Happiness Across Cultures — Happiness 4 (C1)

HAPPINESS · LESSON 4

Happiness Across Cultures

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Two good days

Task Read the two days. Write A or B: which is the better day? Then guess: in a survey of university students in the United States and in Hong Kong, which day would each group, on average, prefer?

Day A

Day B

Up early for a music festival with a big group of friends. A crowded train, a ride on a giant swing, dancing at the front until midnight, then street food and a loud ride home.

A slow breakfast, then a long walk in the hills with one old friend, mostly in comfortable silence. Tea in a quiet garden, an early dinner at home, and a book before bed.

My better day

Guess: students in the United States

Guess: students in Hong Kong

READING

Calm or excited?

The Stanford psychologist Jeanne Tsai separates two things: actual affect, how people feel, and ideal affect, how they would like to feel. Her affect valuation theory claims that culture shapes the second more than the first.

Positive feelings differ in arousal. High-arousal positive states include excitement, enthusiasm and elation; low-arousal positive states include calm, peace and relaxation. In a 2006 study with Brian Knutson and Helene Fung, European American university students on average wanted to feel excited and enthusiastic more than Hong Kong Chinese students did, while the Hong Kong students wanted to feel calm and relaxed more.

Chinese American students fell in between. How people actually felt differed much less.

Later work looked beyond questionnaires. Best-selling American children's storybooks showed more excited faces and activities than Taiwanese ones. Official photographs of American leaders showed more excited smiles than those of Chinese leaders. Tsai links the difference to everyday goals: where people are encouraged to influence others, excitement is prized; where they are encouraged to adjust to others, calm is.

These are averages with a lot of overlap: plenty of people in Hong Kong love excitement, and plenty of Americans want calm.

READING

Happiness with others

In 2009 the psychologists Yukiko Uchida and Shinobu Kitayama asked American and Japanese participants to describe happiness and unhappiness in their own words, then coded what they wrote. On average, the Americans linked happiness with personal achievement. The Japanese participants linked it more with social harmony, and were more likely to see a downside: happiness can disturb relationships, for

example by provoking envy, and it sits in a larger balance with unhappiness. This is interdependent happiness.

Hidefumi Hitokoto and Uchida later built a nine-item Interdependent Happiness Scale (2015): getting on well with the people around you, a quiet mind, and being "ordinary", doing about as well as others.

READING · CONTINUED

Happiness with others

It predicted life satisfaction in Japan, and also among working adults in the United States, Germany and Korea.

Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers reviewed a stranger finding in 2014: aversion to happiness. In many cultures, some people are wary of happiness, for four kinds of reason: happiness will cause bad things to happen; it will make you a worse person; showing it harms you and others; and chasing it harms you

and others. In Iran and neighbouring countries, for example, some worry that happiness invites envy or the "evil eye". But the aversion appears in Western cultures too, even if happiness is valued more highly there.

Nations are not uniform. Kitayama's own research found that people in Hokkaido, Japan's former northern frontier, are on average more independent than people elsewhere in Japan.

How strong is the evidence?

Task Write a letter for each claim. Use "Calm or excited?" and "Happiness with others", and the data in claim 4. Then agree on the claim where the gap between what the study found and what people say about it is biggest.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

1

On average, European American students want to feel excited more than Hong Kong Chinese students do, and the Hong Kong students want to feel calm more.

2

On average, Americans link happiness more with personal achievement, and Japanese people more with social harmony.

3

Fear of happiness is found only in non-Western cultures.

4

In a Japanese study that followed 43,391 adults for about seven years, those who said they had no ikigai (a sense of a life worth living) were more likely to die during that time.

5

So having ikigai makes people live longer.

What the evidence says

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

Strong: On average, European American students value excitement more than Hong Kong Chinese students do, who value calm more.

Many teams have tested this, and it holds. A 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, led by Tsai with more than 50 co-authors, pooled the raw data of over 31,000 participants from 124 datasets. It confirmed that ideal affect and actual affect are different things, that cultural differences in ideal affect are larger than in actual affect, and that most of the differences have lasted over time. It also found new variation: between East Asian groups, by age, gender and income, and a growing value placed on calm among European Americans.

READING

The Buddha's diagnosis

In the early Buddhist texts, the Buddha's first sermon, given to five former companions in a deer park near Varanasi in northern India, sets out the Four Noble Truths. The tradition compares them to a doctor's diagnosis and cure.

