I’ve always been in love with Latin America because the people there are just so darn nice. And now comes word that Latinos are some of the happiest people on the planet, according to a new report by Gallup last Friday, marking the third anniversary of the International Day of Happiness.
How do you measure happiness? Gallup asked adults in 143 countries if they had these five positive experiences on the day before they were surveyed: Lots of enjoyment, smiled and laughed a lot, felt well-rested, felt treated with respect and learned or did something interesting.
Amazingly, 70 percent of the world said yes to the first four positive experiences and 50 percent said they learned or did something interesting the day before the interview.
But in 10 Latin American countries, more than eight-out-of-10 people were happy, as measured by Gallup’s Positive Experience Index Score. In fact, for the first time in the research firm’s 10-year history of global tracking, all of the top 10 countries are in Latin America.
Paraguay is numero uno en el mundo with a score of 89 percent, followed closely by Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala, all with 84 percent. Rounding out the top 10 are Honduras, Panama and Venezuela (82 percent) and Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua (81 percent).
Now these are far from the richest nations on earth, so what’s up? Gallup says some of the key drivers of positive emotions are things such as freedom, social capital and charitable giving. Money is not that big a deal. Guatemala, for instance, ranks one hundred-eighteenth in the world in terms of GDP per capita, but yet it ties for second place.
Research in the U.S., by the way, shows that money affects the emotions studied by Gallup, but only to a point. After you make US$75,000 a year, money has much less of an effect on daily emotions.
The troubled Middle East North Africa (MENA) region of the world does the poorest in the study with an average score of just 59 percent. People in the region show not only the lowest positive emotions in the world, but also the highest negative emotions.
Sudan (47 percent) had the lowest Positive Experience Index Score. The rest of the bottom ten, in ascending order, are Tunisia, Bangladesh, Serbia, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Lithuania, Nepal and Afghanistan.
The U.S., by the way, had a score of 79 percent, ranking the country twenty-fifth of all those studied.
