Although happiness as a state of mind may be universal, its meaning takes culture-specific forms. Drawing on the concept of folk theories, this study attempted to uncover lay beliefs about the nature of happiness in Germany and South Africa. To that end, 57 German and 44 black South African students wrote free-format essays in response to the…

The paper uses household economic panel data from five countries--Australia, Britain, Germany, Hungary and The Netherlands--to provide a reassessment of the impact of economic well-being on happiness. The main conclusion is that happiness is considerably more affected by economic circumstances than previously believed. In all five countries wealth…

Among the surprising results of research on the relation between a person's material circumstances and his or her subjective well-being was the finding that this relationship appears to be rather weak (throughout this paper the terms "(general) life satisfaction", "(subjective) satisfaction", "happiness" and…

This work examined the role of visual capacity in connection with psychological, social network related, and socio-structural predictors of out-of-home everyday functioning and emotional well-being. The results are based on a sample of 1519 community dwelling elderly (55-98 years; mean age 70.8 years), 757 of them were living in urban, and 762…