How was happiness hit by the pandemic’s first year? Data from 10 countries

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-02-11 06:00

International

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

The first study into how happiness changed throughout 2020 - in Australia, New Zealand, and various European nations - has been completed by an international team, including an NZ researcher. Daily data from Twitter was combined with AI to find that changes in the “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) measure were related to new COVID-19 infections, policy stringency, residential mobility, and trust. Unsurprisingly, the severity of both the pandemic and containment policies were negatively correlated with happiness - i.e. GNH declined as the pandemic worsened and policies tightened. However as more people stayed at home, national wellbeing actually increased, which the authors say may be due to a greater sense of protection and altruism when distancing.

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From:

Journal/
conference: PLOS ONE

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: AUT University, Institut national de la statistique et des e´tudes e´conomiques du Grand-Duche´ du Luxembourg (Luxembourg), University of Johannesburg (South Africa)

Funder: This study was funded by Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg (grant number FNR-14878312) awarded to FS. This study was also funded by the Auckland University of Technology, awarded to SR, and by the University of Johannesburg, awarded to TG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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