People have long contemplated the sources of happiness. In recent years, efforts have sought to improve well-being across the world.
A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour magazine shows that happiness can come from within, from external influences, from both, or neither, and which is true differs across people. Emorie Beck, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis and first author on the paper, said, "We have to understand the sources of happiness to build effective interventions."
There are two major models of happiness: the "bottom-up" perspective and the "top-down" perspective. The "bottom-up" perspective holds that overall happiness comes from satisfaction with domains of life, such as wealth, enjoyable work, and satisfying relationships. Surveys such as the World Happiness Report tend to follow the bottom-up model, suggesting that happiness can be improved at a societal level through policies that improve people's income or environmental quality, rather than by targeting factors intrinsic to an individual.
Emorie Beck noted, "But we all know people in our lives who experience traumatic events yet seem to be happy." Surveys have shown that across populations, only part of the happiness gap between groups of people can be assigned to factors such as wealth and life expectancy. This suggests a "top-down" perspective, where happiness comes not from external circumstances, but from personal attitudes and qualities. The top-down perspective implies that happiness can be improved by enhancing mental states through practices such as mindfulness meditation or therapy, rather than by targeting external factors.
A third model is bidirectional: the bottom-up and top-down influences interact with each other to generate overall happiness. From the bidirectional perspective, targeting either intrinsic or external factors should improve well-being.
Emorie Beck and coauthors Joshua Jackson of Washington University in St. Louis, Felix Cheung of the University of Toronto, and Stuti Thapa of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, looked at what determines individual happiness for a group of over 40,000 people. These were nationally representative panels of respondents who had taken part in separate surveys of life satisfaction in Germany, Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Australia repeatedly for up to 30 years.
The surveys captured both global life satisfaction over time and satisfaction in five domains: health, income, housing, work, and relationships. Emorie Beck said, "What comes out is that we see roughly equal groups that demonstrate each pattern." She added, "Some are bottom up; some are top down; the domains don't affect their happiness; some are bidirectional; and some are unclear."
In the unclear group, the researchers could not find any clear connection between the five subdomains and global well-being. While these individuals may feel satisfied with their lives as a whole as well as with certain domains, they don't appear to influence each other over time. One possibility is that other things in their lives, from broader structural issues to specific events, may override these influences, Emorie Beck said.
The findings imply that measuring subjective well-being at the population level does not really reflect the experience of individuals. If the goal is to improve happiness across society, policies need to address both external factors such as health, income, housing, and jobs, and also individual qualities such as personal resilience and purpose in life.
Emorie Beck emphasized, "Importantly, the most effective policies will be tailored to the individual themselves." She continued, "Targeting external factors for individuals whose happiness is not determined by them would likely be ineffective." She concluded, "These things are treated separately, but they aren't really. They feed into each other at a personal level."
The work was supported in part by grants from the National Institute on Aging.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.