The first truth is dukkha, often translated "suffering", though many teachers prefer "unsatisfactoriness". It covers pain, illness, ageing, grief and death, but also losing what we love, being stuck with what we dislike, and not getting what we want. Even pleasant things fall short, because they change and end.

READING · CONTINUED

The Buddha's diagnosis

The second truth names the cause: tanha, literally "thirst", usually translated craving: for sense pleasures, for being or becoming, and for not being. Not all wanting is craving: the wish to act well, or to practise, is not the problem.

The third truth is that dukkha ceases when craving ceases: nibbana (Sanskrit nirvana), which the Dhammapada calls the highest happiness. The fourth is the way

there, the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration.

The sermon calls this path the Middle Way, between chasing sensual pleasure and the self-torment of harsh asceticism, both of which lead to no good. The happiness on offer is not a feeling to grab, but a peace that grows as grasping loosens.

READING

Harmony and roles

Confucius (Kongzi, traditionally 551–479 BCE) taught in a China of rival states; his followers collected his sayings in the Analects. His question was less "how can I feel good?" than "how should a person live among others?"

At the centre are ren, "humaneness", and li, the rites and courtesies that shape social life, from mourning to greeting a teacher. Someone in whom both have become second nature is a junzi, an "exemplary person". Much of this is learned in the family: xiao, respect and care for one's parents, is a root of humaneness.

READING · CONTINUED

Harmony and roles

Flourishing here is relational. Asked about government, Confucius answers that there is order when the ruler is a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father and the son a son (12.11). Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont read this as a role ethics: we are made by our relationships. Other scholars read the Analects as a virtue ethics, closer to Aristotle.

The goal is harmony (he), which is not sameness: the exemplary person seeks harmony without simply agreeing; the petty person agrees without harmony (13.23).

Joy comes as a by-product. With coarse rice, water and his bent arm for a pillow, Confucius says, "I have still joy in the midst of these things" (7.15, in Legge's translation and numbering).

Which answer?

Task For each idea, write P (Pleasure), D (Desire), F (Flourishing) or X (none of them fits). Give one reason for each. Then agree which idea rejects one of the three answers most clearly.

Pleasure

Desire

Flourishing

1. The ideal of excitement in "Calm or excited?"

How does your life feel?

Are you getting what you want?

Is your life going well?

2. Interdependent happiness: harmony, a quiet mind, being "ordinary"

hedonism

desire theories

objective-list theories

3. The Buddha's Middle Way

Four ideas from today

4. Confucius' exemplary person, the junzi

The ikigai diagram

Task Groups of 3 or 4. Study the diagram and answer the four questions. Write your answer to question 4 down before anyone looks at "Where the diagram came from".

What you love

Passion

Mission

1. What does the diagram say a good life is? Which of the three answers does it lean to?

2. Name three kinds of people who could never reach the centre. Does that make their lives less good?

3. What does it leave out?

4. Guess: in which country, in which decade, and by what kind of person was it first drawn?

What you are good at

What the world needs

Ikigai

Profession

Vocation

What you can be paid for

Where the diagram came from

The four-circle diagram is not Japanese. Its shape began as a "purpose" diagram drawn in 2011 by the Spanish author and astrologer Andrés Zuzunaga, published in a 2012 book by Borja Vilaseca. In May 2014 the blogger Marc Winn, after watching Dan Buettner's TED talk about long-lived people in Okinawa, put the word "ikigai" in the centre. Winn later wrote that the diagram was not his, and that he had added a single word.

In Japanese, ikigai (iki, life, and kai, worth or effect) is an ordinary word for what makes life worth living. The psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya made it a subject of study in her 1966 book Ikigai ni tsuite ("On ikigai"). The neuroscientist Ken Mogi stresses that ikigai can start small, in the joy of little things, and that a person can have many. Nothing in it requires being paid.

Case cards (1–3)

Task Groups of 3 or 4. For each of cards 1–6, name the idea from today that fits best. Then write H (the idea helps us understand this person), P (partly) or N (it gets them wrong), and give one reason.

1. The promotion

2. The festival-goer

3. The retired teacher

Mei Ling, an engineer in Singapore, is promoted. Her new manager, who has just moved from Chicago, wants to throw a big party and announce it to the whole office. Mei Ling asks for a quiet lunch with her team instead, and plays the news down.

