Journal of Happiness Studies

Henkens, Juul H. D.; Kalmijn, Matthijs; de Valk, Helga A. G.

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00746-7pmid: N/A

Moving in adolescence could be a stressful experience, potentially disturbing development into adulthood. This study investigated the relationship between residential mobility in adolescence and life satisfaction in young adulthood, focusing on moving timing, frequency, and distance, using (retrospective) longitudinal German survey data (N = 2998, mean age = 20.18, 45.8% boy, 6.8% first-generation immigrant, 31.0% children of immigrants). Moving twice or more in adolescence was linked to lower life satisfaction in young adulthood, even after controlling for family background characteristics. Moving distance was unrelated to life satisfaction. Exploratory analyses showed that particularly for children of immigrants, frequent moving was related to lower life satisfaction. Since frequent moving in adolescence was more common in disadvantaged families, frequent moving could reinforce social inequalities into young adulthood.

Fu, Hongyu; Lin, Yanfeng; Shao, Yifan; Zhang, Zhonglu

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00748-5pmid: N/A

Humor is an effective strategy in regulating emotion. Whereas most previous studies have investigated the correlational relationship between self-directed humor and mental health, it is largely unknown whether self-directed humor causally regulates emotions. The purpose of this study is to examine the causal effect of two types of self-directed humor (self-enhancing vs. self-defeating) on emotion regulation. Initially, participants (N = 75, Mage = 20.31 ± 1.19 years, 62.67% female) were asked to immerse themselves in negative scenes by reading paragraphs. They then rated their feelings of positive and negative emotions before and after reading sentences of different conditions (including baseline, cognitive reappraisal, self-enhancing humor, and self-defeating humor) that randomly matched the scenes. Humor feelings for strategies were rated in the last stage. Results of ANOVA indicated that compared to the baseline, participants experienced an increase in positive emotion and a decrease in negative emotion in the other three conditions. Self-enhancing humor was the most effective in regulating emotion, whereas no significant difference was observed between self-defeating humor and cognitive reappraisal. Furthermore, participants reported that the feeling of humor from self-enhancing humor was higher than from self-defeating humor, as well as from cognitive reappraisal than in the baseline. Mediation analysis suggested that the difference in humor feelings might be due to the changes in positive and negative emotions caused by different conditions. In short, the findings demonstrate that different styles of self-directed humor can causally regulate emotions, and this paper provides new evidence for using self-directed humor to improve emotional well-being.

Mathias, Jean-Denis; Pellerin, Nicolas; Carrero, Gustavo; Raufaste, Eric; Dambrun, Michael

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00766-3pmid: N/A

Describing the dynamical nature of happiness is crucial for understanding why individuals are constantly running on a hedonic treadmill around set levels of well-being. Based on the self-centeredness branch of the ’self-centeredness/selflessness happiness model’, we present a dynamical model that focuses on unfolding the hedonic dimension of happiness dynamics through the use of the approach–avoidance framework. This numerical model enables us to understand and analyze emerging hedonic cycles caused by hedonic motivation and hedonic adaptation. In particular, hedonic motivation leads people to experience hedonic activities, which result in successes or failures and experiences of pleasure and afflictive affects; whereas hedonic adaptation causes individuals to return to a baseline level of pleasure and afflictive affects, more quickly for the former than the latter. The proposed dynamical model is based on the approach–avoidance framework that considers human behavior in two separate regulatory processes that contribute to homeostasis of individuals’ happiness. We analyze these two processes independently and conjointly in order to highlight their effect on happiness levels. The analysis shows how individual characteristics and their combination may result in hedonic cycles, afflictive affects, (dis-)pleasure, and particular happiness dynamics. We also discuss how such a numerical model enables us to perform a multifactorial analysis which is hardly feasible outside the context of a simulation and how it may help us to narrow and design relevant experimental surveys from these preliminary numerical results.

Tobias, Valesca Y.; van Woerkom, Marianne; Meyers, Maria Christina; Bauwens, Robin

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00756-5pmid: N/A

Managers are increasingly expected to coach their employees. However, managers are often ill equipped and lack the necessary support from their organization to effectively implement coaching behavior. Based on strengths theory, we propose that a strengths spotting intervention could help managers to develop their coaching behavior. In addition, based on theory on emotional contagion and the broaden and build theory, we argue that spotting employees’ signature strengths leads to a stronger increase in managerial coaching behavior over time than an intervention that focuses on spotting lesser strengths. We conducted a field experiment, in which 255 managers (providing 414 data points) were randomly assigned to either a signature strengths or a lesser strengths spotting intervention. In a 1-month follow-up study we found that both interventions contributed equally to managerial coaching behavior. We conclude that online training in strengths spotting is a useful tool that helps managers to develop their coaching behavior.

Zhao, Minxiang; Li, Yixuan; Lin, Junqi; Fang, Yuan; Yang, Yuchuan; Li, Boyang; Dong, Yan

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00737-8pmid: N/A

An increasing number of studies emphasize that trust is most relevant to well-being. However, the results of this relationship remain inconclusive. This meta-analysis aims to synthesize the evidence on the association between trust and individual well-being. We searched several electronic databases to identify relevant studies published before September 30, 2022. Studies were included if they reported a Pearson’s correlation coefficient between trust and well-being. And a random-effects model was used. We identified 132 primary studies with a total of 1,060,174 participants. The results provided a moderate correlation between trust and well-being (ρ = 0.255) with 95% CI = [.240, .269]. Furthermore, we explored different trust types, well-being types, individualism, age, and gender as moderators. The results showed that the well-being types moderated the relationship between trust and well-being. Specifically, the strongest is social well-being, while the weakest is physical well-being. Trust types and individualism did not moderate the link between trust and well-being, whereas age and gender did. This study provides the evidence that trust plays an important role in promoting well-being.

