Towards a personalised happiness approach to capturing change in satisfaction

Contemporary approaches examining the determinants of happiness have posited that happiness is determined bi-directionally by both top-down, global life satisfaction and bottom-up, domain satisfaction processes. We propose a personalised happiness perspective that the determinants and consequences of happiness are idiographic (i.e. specific) to each individual rather than assumed to be the same for all. We demonstrated the utility of a personalised happiness approach by testing associations between life and domain satisfaction at both the population and personalised levels using nationally representative data of 40,074 German, British, Swiss, Dutch, and Australian participants tracked 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% participants showed primarily bi-directional associations. Moreover, the population models differed from personalised models, suggesting that aggregated, population-level research fails to capture individual differences in personalised happiness, demonstrating the importance of a personalised happiness approach. Patterns of individual differences were robust, yet distinguishing between individual level patterns and random error is challenging, highlighting the need for future work and innovative approaches to studying personalised happiness.