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, but also about the well-being of their families. It is currently however unknown how much people tend to value their own and 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 with country levels varying from -.02 to almost .48), but ubiquitous, i.e., direction presented in 98% of the studied countries, 73-75% with statistical significance and .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

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

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 wellbeing is being measured according to the way people in country A think about wellbeing? 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 wellbeing 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

Societal emotional environments and cross-cultural differences in life satisfaction: A forty-nine country study.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of ‘societal emotional environment’: the emotional climate of a society (operationalized as the degree to which positive and negative emotions are expressed in a society). Using data collected from 12,888 participants across 49 countries, we show how societal emotional environments vary across countries and cultural clusters, and we consider the potential importance of these differences for well-being. Multilevel analyses supported a ‘double-edged sword’ model of negative emotion expression, where expression of negative emotions predicted higher life satisfaction for the expresser but lower life satisfaction for society. In contrast, partial support was found for higher societal life satisfaction in positive societal emotional environments. Our study highlights the potential utility and importance of distinguishing between positive and negative emotion expression, and adopting both individual and societal perspectives in well-being research. Individual pathways to happiness may not necessarily promote the happiness of others

Two unconventional precursors to produce ZnCl₂‐based activated carbon for water treatment applications

Abstract Two unconventional raw materials, the seeds from Spondias purpurea L. (red mombin) and Inga edulis (ice cream bean), were characterized and used as precursors to produce good‐quality zinc chloride‐activated carbons for potential use in water treatment applications. The red mombin seed was significantly more porous than the ice cream bean seed, while the activated carbons prepared from red mombin seed and ice cream bean seeds showed both a very well‐established microporous‐mesoporous structure. Equilibrium as well as kinetic adsorption experiments were conducted with methylene blue, methyl orange, and As(V). It was revealed that both seeds are unconventional, renewable, cheap, and suitable agro‐precursors for production of activated carbons with potential application in wastewater treatment

Wavelength Effect on Photocatalytic Reduction of CO2 by Ag/TiO2 Catalyst

Photocatalytic reduction of CO2 by water was performed in the presence of a Ag/TiO2 catalyst under illumination by lamps with different wavelengths (254, 365, and 400 nm). The yields of the main products (methane and methanol) were higher with the 254 nm lamp than with the 365 lamp while no products were observed with the 400 nm lamp. This was because the electron-hole generation rate increased with increasing energy of irradiation (decreasing wavelength) and there were higher densities of electron states at higher energies in TiO2. The increased efficiency of electron-hole generation with a shorter wavelength irradiation increased the efficiency of the catalyst. The energy of the electrons excited by visible light (400 nm) was too low for CO2 photocatalytic reduction.Web of Science32581581