Culture and Well-Being

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.

– Culture and Well-Being Works by Ed Diener.- Culture and Subjective Well-Being.- Factors Predicting the Subjective Well-Being of Nations.- Cross-Cultural Correlates of Life Satisfaction and Self-Esteem.- Goals, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being.- Cross-Cultural Variations in Predictors of Life Satisfaction: Perspectives from Needs and Values.- From Culture to Priming Conditions: Self-Construal Influences on Life Satisfaction Judgments.- The Dynamics of Daily Events and Well-Being Across Cultures: When Less Is More.- Norms for Experiencing Emotions in Different Cultures: Inter- and Intranational Differences.- Emotions Across Cultures and Methods.- Positivity and the Construction of Life Satisfaction Judgments: Global Happiness is Not the Sum of its Parts.- Most People Are Pretty Happy, but There Is Cultural Variation: The Inughuit, the Amish, and the Maasai.- Making the Best of a Bad Situation: Satisfaction in the Slums of Calcutta.- Conclusion: What We Have Learned and Where We Go Next.

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)