Beck Emorie D, Cheung Felix, Thapa Stuti, Jackson Joshua J
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Nat Hum Behav. 2025 May 2. doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02171-z.
Contemporary approaches examining the determinants of happiness have posited that happiness is determined bidirectionally by both top-down, global life satisfaction and bottom-up, domain satisfaction processes. We propose a personalized happiness perspective, suggesting that the determinants and consequences of happiness are idiographic (that is, specific) to each individual rather than assumed to be the same for all. We showed the utility of a personalized happiness approach by testing associations between life and domain satisfaction at both the population and personalized levels using nationally representative data of 40,074 German, British, Swiss, Dutch and Australian participants tracked for up to 33 years. The majority of participants (41.4-50.8%) showed primarily unidirectional associations between domain satisfactions and life satisfaction, and only 19.3-25.9% of participants showed primarily bidirectional associations. Moreover, the population models differed from personalized models, suggesting that aggregated, population-level research fails to capture individual differences in personalized happiness, showing the importance of a personalized happiness approach. Patterns of individual differences are robust, yet distinguishing between individual-level patterns and random error is challenging, highlighting the need for future work and innovative approaches to study personalized happiness.
当代研究幸福决定因素的方法认为，幸福是由自上而下的整体生活满意度和自下而上的领域满意度过程双向决定的。我们提出了一种个性化幸福观，即幸福的决定因素和结果是因人而异的（也就是说，是特定于每个人的），而不是假定对所有人都相同。我们通过使用对40,074名德国、英国、瑞士、荷兰和澳大利亚参与者进行长达33年跟踪的具有全国代表性的数据，在总体和个性化层面检验生活满意度与领域满意度之间的关联，展示了个性化幸福方法的效用。大多数参与者（41.4% - 50.8%）在领域满意度和生活满意度之间主要呈现单向关联，只有19.3% - 25.9%的参与者主要呈现双向关联。此外，总体模型与个性化模型不同，这表明汇总的总体层面研究未能捕捉到个性化幸福中的个体差异，凸显了个性化幸福方法的重要性。个体差异模式是稳健的，但区分个体层面模式和随机误差具有挑战性，这突出了未来研究个性化幸福的工作和创新方法的必要性。
