People care about their relative standing in society and therefore compare themselves to relevant others. Empirical findings suggest that there are concerns for relative standing for different goods and life domains such as income, cars, attractiveness, and supervisor's praise. Even education...

For people living in the former East Germany, reunification with the former West Germany fundamentally transformed the sociopolitical system and most domains of everyday life. Previous research has revealed temporal shifts in average life satisfaction after reunification in the former East...

Past research has shown a positive association between education and well-being. Much of this research has focused on the cognitive component of well-being (i.e., life satisfaction) as outcome. On the other hand, the affective component, that is, how often and intensively people experience...

This paper examines the impact of fixed-term employment on well-being from a cross-national comparative perspective by testing (1) the effect heterogeneity across European countries, (2) to which extent Jahoda’s Latent Deprivation Model provides a sufficient micro-level explanation for the...

This paper seeks to analyze the influence of the weather on a person’s self-reported life satisfaction. On a theoretical level, it is claimed that ‘nice’ weather can improve the affective well-being of a person. Given this, it is argued that affects can, in turn, have an impact on that...

Over the last decades, the European Statistical System has developed many European statistics and indicators to measure social progress and sustainable development. Initially only in a few cases the measuring instruments contained questions on subjective issues. With the adoption of its...

Facebook’s Gross National Happiness (FGNH) indexes the positive and negative words used in the millions of status updates submitted daily by Facebook users. FGNH has face validity: it shows a weekly cycle and increases on national holidays. Also, happier individuals use more positive words and...

The Flourishing Scale (FS; Diener et al. in Soc Indic Res 97(2):143–156, <CitationRef CitationID="CR15">2010</CitationRef>) was developed to assess psychological flourishing, which can be conceived of as a social-psychological prosperity incorporating important aspects of human functioning. This study takes the FS, which has previously...</citationref>

Both the potential pitfalls of macro-economic policies focused on stimulating economic growth and the problems involved in using GDP as a measure of well-being or economic welfare have long been recognized by economists and researchers from other social sciences. Therefore, it is no surprise...