This paper examines the subjective consequence of rising income inequality amidst the rapid economic growth in China. Based on the data from a national representative survey conducted in 2005, we employ multi-level models to show that, while personal income improves life satisfaction, the effect decreases with the level of local economic development; moreover, the rate of local economic growth ...

Researchers and pundits alike view the state of the national economy as a key determinant of vote decisions and election outcomes: voters reward or punish the incumbent party as national economic conditions improve or decline. In an era of rising income inequality, however, national conditions provide relatively poor information to voters about how the incumbent is handling the economy in their...

Subjective Well-Being and Relative Poverty in Rural Bangladesh This paper revisits the debate over the importance of absolute vs. relative income as a correlate of subjective well-being using data from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world with high levels of corruption and poor governance. We do so by combining household data with population census and village survey records. O...

In this paper we present new quantitative results on the linkages between absolute income levels, relative incomes, income inequality, and attitudes towards redistribution in a large sample of countries over the past 30 years. While we find that absolute income levels have a significant but very small effect on well-being, we find that relative incomes matter much more. In addition, we find tha...

Subjective well-being includes 'affect' and 'satisfaction with life' (SWL). This study proposes a unified approach to construct a profile of subjective well-being based on social media language in Facebook status updates. We apply sentiment analysis to generate users' affect scores, and train a random forest model to predict SWL using affect scores and other language features of the status upda...

We describe booST and hooPS, two applications targeted toward the youth demographic. These mobile, social applications are designed with the goals of promoting health and wellbeing by engendering and strengthening social relationships among youth. What makes booST and hooPS stand out is that they exhibit sensitivity to their user’s emotional state and support the user in exchanging that state w...

The goal of this study was to experimentally examine how social comparison with younger and same-age targets influences perceptions of future well-being and mood among elderly women. In addition, we assessed whether life satisfaction and reminiscence about a positive former self moderated these reactions. Results indicated that reminiscence prior to comparison with a successful, younger target ...

A pervasive challenge faced by Canadian health and social service providers is to promote health for low-income families in a proactive and costeffective manner. Families with low incomes experience an array of health and social problems that prevent access to available services, compromise their resilience, and lead to negative family outcomes; for some populations, linkage to the services the...

The measurement of individual happiness challenges the notion that revealed preferences only reliably and empirically reflect individual utility. Reported subjective well-being is a broader concept than traditional decision utility; it also includes concepts like experience and procedural utility. Microand macroeconometric happiness functions offer new insights on determinants of life satisfact...

The trajectory of participation in health research by community social actors worldwide has been built on a history of community participation from the Ottawa Charter Health Promotion call for community mobilization, to the emancipatory educational philosophy of Paulo Freire, to social movements and organizing for health and social justice. This paper builds on this history to expand our global...