Culture and Well-Being: The Collected Works of Ed Diener / Edition 1

by Ed Diener

Overview

material boundaries capture cultural effects? The articles contained in this volume offer initial answers to most of these questions. The culture and well-being questions are of fundamental importance to understanding in the entire eld and to scienti c knowledge in the behavioral s- ences as a whole. Unless we understand what is universal and what is speci c, we cannot hope to understand the processes governing well-being. Unfortunately, our scienti c knowledge in most behavioral science elds, including the study of we- being, has been built on a narrow database drawn from westernized, industrialized nations. This means that we have only a little knowledge of whether our ndings are generalizable to all peoples of the globe and to universal human psychol- ical processes. Fortunately, during the last decade my students and I, as well as others working in this area, have rapidly expanded our knowledge of well-being vis-a-vis ‘ culture. The rst attempt to summarize the ndings in this area came in 1999 with Culture and Subjective Well-Being, a book edited by Eunkook Suh and Diener. The current volume represents a renewed effort to give a broad overview of major ndings in this area and to point to the important directions for future research. Composition of This Volume I am very pleased with the articles presented in this volume because I believe that they represent true advances in our fundamental understanding of subjective we- being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789048123513
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	06/09/2009
Series:	Social Indicators Research Series , #38
Edition description:	2009
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Ed Diener is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for the past 34 years. Dr. Diener was the president of both the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Currently he is the president of the International Positive Psychology Association. Dr. Diener was the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Happiness Studies, and he is the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Diener has over 240 publications, with about 190 being in the area of the psychology of well-being, and is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information with over 12,000 citations to his credit. He won the Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, the first Gallup Academic Leadership Award, and the Jack Block Award for Personality Psychology. Dr. Diener also won several teaching awards, including the Oakley-Kundee Award for Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Illinois.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction - Diener 2. Culture and Subjective Well-Being - Tov & Diener 3. Factors Predicting the Subjective Well-Being of Nations - Diener, Diener & Diener 4. Cross-Cultural Correlates of Life Satisfaction and Self Esteem - Diener & Diener 5. Goals, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being - Oishi & Diener 6. Cross-Cultural Variations in Predictors of Life Satisfaction - Osihi, Diener, Lucas & Suh 7. From Culture to Printing Conditions - Suh, Diener & Updegraff 8. The Dynamics of Daily Events and Well-Being Across Cultures: When Less is More - Oishi, Diener, Choi, Kim-Prieto & Choi 9. Norms for Experiencing Emotions in Different Cultures - Eid & Diener 10. Emotions Across Cultures and Methods - Scollon, Diener, Osihi & Biswas-Diener 11. Positivity and the Construction of Life Satisfaction Judgements: Global Happiness Is Not Sum of Its Parts - Diener, Scollon, Oishi, Dzokoto & Sug 12. Most People are Pretty Happy, but There is Cultural Variation - Biswas-Diener, Vitterso & Diener 13. Making the Best of a Bad Situation: Satisfaction in the Slums of Calcutta - Biswas-Diener & Diener 14. Conclusion - Diener

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews: “Culture and Well-Being, covers national differences in life satisfaction and the role of cultural factors in producing these differences. … I can envision its use in a college class concerned with culture and well-being. … Certainly academic researchers interested in well-being will find them extremely useful. … The audience should extend beyond research psychologists and include policy makers as well as interested members of the general public. … the collected works of Ed Diener are timely, impressive, and useful.” (Christopher Peterson, PsycCRITIQUES, Vol. 54 (50), 2009)

From the Publisher