Studies of happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) employ a variety of conceptualizations and item formats. Some authorities prefer to focus on the cognitive or evaluative component of SWB in studies of national happiness, and consider the affective component a lesser priority. However, we show that the latter component has unique and important predictive properties. We measured the stable element of the affective component (being “usually happy and in a good mood”) in 44,096 respondents recruited probabilistically from 56 societies (nations and some ethnic groups), from all inhabited continents. Consistent with previous studies, we obtained the highest positive affect scores in the nations of northern Latin America and Africa, whereas the highest percentages of respondents “rarely in a good mood” were recorded in East Asia, Russia, Italy, and the Arab world. Our happiness measure is a significant negative predictor of national suicide rates and cigarette consumption, after controlling for other plausible predictors, including other SWB measures from the World Values Survey, Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness, and climate and socioeconomic variables.

中文翻译：

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一项新的全球幸福衡量标准解释了各国自杀率和香烟消费量的差异

幸福或主观幸福感 (SWB) 的研究采用了各种概念化和项目格式。一些权威更倾向于在国民幸福研究中关注主观幸福感的认知或评价成分，而认为情感成分次之。然而，我们表明后一个组件具有独特而重要的预测特性。我们测量了 44,096 名受访者的情感成分的稳定因素（“通常是快乐和心情好”），这些受访者来自所有有人居住的大陆的 56 个社会（国家和一些族群）。与之前的研究一致，我们在拉丁美洲北部和非洲国家获得了最高的积极情感分数，而在东亚、俄罗斯、意大利、和阿拉伯世界。我们的幸福指数是国家自杀率和香烟消费量的显着负面预测因素，在控制了其他似是而非的预测因素后，包括来自世界价值观调查、维恩霍芬世界幸福数据库的其他 SWB 衡量标准，以及气候和社会经济变量。