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Towards a personalized happiness approach to capturing change in satisfaction

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 1391–1404 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Contemporary approaches examining the determinants of happiness have posited that happiness is determined bidirectionally by both top-down, global life satisfaction and bottom-up, domain satisfaction processes. We propose a personalized happiness perspective, suggesting that the determinants and consequences of happiness are idiographic (that is, specific) to each individual rather than assumed to be the same for all. We showed the utility of a personalized happiness approach by testing associations between life and domain satisfaction at both the population and personalized levels using nationally representative data of 40,074 German, British, Swiss, Dutch and Australian participants tracked for up to 33 years. The majority of participants (41.4–50.8%) showed primarily unidirectional associations between domain satisfactions and life satisfaction, and only 19.3–25.9% of participants showed primarily bidirectional associations. Moreover, the population models differed from personalized models, suggesting that aggregated, population-level research fails to capture individual differences in personalized happiness, showing the importance of a personalized happiness approach. Patterns of individual differences are robust, yet distinguishing between individual-level patterns and random error is challenging, highlighting the need for future work and innovative approaches to study personalized happiness.

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Fig. 1: Three theoretical, population-level models of happiness and well-being.
Fig. 2: Visual representations of a personalized approach to happiness.
Fig. 3: Example patterns of personalized happiness.
Fig. 4: Scatterplot of participants (N = 40,074) with different patterns of personalized happiness.
Fig. 5: Population-level models of happiness.
Fig. 6: Participants (N = 40,074) show little congruence with population models.

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Data availability

Each data source was drawn from publicly accessible longitudinal studies. However, data cannot be shared directly due to contractual obligations and agreements necessary to use the data. In the text and online materials, we provide detailed information on how to gain access to raw data sources. All data analysis was conducted on the raw data files provided by the data maintainers, and all the utilized variables are documented in detailed in the study codebook. For GSOEP data, see https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.601584.en/data_access.html; for BHPS, https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/bhps/about/latest-release-of-bhps-data; for SHP, https://forsbase.unil.ch/project/study-public-overview/15632/0/ for HILDA, https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/hilda/for-data-users; and for LISS, https://liss.statements.centerdata.nl/.

Code availability

All code, results, tables and figures are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/r7vgq/) and GitHub (https://github.com/emoriebeck/personalised-happiness) and depicted in an interactive R Shiny web app (https://emoriebeck.shinyapps.io/personalised-happiness/). All scripts proceed from raw data that can be attained by downloading data files from the maintainers for each sample.

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Acknowledgements

E.D.B.’s time was supported by National Institute on Aging grants T32 AG00030-3, R01-AG067622 and R01-AG018436.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Emorie D. Beck

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Felix Cheung

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, USA

    Stuti Thapa

  4. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Joshua J. Jackson

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  1. Emorie D. Beck
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  4. Joshua J. Jackson
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Contributions

E.D.B.: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. F.C.: conceptualization, data curation, investigation, writing—original draft. S.T.: conceptualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. J.J.J.: conceptualization, investigation, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Emorie D. Beck.

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Beck, E.D., Cheung, F., Thapa, S. et al. Towards a personalized happiness approach to capturing change in satisfaction. Nat Hum Behav 9, 1391–1404 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02171-z

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