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result(s) for
"Happiness History 20th century."
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China’s life satisfaction, 1990–2010
Despite its unprecedented growth in output per capita in the last two decades, China has essentially followed the life satisfaction trajectory of the central and eastern European transition countries—a U-shaped swing and a nil or declining trend. There is no evidence of an increase in life satisfaction of the magnitude that might have been expected to result from the fourfold improvement in the level of per capita consumption that has occurred. As in the European countries, in China the trend and U-shaped pattern appear to be related to a pronounced rise in unemployment followed by a mild decline, and an accompanying dissolution of the social safety net along with growing income inequality. The burden of worsening life satisfaction in China has fallen chiefly on the lowest socioeconomic groups. An initially highly egalitarian distribution of life satisfaction has been replaced by an increasingly unequal one, with decreasing life satisfaction in persons in the bottom third of the income distribution and increasing life satisfaction in those in the top third.
Journal Article
Historical analysis of national subjective wellbeing using millions of digitized books
In addition to improving quality of life, higher subjective wellbeing leads to fewer health problems and higher productivity, making subjective wellbeing a focal issue among researchers and governments. However, it is difficult to estimate how happy people were during previous centuries. Here we show that a method based on the quantitative analysis of natural language published over the past 200 years captures reliable patterns in historical subjective wellbeing. Using sentiment analysis on the basis of psychological valence norms, we compute a national valence index for the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Italy, indicating relative happiness in response to national and international wars and in comparison to historical trends in longevity and gross domestic product. We validate our method using Eurobarometer survey data from the 1970s and demonstrate robustness using words with stable historical meanings, diverse corpora (newspapers, magazines and books) and additional word norms. By providing a window on quantitative historical psychology, this approach could inform policy and economic history.
Using billions of words of digitized historical text, Hills et al. develop and validate a measure of national subjective wellbeing, the National Valence Index, going back 200 years.
Journal Article
A Global Perspective on Happiness and Fertility
The literature on fertility and happiness has neglected comparative analysis. We investigate the fertility/happiness association using data from the World Values Surveys for 86 countries. We find that, globally, happiness decreases with the number of children. This association, however, is strongly modified by individual and contextual factors. Most importantly, we find that the association between happiness and fertility evolves from negative to neutral to positive above age 40, and is strongest among those who are likely to benefit most from upward intergenerational transfers. In addition, analyses by welfare regime show that the negative fertility/happiness association for younger adults is weakest in countries with high public support for families, and the positive association above age 40 is strongest in countries where old-age support depends mostly on the family. Overall these results suggest that children are a long-term investment in well-being, and highlight the importance of the life-cycle stage and contextual factors in explaining the happiness/fertility association.
Journal Article
Pornography, Religion, and the Happiness Gap: Does Pornography Impact the Actively Religious Differently?
Club good models developed by economists suggest that the club provides a benefit to members by fostering the provision of semi-public goods. In the case of religion, churches create enforcement mechanisms to reduce free riding. Consequently, the psychic costs of deviant activity should be higher for individuals who belong to religious groups with strong social norms. Data from the General Social Survey are used to examine whether the cost of using pornography is greater for the more religiously involved. We measure the cost of using pornography as the happiness gap or the gap between the average happiness reported by individuals who do and individuals who do not report using pornography. The happiness gap is larger for individuals who regularly attend church and who belong to religious groups with strong attitudes against pornography.
Journal Article
Public health in Russia: a sad state of affairs
The sad state of affairs in the Russian public health system has nothing to do with President Vladimir Putin, which, of course, is too bad. After all, wouldn't it be wonderful if he could be blamed for that as well?
Journal Article
Fitting In: The Roles of Social Acceptance and Discrimination in Shaping the Daily Psychological Well-Being of Latino Youth
Objectives. We examine how acculturation experiences such as discrimination and social acceptance influence the daily psychological well-being of Latino youth living in newly emerging and historical receiving immigrant communities. Methods. We use data on 557 Latino youth enrolled in high school in Los Angeles or in rural or urban North Carolina. Results. Compared to Latino youth in Los Angeles, Latino youth in urban and rural North Carolina experienced higher levels of daily happiness, but also experienced higher levels of daily depressive and anxiety symptoms. Differences in nativity status partially explained location differences in youths' daily psychological well-being. Discrimination and daily negative ethnic treatment worsened, whereas social acceptance combined with daily positive ethnic treatment and ethnic and family identification improved, daily psychological well-being. Conclusions. Our analysis contributes to understanding the acculturation experiences of immigrant youth and the roles of social context in shaping adolescent mental health.
Journal Article
Rising Happiness in Nations 1946—2004: A Reply to Easterlin
The 'Easterlin paradox' holds that economic growth does not add to the quality-of-life and that this appears in the fact that average happiness in nations has not risen in the last few decades. The latest trend data show otherwise. Average happiness has increased slightly in rich nations and considerably in the few poor nations for which data are available. Since longevity has also increased, the average number of happy life years has increased at an unprecedented rate since the 1950s.
Journal Article
A Paradox of Pleasure: Black Joy during “the Nadir,” 1875‒1905
This article revisits Rayford Logan’s thesis in The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877‒1901 to chart how African Americans experienced joy during a racial low point—“the Nadir” of race relations. Using Logan’s claims as a conceptual framework, the article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s position on amusement and everyday Black people’s joyful acts during the post-Reconstruction period to understand “a paradox of pleasure”—feeling jovial during dark times. With the Nadir as a case study, this essay argues that historians may develop Black joy as a historical analytic by asking research questions about Black affect, employing the tools of historical imagination, and concentrating on the small delights of daily life. This essay seeks to inspire curiosity about how exploring Black life from the angle of elation, not sorrow, can produce complex histories of Black subjectivity and feeling. It proposes Black joy as an inchoate analytic in hopes of it becoming a formal mode of historical inquiry.
Journal Article
Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health
Jonathan Katz denounced psychiatric treatment as \"one of the more lethal forms of homosexual oppression\" and documents the use of lobotomy, electroconvulsive shock, aversion therapy, and psychotherapy to treat homosexuality.2 Beginning in the 1950s, and with increasing assertiveness in the 1960s and 1970s, gay activists and some dissident psychiatrists worked to sever the association between mental illness and homosexuality.The psychologist Evelyn Hooker set out to study what she termed \"normal\" homosexuals\" and in 1957 demonstrated that the psychological profile of gay men not in psychiatric treatment was indistinguishable from that of a comparable group of heterosexual men.3 A decade after Hooker began to debunk the notion of homosexuality as a mental disorder, the effort to distance homosexuality from the stigma of mental illness became the defining project of the emerging gay rights movement.Efforts to align gay with the norms of health redrew the definitions of the modern gay and lesbian in opposition to the anachronistic \"homosexual,\" aligning the former with gender normativity, putative whiteness, economic stability, monogamy, and other forms of national belonging, and the latter with sickness and trauma.\"12 The strategy of attempting to attain rights and respect by distancing one's own group from associations with disability and mental illness was far from unique to the gay rights movement.
Journal Article