Haruka in Nagoya lives for rock festivals and roller coasters, and plans her year around them. Her colleagues tease her that she is "very American". She says she is just Haruka.

Kenji, 74, a retired teacher in Osaka, is asked by a visiting journalist about his ikigai. He says: his morning walk, his tomatoes, and teaching his granddaughter to play the board game go. The journalist looks disappointed and asks, "But what about your purpose?"

Case cards (4–6)

4. The retreat

5. The eldest son

6. The candle shop

Daniel, a software developer in Berlin, books a weekend meditation retreat to become "happier and more productive". On the first evening, the teacher suggests that wanting so badly to be happier may itself be part of the problem.

Lin Hao in Taipei is the eldest son, and his parents expect him to take over the family's tea shop. He wants to study music in another city. He loves his parents, and he does not want to choose between them and the music.

A shop in Toronto sells candles, blankets and mugs under the slogan "Live the Danish way: hygge". Freja, a Danish student who works there, says that for her family hygge means a slow evening with people you like, and that nobody needs to buy anything for it.

1. Is this true where you live: do people value calm or excitement more?

2. Is it wise to hide good news so that others don't feel envy?

3. Can a person have a good life without ever reaching the centre of the ikigai diagram?

4. When an idea like ikigai or hygge travels, is it borrowed, or changed into something new?

5. Should a happy life fit your roles, or should your roles fit your happiness?

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of someone you know, or a character from a book or film, whose idea of a good life is very different from the one you grew up with. Which tradition or idea from today comes closest to theirs?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Name one small, everyday pleasure that many people where you live enjoy. Would Ken Mogi count it as an ikigai?

Before Lesson 5

This week, find one advert, app or post that sells a feeling. Is it selling excitement or calm?

Pleasure

Note where it comes from, who it seems to be aimed at, and whether its picture of happiness matches anything from today: the Buddha, Confucius, Tsai's ideal affect, or the ikigai diagram.

Desire

Next lesson: Measuring Happiness: Who Is Happiest? Can one survey question compare happiness across the world?

Flourishing

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

HOW STRONG IS THE EVIDENCE?

1 S. Revealed in "What the evidence says": confirmed by a 2025 meta-analysis of over 31,000 participants in 124 datasets (Tsai and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin).

2 M (S is defensible). The pattern recurs across several studies, and the Interdependent Happiness Scale works in other countries too. But the key studies compare mostly two countries, often with student samples and coded free descriptions, and there is real variation within Japan (Hokkaido). "Japanese people" and "Americans" here are averages, not types.

3 F. Joshanloo and Weijers' 2014 review found aversion to happiness in Western cultures as well as non-Western ones; what differs is how highly happiness is valued.

4 S. The Ohsaki Study (Sone and colleagues, 2008, Psychosomatic Medicine) followed 43,391 adults in Miyagi Prefecture for about seven years; 3,048 died. After adjusting for other risk factors, those who said they had no ikigai had about 1.5 times the risk of dying (hazard ratio 1.5, 95% CI 1.3–1.7), mainly from cardiovascular disease and external causes, not cancer. A 2016 meta-analysis of 10 prospective studies (about 136,000 people in the United States and Japan) found a similar link between purpose in life and lower mortality.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

5 W. The link is solid; the cause is not. These are observational studies. Illness, depression or loneliness could reduce both ikigai and life expectancy, and adjustment can only remove the confounders that were measured. The meta-analysis authors themselves say the mechanisms are unclear. No experiment has given people ikigai and measured their lifespan.

WHICH ANSWER? suggested; these are for argument

1 P. Excitement is a feeling, so the ideal sits most naturally with Pleasure, though high-arousal feelings often come with achievement, which some will call Desire.

2 Open. F if harmony with others is a good in itself; D if it means meeting the expectations of one's context; even P for the "quiet mind". This is the item to argue over.

3 Often F or X. The path is a whole trained way of life (Flourishing), and nibbana is called the highest happiness, but not a pleasant feeling in the ordinary sense. It rejects Desire most clearly: craving is the cause of dukkha, so getting what you want is not the goal.

4 F. The junzi flourishes by living ren and li within his relationships; joy is a by-product, not the target.

THE IKIGAI DIAGRAM, QUESTION 4 Spain, 2011, an author and astrologer (Andrés Zuzunaga); the word "ikigai" was added in 2014 by a blogger (Marc Winn), so the version students know dates from the 2010s.