Introduction to a Culturally Sensitive Measure of Well-Being: Combining Life Satisfaction and Interdependent Happiness Across 49 Different Cultures

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when well-being is being measured according to the way people in country A think about well-being? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of well-being varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being

A Comparative Study on Activated Carbons Derived from a Broad Range of Agro-industrial Wastes in Removal of Large-Molecular-Size Organic Pollutants in Aqueous Phase

The National University of Tumbes provided important financial support (Proyecto de Investigacion Docente - Resolucion No 1217-2013/UNT-R). The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnologia e Innovacion Tecnologica (CONCYTEC) in Peru (joint project reg. No. 002/PE/2012) are also gratefully recognized for their support. The Academy of Finland and the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (Tekes) are acknowledged for research funding to the AdMatU project from the Development funds and to the HYMEPRO project, respectively. Thanks to Dr. Gladys Ocharan, Alex Diamond, and Hana Snajdaufova (from ICPF) for technical support and Dr. Tomas Strasak (from ICPF) for help with DFT calculations.Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica - Concyte

National collective identity in transitional societies: Salience and relations to life satisfaction for youth in South Africa, Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Kosovo and Romania

In this study we investigated the salience of the construct of national collective identity and its associations with life satisfaction among adolescents living in transitional societies characterised by relevant change in the last decades . Participants were 1 066 adolescents (M = 15 .35 years, SD = 1 .35) from South Africa (n = 186) and five Central Eastern European countries, including Albania (n = 209), Bulgaria (n = 146), Czech Republic (n = 306), Kosovo (n = 116), and Romania (n = 103) . They completed a questionnaire including national identity and life satisfaction scales . Data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group structural equation modeling . Results showed that national identity of adolescents in transitional societies is multidimensional and pertains to different salient dimensions (i .e ., self-categorisation, evaluation, importance, attachment, and behavioural involvement) . Importantly, the findings provided evidence to suggest that higher levels of national collective identity are associated with increased levels of life satisfaction

Culture-level dimensions of social axioms and their correlates across 41 cultures

Leung and colleagues have revealed a five-dimensional structure of social axioms across individuals from five cultural groups. The present research was designed to reveal the culture level factor structure of social axioms and its correlates across 41 nations. An ecological factor analysis on the 60 items of the Social Axioms Survey extracted two factors: Dynamic Externality correlates with value measures tapping collectivism, hierarchy, and conservatism and with national indices indicative of lower social development. Societal Cynicism is less strongly and broadly correlated with previous values measures or other national indices and seems to define a novel cultural syndrome. Its national correlates suggest that it taps the cognitive component of a cultural constellation labeled maleficence, a cultural syndrome associated with a general mistrust of social systems and other people. Discussion focused on the meaning of these national level factors of beliefs and on their relationships with individual level factors of belief derived from the same data set

Personal Life Satisfaction as a Measure of Societal Happiness is an Individualistic Presumption: Evidence from Fifty Countries

Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of personal life satisfaction) is individualism-themed. With the data collected from 13,009 participants across fifty countries, we compare associations of four types of happiness (out of which three are more collectivism-themed than personal life satisfaction) with two different measures of individualism. We replicated previous findings by demonstrating that societal happiness measured as country-level aggregate of personal life satisfaction is correlated with individualism. Importantly though, we also found that the country-level aggregates of the collectivism-themed measures of happiness do not tend to be significantly correlated with individualism. Implications for happiness studies and for policy makers are signaled