Palomeque, Marco; de-Lucio, Juan

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00757-4pmid: N/A

This paper studies the positiveness in most consumed songs during a period of sadness, worry and uncertainty: the COVID-19 crisis in comparison with previous years. In order to perform the analysis, we create an original positive music indicator using a dataset of weekly patterns for music consumption in 31 OECD countries over a five year period. Results show that negative shocks from events such as economic business cycles and the COVID-19 pandemic increase the consumption of positive songs, suggesting that society compensates the negative impact on well-being with positive music. We conclude that society adapts sentiment-based music consumption preferences according to the socioeconomic situation.

Brown, James L. D.; Potter, Sophie

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00763-6pmid: N/A

This paper examines the integration and unification of the philosophy and psychology of well-being. For the most part, these disciplines investigate well-being without reference to each other. In recent years, however, with the maturing of each discipline, there have been a growing number of calls to integrate the two. While such calls are welcome, what it means to integrate well-being philosophy and psychology can vary greatly depending on one’s theoretical and practical ends. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel conceptual framework for thinking about integrating well-being philosophy and psychology that systematically categorizes different kinds of integration projects. We divide existing attempts in the literature into three broad categories according to the perspective from which the integration takes place: (1) top-down meta-theoretical unification; (2) psychological integration within philosophy; and (3) philosophical integration within psychology. These categories are then broken down into various further subcategories. Our aim in providing this framework is both to facilitate the assessment and comparison of existing integration attempts and to provide a roadmap for future integration attempts. For each category, we discuss one or two representative examples of the approaches. By doing so, we hope to generate interest in the wide variety of existing integration projects, as well as to generate discussion concerning the benefits and pitfalls of different approaches.

Lignier, Phil; Jarvis, Diane; Grainger, Daniel; Chaiechi, Taha

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00765-4pmid: N/A

The role of social capital, the social networks that influence human wellbeing has been explored by empirical research in the US and Europe, however no study so far has undertaken a systematic investigation of the impact of the various dimensions of social capital in metropolitan areas. Addressing this gap in knowledge can have practical and policy-oriented implications by contributing to more informed decision-making processes in metro areas, better targeted interventions and ultimately an improved quality of life for residents. This study adopts a multi-level modelling approach to investigate life satisfaction and social capital heterogeneity within metropolitan areas in Australia. Our dataset was collected by the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey and includes almost 4,000 individual respondents. Our results show that social trust, social engagement and connection, and a psychological sense of community measured at an individual level have a strong positive influence on individual life satisfaction. Conversely negative individual perceptions about neighbourhood criminality and shabbiness are associated with a lower level of life satisfaction. The application of a model using random slope coefficients for social capital variables suggests that most of the spatial heterogeneity between census districts is explained by between-individual (compositional) variations, rather than contextual differences. Only social connection and engagement appeared to have a distinctive contextual influence. These findings confirm the importance of social inclusion in enhancing wellbeing for everyone and may inform social policy on how to promote social networks in urban areas by all levels of government.

Lee, Ju Young; Nsair, Viva; Do, Boram

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00762-7pmid: N/A

Despite the various positive outcomes of perceived calling fulfillment at work that previous scholars have suggested, little effort has been made to understand employees who have a calling but do not identify it with their current work. By integrating self-determination theory into the calling literature, we explore how having a calling outside of one’s workplace can still lead individuals to connect strongly with their work through a mechanism that we term perceived calling enablement. Through an initial qualitative study, we identify four ways through which employees perceive their work as a calling enabler: as a source of (1) financial resources, (2) time flexibility, (3) skill development and learning, and (4) social networks/connections that allow people to pursue their callings. Then, in a series of quantitative survey studies, we developed a measure of perceived calling enablement that reflects these four dimensions and showed that perceived calling enablement facilitated work attitudes and behaviors such as job satisfaction, willingness to sacrifice, and job crafting.

Yiğit, Busra; Çakmak, Bünyamin Yasin

doi: 10.1007/s10902-024-00754-7pmid: N/A

Psychological well-being is among the concepts that have attracted significant attention from researchers in the fields of social life, work life, and health in recent years. We conducted bibliometric mapping and content analysis to reveal current trends in the concept and contribute to the literature. Using VOSviewer, Citespace, Bibliometrix and MS Office Excel programs, we analysed 16,885 academic studies published in the Web of Science database between 1980 and 2022. The research results show a continuous increase in publications and citations, with a notable surge observed after 2016. The United States accounts for over a third of the publications. Furthermore, the International Journal of Environment Research and Public Health and Frontiers in Psychology stand out as the most productive journals, whereas Carol D. Ryff is the most prolific and cited author in the field. When the footprints of the keywords over the past 10 years are interpreted, some notable trends are identified. Initially, research themes mainly revolved around children, dementia, and social support. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic emerging as a new thematic focus and the disruption of the person-job and person-environment order due to the repercussions of lockdowns, the emphasis has shifted from the theme of social support to mindfulness, loneliness, and support. Notably, motivation and rehabilitation have emerged as significant focal points, with increased attention on social isolation and healthcare workers in recent publications.