Are Happiness and Life Satisfaction Different Across Religious groups? Exploring Determinants of Happiness and Life Satisfaction

This study explores whether different religions experience different levels of happiness and life satisfaction and in case this is affected by country economic and cultural environment. Using World Value Survey (from 1981 to 2014), this study found that individual religiosity and country level of development play a significant role in shaping people’s subjective well-being (SWB). Protestants, Buddhists and Roman Catholic were happier and most satisfied with their lives compared to other religious groups. Orthodox has the lowest SWB. Health status, household’s financial satisfaction and freedom of choice are means by which religious groups and governments across the globe can improve the SWB of their citizens. Keywords: happiness; life satisfaction; religion; religious differences; cultur

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

Validating the concord index as a measure of family relationships in China

Interest in family functioning across cultures has become more widespread, but our instruments have not kept pace by measuring constructs that are especially relevant outside the West. We present the psychometric properties of the Concord Index (CI) in the family context. The CI examines (qihe), translated most closely into English as concord. The term includes concepts of harmony and mutuality, and is a characteristic of dyadic relationships valued in Chinese cultural groups that form about a fifth of the world\u27s population. The scale was adapted to measure 2 types of family relationships: specific dyadic relationships within the family between any individual family member and another (the A-P perspective), as well as an individual\u27s composite assessment of all his/her family relationships (the A-FAM perspective). The 10-item measure was internally consistent, stable over 2 weeks, and showed factor invariance across gender, age, relationship, and household size for A-P and A-FAM perspectives. The A-P correlated negatively with disagreement with the partner. The A-FAM correlated with measures of family functioning, well-being, leisure time spent with family members, and with measures of emotional but not physical symptoms. Furthermore, the A-FAM measure added predictive power to individual measures of emotional functioning in assessing subjective happiness. The CI adds to other imported instruments designed to measure family function in Chinese populations because of its brevity, its adaptability for measuring dyadic and global family relationships across family roles, its easily understood items, and its incremental validity in predicting well-being beyond individually focused measures

Chinese and United States undergraduates' critical thinking skills: Academic and dispositional predictors

The present study explored the relationships between critical thinking performance and various possible correlates in two groups of students from different cultural backgrounds. The Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment was administered to 142 Chinese (Hong Kong) and 153 US undergraduates. Consistent with the assertion that the Chinese educational tradition emphasizes effort and academic performance may more realistically reflect student diligence, GPA was found to be unrelated with critical thinking abilities among Chinese students. US students critical thinking performance was also better predicted by SAT scores than GPA. Gender, subject major, and dispositional factors of openness and conscientiousness were found to be variably related to critical thinking skills in the two groups

Chinese and United States students' critical thinking: Cross-cultural construct validation of a critical thinking assessment

Critical thinking---its instruction, development, and assessment--- is a vital and urgent concern among educators around the globe. In this study, critical thinking skills were assessed among 295 Chinese and U.S. undergraduates with the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment Using Everyday Situations (HCTAES; Halpern, 2005). It uses familiar and realistic scenarios with both constructed response and forced choice response formats to assess five domains of critical thinking skills. Multiple group confirmatory factor analysis indicated that critical thinking is similarly defined by the five composite subscales in the two cultures. Results also suggested that the cognitive processes used in constructing a response probably differ from those used in recognizing a correct response, for both students in China and the U.S

Family First: Evidence of Consistency and Variation in the Value of Family Versus Personal Happiness Across 49 Different Cultures

People care about their own well-being and about the well-being of their families. It is currently, however, unknown how much people tend to value their own versus their family's well-being. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding across a larger sample size (N = 12,819) and a greater number of countries (N = 49). We found that the strength of the idealization of family over personal happiness preference was small (average Cohen's ds = .20, range -.02 to.48), but present in 98% of the studied countries, with statistical significance in 73% to 75%, and variance across countries <2%. We also found that the size of this effect did vary somewhat across cultural contexts. In Latin American cultures highest on relational mobility, the idealization of family over personal happiness was very small (average Cohen's ds for Latin America = .15 and .18), while in Confucian Asia cultures lowest on relational mobility, this effect was closer to medium (ds > .40 and .30). Importantly, we did not find strong support for traditional theories in cross-cultural psychology that associate collectivism with greater prioritization of the family versus the individual; country-level individualism-collectivism was not associated with variation in the idealization of family versus individual happiness. Our findings indicate that no matter how much various populists abuse the argument of "protecting family life" to disrupt emancipation, family happiness seems to be a pan-culturally phenomenon. Family well-being is a key ingredient of social fabric across the world, and should be acknowledged by psychology and well-being researchers and by progressive movements too

Self-construals predict personal life satisfaction with different strengths across societal contexts differing in national wealth and religious heritage

We explore to what extent previously observed pan-cultural association between dimensions of self-construal and personal life satisfaction (PLS) may be moderated by three national-contextual variables: national wealth, economic inequality, and religious heritage. The results showed that MSelf-reliance (vs. dependence on others) predicted PLSpositively in poorer countries but negatively in richer countries. Connectedness to others (vs. self-containment) predicted PLS more strongly in Protestant-heritage countries. Self-expression (vs. harmony) predicted PLS more weakly (and non-significantly) in Muslim-heritage countries. In contrast, previously reported associations of self-direction (vs. reception-to-influence), consistency (vs. variability), and decontextualized (vs. contextualized) self-understanding with personal life satisfaction were not significantly moderated by these aspects of societal context. These results show the importance of considering the impact of national religious and economic context