Or not.

Research look­ing at how dif­fer­ent cul­tures (specif­i­cally, Amer­i­cans and Japan­ese) per­ceive the con­cept of hap­pi­ness has shown that it’s not a uni­ver­sal con­stant, at least in terms of how we define it.

[The researchers] sys­tem­at­i­cally ana­lyzed Amer­i­can and Japan­ese par­tic­i­pants’ spon­ta­neously pro­duced descrip­tions of [hap­pi­ness and unhap­pi­ness] and observed, as pre­dicted, that whereas Amer­i­cans asso­ci­ated pos­i­tive hedo­nic expe­ri­ence of hap­pi­ness with per­sonal achieve­ment, Japan­ese asso­ci­ated it with social harmony.

Fur­ther­more, Japan­ese were more likely than Amer­i­cans to men­tion both social dis­rup­tion and tran­scen­den­tal reap­praisal as fea­tures of hap­pi­ness. As also pre­dicted, unlike hap­pi­ness, descrip­tions of unhap­pi­ness included var­i­ous culture-specific cop­ing actions: Whereas Amer­i­cans focused on exter­nal­iz­ing behav­ior (e.g., anger and aggres­sion), Japan­ese high­lighted tran­scen­den­tal reap­praisal and self-improvement.

Surely this has some impli­ca­tions that I’m not think­ing of?

via Mind Hacks