Conceptions of happiness across cultures

Abstract

Research on the confluence of culture and happiness has grown dramatically in the past three decades. However, this line of research has mostly focused on levels and predictors of happiness, largely ignoring conceptualizations of happiness. To partially fill this gap, the current thesis sought to investigate three variables related to the way people conceive of happiness and unhappiness across cultures. These include the fear of happiness (the belief that being happy may lead to bad things happening), eudaimonism (that happiness is not dependent on pleasure and good feeling but on moral virtues), and the transformative power of suffering (that suffering can lead to spiritual growth and happiness). Chapter 1 presents a short discussion on the importance of studying conceptions of happiness in the field of happiness studies, and an overview of the studies of the thesis. Chapter 2 examines the concept of the fear of happiness and its cross-cultural validity across 14 nations. Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis and multi-level modelling, this chapter investigates the measurement invariance, cross-level isomorphism, predictive validity, and the nomological network of the fear of happiness scale. The results show that this scale has good statistical properties at both individual and cultural levels, and has the potential to add to knowledge about how people conceive happiness across cultures. Chapter 3 investigates the influence of priming various aspects of Iranian identity (i.e., ancient Iranian, Islamic, and western) on Iranians‘ conceptualizations of happiness (as assessed by eudaimonism and transformative suffering scales). The findings largely supported the prediction that situationally cuing various identities significantly affects Iranians‘ concepts of happiness. Moreover, it was found that identity integration (i.e., the degree to which a person sees consistency among the three aspects of Iranian identity) significantly interacted with the western identity prime. Chapter 4 examines differences in the endorsement of three conceptions of happiness (i.e., eudaimonism, the transformative power of suffering, and the fear of happiness) in two Iranian groups: university students and Basij members. University students are among the most westernized groups in Iran, advocating modern and non-traditional values. In contrast, the Basij is a highly religious and conservative group strongly influenced by Islamic values. It was expected that the Basij members would score significantly higher than the university students on the three conceptions of happiness under study, because these conceptions are associated with the Islamic worldview. The results of a MANCOVA (controlling for age and gender) and the investigation of mean differences in latent factors supported these predictions. Finally, Chapter 5 provides a general discussion of the findings of the present studies. It is argued that happiness studies would greatly benefit from paying close attention to conceptions of happiness and the influence of religious worldviews on these conceptions. Moreover, the importance of within-culture studies and establishing indigenous psychology in understudied cultures are briefly discussed. This chapter ends with a discussion of limitations, potential applications, and directions for future studies.