The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness
By Claudia Senik. Social Science Research Network, 2014
117 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of similar affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus psychological and cultural factors. The latter turn out to be of non-negligible importance. In some countries, such as France, they are responsible for the best part of the country's unobserved idiosyncratic source of unhappiness. French natives are less happy than other Europeans, whether they live in France or outside. By contrast, immigrants are not less happy in France than they are elsewhere in Europe, but their happiness fall with the passage of time and generations. I show that these gaps in self-declared happiness have a real emotional counterpart and do not boil down to purely nominal differences.
Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e438fa4e75aca3075adf1853361d929bde5ed7b
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Social Psychology
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The happiness of international migrants: A review of research findings (2015, background): “Concurrently, a related issue that has been debated in previous literature is tested: the debate is whether migrants completely progress towards the happiness levels of natives in the destination country over time, as assimilation theories suggest (Esser 2010), or whether differences remain as sugge”