Below are some highlights from Ed Diener’s talk, “New Findings on Happiness” at the world congress of positive psychology which took place from June 17-20 in Philadelphia.

Diener’s main focus appears to be on promoting the integration of measures of well-being into public policy, also a theme of his new book.  Towards that end, he sought to dispel one of the most widely believed findings dealing with happiness…the idea that people adapt to situations.  People do adapt, but situation matters and adaptation is not complete.  For example, in the Gallup World Poll Ladder of Life, 94% of danes score higher than 97% of togolese.

He emphasized that Happiness is not a single thing.  For example, the US scores well on positive affect, but has relatively high levels of negative affect.  There is a difference between Life satisfaction (related to income, conveniences, basic needs) and feelings/affect  (related to social suppoet, learning and flow, public trust).  He cited research by Berridge on wanting vs. liking showing how drug addicts want drugs, but eventually get less and less enjoyment out of them, even as they want them more.   Wanting and liking are separate things, which is why traditional materialist economics misses some part of the whole perspective on society. Materialists emphasize having what you want.  Positive psychology says happiness is liking what we have.

He also reiterated meta-analysis findings about how functional it is to be happy, to counter those who dismiss happiness as unimportant.  For example, increased happiness would significantly reduce health expenditures.
He has sent his new book, Well Being for Public Policy, to Obama’s staff.  He also gave talk to the CDC and they are measuring well being as part of health promotion.  The OECD is also planning to start collecting data on well being.  They publish a lot and as such are very influential.   He sees a big change in public policy since 1990.  The Uk and Canada collect well-being data and more progress is being made.