Humans have achieved some incredible feats in our brief existence. Behind our collective triumphs, however, many of us still struggle to feel happy.
The pursuit of happiness is ancient, with countless generations mulling the sources of their own and others’ contentment. In modern times, psychologists have tried to measure and boost happiness en masse as a matter of public health, with projects like the World Happiness Report.
Yet while modern science has shed new light on happiness, the mechanics involved remain poorly understood. According to a new study, it might help to adopt a more personalized approach, focusing on individual differences that could be lost in aggregated, population-level research.
“We have to understand the sources of happiness to build effective interventions,” says first author Emorie Beck, a psychology researcher at the University of California, Davis.
As previous research has shown, socioeconomic factors wield significant influence on happiness, including things like health, wealth, social connections, and job satisfaction.
This informs the ‘bottom-up’ model of happiness, which focuses on how external factors can determine our standing in certain life domains, possibly swaying our satisfaction. This view tends to favor broader policies to promote public happiness more than personal interventions.
“But we all know people in our lives who experience traumatic events yet seem to be happy,” Beck says. Many people report happiness that apparently defies their circumstances; some muster satisfaction or joy in difficult conditions, while others struggle despite apparent advantages.
The ‘top-down’ model of happiness focuses more on this angle, with less emphasis on external factors themselves than on how people think and feel about them. It favors interventions like therapy or meditation, targeting personal traits and attitudes rather than outside factors.
With compelling evidence for both models, many researchers now prefer a third, bidirectional view of happiness, accounting for complex interaction between bottom-up and top-down effects.
Plenty of questions remain, however, including key details about how such diverse factors interact to shape a person’s happiness – and whether it works the same way for everyone.
In the new study, Beck and her colleagues explore the possibility that it doesn’t. Instead of dwelling on debates over different models of happiness, they suggest paying more attention to individual people.
“Here we propose a reframing of this question, asking not whether top-down, bottom-up or bidirectional theories are correct, but rather for whom they are correct,” they write.
The researchers measured associations between life and domain satisfaction at the population and individual level, using data from more than 40,000 subjects.
These were nationally representative panels of people from Australia, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, all of whom had periodically responded to life-satisfaction surveys for up to 33 years.
The surveys measured global life satisfaction over time, plus specific satisfaction in five life domains: health, housing, income, relationships, and work.
“What comes out is that we see roughly equal groups that demonstrate each pattern,” Beck says. “Some are bottom up; some are top down, the domains don’t affect their happiness; some are bidirectional and some are unclear.”
Roughly half of subjects showed primarily one-way associations between domain satisfactions and life satisfaction, the study found, and about a quarter showed mainly bidirectional associations.
Some subjects showed no clear link between domain satisfactions and overall life satisfaction, suggesting these exert little or no influence on one another, although it’s unclear why.
These findings highlight possible limitations of population-level happiness research, which may not capture important individual differences.
The researchers suggest happiness may be easier to promote with a more personalized approach, and less emphasis on broad models, although more research is still needed to determine how this might work.
“These things are treated separately, but they aren’t really. They feed into each other at a personal level,” Beck says.
The study was published in Nature Human Behavior.
