Self-reporting is both necessary and biasing--does your culture deprecate boasting about happiness or professing unhappiness?
And, of course, do we agree on what happiness consists in? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Everybody recognizes all these problems, except of course the reporters turning the press release into a story.
I regard myself as fairly phlegmatic (especially when I have a head cold, but never mind that for now). I'm rarely ecstatic. I'm rarely depressed. How does a survey compare that with someone with bigger highs and lows?
I gather that these kinds of disposition are largely hereditary. I can easily imagine a survey giving radically different results on different temperaments. Suppose one ethnicity trends more choleric in one small country and a different one more phlegmatic in another... Yeah. Double whammy--the countries would have different average reactions to the survey and a different culture too, because of the differences.
My usual association with the word "contentment" is rest, but busy-ness can be contented too. Even driving, of which I am not excessively fond (I'd rather just be there without the intervening concentration and staving off chaos), can have a contented feeling when all is going well. And arriving can have a contentment, even happiness, of its own. It depends on what the journey's for.
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