Personal or Interpersonal Construal of Happiness: A Cultural Psychological Perspective
By Yukiko Uchida, Yuji Ogihara. 2012
211 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cultural psychological research reveals considerable variation in how people construe happiness and experience subjective wellbeing. This paper identified substantial cultural differences in (1) meanings of happiness, (2) predictors of happiness, and (3) how social changes such as globalization are related to happiness. In European-American cultural contexts, happiness is construed as including experience of a highly desirable and positive emotional state defined in terms of a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement. Moreover, individual happiness is best predicted by personal goal attainment and high self-esteem or self-efficacy. In contrast, in East Asian cultural contexts (i.e., those found in Japan), happiness is construed as including experience of both positive and negative emotional state. Happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness and interpersonal connectedness and harmony. Furthermore, individual happiness is best predicted by relationship harmony and emotional support from others. While people maintain traditional cultural norms, some societies and organizations are under pressure from globalization and this might affect happiness. We examined how cultural change affects wellbeing, especially focusing on current Japanese contexts where individuals have experienced an increasing shift toward individualism and have experienced a large national disaster. Cultural psychological perspectives regarding happiness provide important contributions to psychological science and society at large.
Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5dd098bb29e3eccdd28dbf5e8a1053f7b5350a7b
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Citations in the corpus
- Second Wave Positive Psychology: Exploring the Positive–Negative Dialectics of Wellbeing (2016, background): “This argument is also central to traditions such as Buddhism (Hayes 2002), which perhaps explains why Eastern cultures are thought to be more comfortable with a pessimistic outlook (Uchida and Ogihara 2012).”
- Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: Enriching our emotional landscape through 216 ‘untranslatable’ words pertaining to well-being (2016, background): “This emergent sensitivity is reflected in studies exploring variation in the way different cultures relate to well-being, including in how it is defined (Joshanloo, 2014), experienced (Uchida & Ogihara, 2012) and reported (Oishi, 2010).”
- Forgiveness, Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being Among Filipino Adolescents (2014, background): “In fact, the major propositions of the self-construal theory (Markus and Kitayama 1991) emphasize the importance of interdependence in achieving happiness among individuals in collectivist contexts (Markus et al. 1997; Suh 2007, 2002; Uchida and Ogihara 2012).”