Culture and Well-Being

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XII

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2. Introduction – Culture and Well-Being Works by Ed Diener

   • Ed Diener

   Pages 1-8

3. Culture and Subjective Well-Being

   • William Tov, Ed Diener

   Pages 9-41

4. Factors Predicting the Subjective Well-Being of Nations

   • Ed Diener, Marissa Diener, Carol Diener

   Pages 43-70

5. Cross-Cultural Correlates of Life Satisfaction and Self-Esteem

   • Ed Diener, Marissa Diener

   Pages 71-91

6. Goals, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being

   • Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener

   Pages 93-108

7. Cross-Cultural Variations in Predictors of Life Satisfaction: Perspectives from Needs and Values

   • Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener, Richard E. Lucas, Eunkook M. Suh

   Pages 109-127

8. From Culture to Priming Conditions: Self-Construal Influences on Life Satisfaction Judgments

   • Eunkook M. Suh, Ed Diener, John A. Updegraff

   Pages 129-142

9. The Dynamics of Daily Events and Well-Being Across Cultures: When Less Is More

   • Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener, Dong-Won Choi, Chu Kim-Prieto, Incheol Choi

   Pages 143-168

10. Norms for Experiencing Emotions in Different Cultures: Inter- and Intranational Differences

    • Michael Eid, Ed Diener

    Pages 169-202

11. Emotions Across Cultures and Methods

    • Christie N. Scollon, Ed Diener, Shigehiro Oishi, Robert Biswas-Diener

    Pages 203-228

12. Positivity and the Construction of Life Satisfaction Judgments: Global Happiness is Not the Sum of its Parts

    • Ed Diener, Christie Napa Scollon, Shigehiro Oishi, Vivian Dzokoto, Eunkook M. Suh

    Pages 229-243

13. Most People Are Pretty Happy, but There Is Cultural Variation: The Inughuit, the Amish, and the Maasai

    • Robert Biswas-Diener, Joar Vittersø, Ed Diener

    Pages 245-260

14. Making the Best of a Bad Situation: Satisfaction in the Slums of Calcutta

    • Robert Biswas-Diener, Ed Diener

    Pages 261-278

15. Conclusion: What We Have Learned and Where We Go Next

    • Ed Diener

    Pages 279-289

material boundaries capture cultural effects? The articles contained in this volume offer initial answers to most of these questions. The culture and well-being questions are of fundamental importance to understanding in the entire eld and to scienti c knowledge in the behavioral s- ences as a whole. Unless we understand what is universal and what is speci c, we cannot hope to understand the processes governing well-being. Unfortunately, our scienti c knowledge in most behavioral science elds, including the study of we- being, has been built on a narrow database drawn from westernized, industrialized nations. This means that we have only a little knowledge of whether our ndings are generalizable to all peoples of the globe and to universal human psychol- ical processes. Fortunately, during the last decade my students and I, as well as others working in this area, have rapidly expanded our knowledge of well-being vis-a-vis ` culture. The rst attempt to summarize the ndings in this area came in 1999 with Culture and Subjective Well-Being, a book edited by Eunkook Suh and Diener. The current volume represents a renewed effort to give a broad overview of major ndings in this area and to point to the important directions for future research. Composition of This Volume I am very pleased with the articles presented in this volume because I believe that they represent true advances in our fundamental understanding of subjective we- being.

• Emotions
• emotion
• happiness
• life satisfaction
• quality of life
• subjective well-being
• well-being

From the reviews: “Culture and Well-Being, covers national differences in life satisfaction and the role of cultural factors in producing these differences. … I can envision its use in a college class concerned with culture and well-being. … Certainly academic researchers interested in well-being will find them extremely useful. … The audience should extend beyond research psychologists and include policy makers as well as interested members of the general public. … the collected works of Ed Diener are timely, impressive, and useful.” (Christopher Peterson, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 54 (50), 2009)

• Dept. Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, USA

  Ed Diener

Ed Diener is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for the past 34 years. Dr. Diener was the president of both the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Currently he is the president of the International Positive Psychology Association. Dr. Diener was the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Happiness Studies, and he is the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Diener has over 240 publications, with about 190 being in the area of the psychology of well-being, and is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information with over 12,000 citations to his credit. He won the Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, the first Gallup Academic Leadership Award, and the Jack Block Award for Personality Psychology. Dr. Diener also won several teaching awards, including the Oakley-Kundee Award for Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Illinois.

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