Income and Well-Being: Relative Income and Absolute Income Weaken Negative Emotion, but Only Relative Income Improves Positive Emotion.

ABSTRACT: Whether relative income or absolute income could affect subjective well-being has been a bone of contention for years. Life satisfaction and the relative frequency of positive and negative emotions are parts of subjective well-being. According to the prospect theory, hedonic adaptation helps to explain why positive emotion is often so hard to be maintained, and negative emotion wouldn't be easy to be eliminated. So we expect the relationship between income and positive emotion is different from that between income and negative emotion. Given that regional reference is the main comparison mechanism, effects of regional average income on regional average subjective well-being should be potentially zero if only relative income matters. Using multilevel analysis, we tested the hypotheses with

SUBMITTER: Yu Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5174105 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature