New psychological research suggests that people who generally are politically conservative are happier than their liberal compatriots. This resulted in an ideological happiness gap, and that became the basis for many more theories suggesting as to why conservative people enjoy their life much more than their liberal counterparts.
As of now, happiness is a hot subject in psychology and the reasons are valid because happiness correlates with almost everything - health, wealth and life expectancy. Plus, the research methods used to test different theories is also much cheaper and easier to implement. Not to mention that all the research results matter a lot to policy makers, mainly because happiness is connected with almost everything
According to the Science Mag, in the recent survey results in which respondents were asked a couple of simple questions, such as "The conditions of my life are excellent. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing. I am satisfied with my life." They were then asked to rate that statement on a scale of 1 to 7 how well it applies to them.
The thing that surprised the researchers was the results in the other measures that they used to gauge the happiness of conservatives and liberals. They used a language processing software to measure the positive and negative emotions of more than 47,000 tweets.
They found out that people who were following the Republican Party on Twitter, were more likely to use emotionally negative words compared to the followers of the Democratic Party.
In another research, they hired an expert facial expression analyst to analyze the photos of the current members of the Congress. The results showed that the Democrats were having slightly more genuine smiles than the Republicans.
In both the studies, the researchers found out that both, the liberals and the conservatives have the same amounts of happiness.
Dan Kahan, a psychologist at Yale University says "Conservatives don't seem to be any happier than liberals. The study raises questions about the validity of happiness self-report measures generally." He also says that he wonders whether these happiness surveys are truly able to measure what they care about.
Kahan was not involved with any of the researchers but he was able to wade through all the information.
