Cultural religiosity as the moderator of the relationship between affective experience and life satisfaction: A study in 147 countries
Abstract
People in different cultures may give different weights to emotional experience when evaluating their lives. In modern secularized cultures, people are more likely to focus on maximizing the experience of positive emotions and minimizing the experience of negative emotions to achieve well-being. In contrast, in traditional religious cultures, people are more likely to use religious standards to evaluate their lives. Therefore, the present study predicted that the frequency of positive and negative affect would be a better predictor of life satisfaction in secular (vs. religious) cultures. A sample of 295,933 participants from 147 countries was used to test this prediction. The data were extracted from the Gallup World Poll. As expected, the results of multilevel modeling showed that the association between affect and life satisfaction was weaker in religious than secular cultures. Therefore, the socioreligious context partly determines the extent to which affective information is relied on in life evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Read the paper
Related studies
- Global, regional, and national burden of hepatitis B, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
- A meta‐analysis of anal cancer incidence by risk group: Toward a unified anal cancer risk scale
- Global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 1950–2021, with forecasts to 2100: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021
- Exercise interventions in Alzheimer's disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials
- Prognostic Significance of Carbonic Anhydrase IX Expression in Cancer Patients: A Meta-Analysis
- Glucocorticoid Resistance: Is It a Requisite for Increased Cytokine Production in Depression? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.