number of different paradoxes concerning aims, success, freedom, and attitudes. These paradoxes enhance our understanding of the complexity of happiness and its interaction with other values in good lives, that is, lives which are happy as well as morally decent, meaningful, and fulfilling. Yet, each paradox conveys a one-sided truth that needs to be balanced with others. Happiness, understood as subjective well-being, involves positively evaluating our lives and living with a sense of well-being. As such, it should not be confused with either pleasure or normative conceptions of “true” happiness.

In spite of the large research interest in older adults’ wellbeing, a theory of older adult’s wellbeing as such is still lacking. I present the outline of such a theory, determining its scope and premises and suggesting avenues for its further development and related empirical research. I assume that wellbeing is a complex and dynamic phenomenon, depending on a subtle interplay between several different factors. Older adults tend to combine and value these factors differently from other age groups, and this should be reflected by a domain-specific wellbeing theory. I argue more specifically that dispositional properties are less important to older adults’ wellbeing; that vulnerability is a second-order disposition, and that this explains why it does not seem to impede wellbeing; that hedonic adaptation takes very different forms, not least in older adults, and that it should be assessed in a correspondingly differentiated manner; that cognition and cognitive impairment can play very different, both positive and negative, roles depending on the context; and that notions like flourishing need modification, and are actually modified in wellbeing assessments and self-assessments.

Aspirations, along with attainments, play an important role in shaping well-being. Early in adult life women are more likely than men to fulfill their material goods and family life aspirations; their satisfaction in these domains is correspondingly higher; and so too is their overall happiness. Material goods aspirations refer here to desires for a number of big-ticket consumer goods, such as a home, car, travel abroad and vacation home. In later life these gender differences turn around. Men come closer than women to fulfilling their material goods and family life aspirations, are more satisfied with their financial situation and family life, and are the happier of the two genders. An important factor underlying the turnaround in fulfillment of aspirations for material goods and family life is probably the shift over the course of the life cycle in the relative proportion of women and men in marital and non-marital unions.

The main aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between ongoing cumulative chronic stressors (OCCS) and well-being during the second half of life. The sample comprised 7,268 participants who had completed the Health and Retirement Study 2006 psychosocial questionnaire and the full OCCS questionnaire. OCCS were evaluated as a predictor of Subjective Well-Being and Psychological Well-Being (PWB) using two measures: the number of events and the subjective evaluation attributed to the events by the participant. Additionally, the association between OCCS and well-being was evaluated in midlife (50–64), young-old (65–79), and old-old (80–104) participants. The results showed that the participant’s age as well as the number of OCCS perceived as “very upsetting” were strong predictors of well-being. The relationship between OCCS and PWB was weaker among old-old participants than among midlife and young-old participants. Although well-being is considered a stable trait-like personality dimension in the second half of life, the study’s findings suggest that as the number of OCCS was higher, and especially as the subjective evaluations attributed to an event are more upsetting, well-being was lower. Nevertheless, this lower level of well-being is partially moderated in the PWB measures by age. Old-old participants maintain a higher general positive sense of PWB than midlife and young-old participants in what was previously termed the “well-being paradox.” Implications of the results are discussed.

The cognitive and motivational processes by which happy people are able to artfully sustain their happiness are examined within a subjectivist construal approach. Individuals who perceive themselves as happy respond to ordinary experiences differently than their less happy peers. Research from our laboratory has revealed these differences in a variety of contexts, including people's responses to decisions, their reactions to social comparisons, and their interpretations of life events. Our research has also shown that, after experiencing failure, happy people tend not to engage in negative self-reflection and are able to perform subsequent tasks without dwelling. Although happy people experience negative moods and negative life events similar to those of less happy people, they evaluate these events less negatively and respond to them in more positive, affirming ways. These group differences suggest a number of possible ways to sustainably enhance happiness, and current experimental interventions designed to test the effectiveness of several intentional happiness-increasing strategies are discussed.

In the last years, there has been a shift from traditional measurements of affective well-being to approaches such as the day reconstruction method (DRM). While the traditional approaches often assess trait level differences in well-being, the DRM allows examining affective dynamics in everyday contexts. The latter may ultimately explain why some people feel more happy than others (e.g., because they experience more gratification during everyday experiences). Even though DRM research has increased in the last years, little is known about the structure of affective well-being in everyday life, and potential structural differences of affect at the within- and between-person level have rarely been considered. We thus thoroughly examined the structure of affective well-being in daily life, using data from a nationally representative sample (N = 2401) of the German Socioeconomic Panel Innovation Sample that were obtained with the DRM. Multilevel structural equation models revealed that (1) affective well-being in daily life cannot be reduced to the two global dimensions positive and negative affect (PA and NA) but that the structure of NA is more nuanced; (2) the emerging subfacets of NA have distinct associations with global indicators of well-being (e.g., life satisfaction); (3) there are structural differences of affective well-being at the within- and between-person level, and (4) the relationships between affect subfacets and activities such as “work” can be opposed at the within- and between-person level. These results show that a more differentiated view on the structure of affect contributes to a better understanding of affective well-being in everyday life.