New research from Assistant Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology Stuti Thapa was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior titled “Towards a personalized happiness approach to capturing change in satisfaction” this month. The paper addresses questions about the determinants of happiness across five countries.
“People have long contemplated ways to live a more satisfying or happier life,” Thapa said, explaining the inspiration for their research. “Do happier people tend to see different areas of their life through rose-colored glasses? Or are different areas of life the building block of happiness? In other words, does happiness come from within, or is it built from external influences such as our jobs, health, relationships, and material circumstances?”
Thapa and her colleagues – from University of California Davis, University of Toronto and Washington University in St. Louis – argue that each of these may be true but not for everyone and investigate these “top-down” versus “bottom-up” models of wellbeing and happiness in their research.
The “top-down” perspective suggests that happiness does not come from external circumstances, rather it is a product of personal attitudes and qualities, implying that we can improve happiness by improving our mental states through practices such as mindfulness meditation or therapy.
This contrasts with the “bottom-up” perspective, which proposes that our overall happiness comes from our satisfaction with domains of our life, such as money, fulfilling work, and satisfying relationships. This model suggests that we improve happiness at a broad scale by improving people’s life circumstances, not by targeting factors intrinsic to a person.
A third perspective compromises and suggests that both are correct. Happiness comes from external circumstances and internally, but each of these perspectives have been treated as competing, which suggests that one must be the model that operates for everyone. Thapa and her colleagues argue that this assumption is misguided, and that people may meaningfully differ in the degree to which each perspective applies to them, i.e., is this true for each individual or an artifact of population-level aggregation?
To investigate which model was most accurate for individual people, they used archival data from five nationally representative panels, including more than 40,000 respondents in Germany, Britain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Australia. The surveys asked participants about their life satisfaction as well as satisfaction with five domains of their lives: health, income, housing, work, and relationship. They then used network analysis to build individualized models for each person and compared it to whether it fits the general population model.
“What we found was that population level models did not fully represent individual models,” Thapa explained. “The findings suggests that if we want to improve happiness and subjective wellbeing in society, policies addressing both external factors such as health, income, housing, and jobs and individual qualities such as personal resilience and purpose in life need to be designed based on individual needs. Specifically, the most effective interventions will be tailored to the individual themselves.”
Research such as Thapa’s is common in the Department of Psychology, which is housed in UTulsa’s Kendall College of Arts & Sciences. Much of the work is interdisciplinary and allows students to take part in the projects.