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Money really can buy you happiness -- or at least one form of it, according to the biggest study to examine the relationship between income and well-being around the world. Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall -- whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages. The survey, dubbed the "first representative sample of planet Earth," was conducted by Gallup and involved detailed questioning in 2005 and 2006 of 136,839 residents age 15 and older in 132 countries throughout the world. The samples in each country were designed to be nationally representative and represent about 96 percent of the world's population.

"Yes, money makes you happy; the effect of income on life satisfaction is very strong and virtually ubiquitous and universal around the world," said Ed Diener, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Illinois who led the study. "But it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good. Positive feelings are less affected by money and more affected by the things people are doing day to day." Previous studies had suggested that money was associated with happiness, but the relationship appeared weak. Earlier work tended to focus on individual countries and global evaluations of life without parsing out the effects on specific positive and negative emotions or examining differences across nations.

The new survey -- the first large international study to differentiate between overall life satisfaction and day-to-day emotions -- makes that crucial distinction, allowing researchers to explore the elusive concept of happiness in much greater nuance. "When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity," said Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University. "That was unexpected."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/01/AR2010070100039.html