Emotional Environment of a Culture and Societal Happiness

Studies on emotions focus most often on emotionality of individuals. Rarely, researchers analyze culture-level averages for frequency of experienced emotions as a culture-level dependent variable in studies on societal well-being (along with life satisfaction). Here, we propose to study culture-level aggregates of emotions as an ‘emotional environment’ prevalent in a given society and to analyze its relation to societal well-being. With the data collected in the Happiness Meanders study we analyze how the frequency of experienced emotions and the frequency of expressed emotions (as well as the difference between them) relates to four different types of societal happiness (i.e., life satisfaction vs interdependent happiness measured separately for individuals and for families).