“The particulars of what people buy vary across culture, like the ways in which we show we care vary by culture,” Aknin explains. “In some places that might look like a fancy roast pig dinner, and in other places, it might look like a spa treatment.”

The joys of spending

The director of SFU’s Helping and Happiness Lab, Aknin has spent the past ten years researching this connection between happiness and “prosocial spending,” or the spending of money to help others. Her research shows that generosity leads to higher emotional rewards under three conditions. The first of which is volition: the spending must feel like a free choice.

“The second is that it tends to be more emotionally rewarding when people give in ways that are relational,” the professor explains. “So, usually taking someone for lunch or giving face-to-face has a greater positive impact than just sending [money through] PayPal.”

As for the last condition, the giver must feel that their spending had a positive impact. This criterion is easier achieved through face-to-face interactions, as the spender can immediately see the gift’s positive reception. Positive feedback, however, can also be delivered through indirect means.

“You can imagine making a donation to a charity when you hear about all the wonderful acts or all the wonderful things your money has done as opposed to never hearing back,” she adds. “When you hear about all that positive impact, it’s really wonderful, and you feel good about your gift.”

Factors – such as the level of closeness between spender and recipient – can also influence happiness levels. According to Aknin, studies show that emotional rewards of spending tend to increase when people spend on those whom they regard as “near and dear.”

While the benefits of prosocial spending exist across cultures, Aknin observes how people’s spending choices vary. A study of North American students found that they spend money on food, birthday gifts and flowers for their mother.

“In South Africa and Uganda, we ran very similar experiments and asked people to tell us how they spend money on others,” Aknin explains. “People are buying food, but [also] medication [and] airtime, which is a really big deal with cell phone plans.”

Benefits of generosity

The professor adds that South Africans and Ugandans were also making life-saving purchasers and helping with their friend’s or family’s educational expenses. For her, the universal benefit of prosocial spending shows human dependency on one another.

“It’s easiest sometimes to just retreat and appreciate solitude,” the professor notes. “But I think one of the greatest sources of happiness is other people, and that’s one of the reasons generosity has relatively, robustly, consistently shown this effect.”

Aknin’s first became interested in studying emotions following an undergraduate psychology course at the University of British Columbia (UBC). After discovering that a plethora of literature on negative emotions already existed, she turned to exploring what researchers call “positive affect.”

Her graduate studies were supervised by UBC professor Elizabeth Dunn, a leading happiness researcher. To define happiness, Aknin draws on American psychologist Ed Diener’s tripartite model of the emotion – a framework that has influenced her personal understanding.

“The first two parts are about your more short-term emotions, and it’s the presence of positive emotions,” Aknin explains, adding that the definition also incorporates the absence of negative emotions. “The third and final component is about not just how you feel in the moment, but rather how you take stock of your life as a whole.”

Danish contentment

In recent years, Denmark has held its place as the second happiest country in the world. For Ann-Kathrine Havemose, lecturer of Danish and Scandinavian studies at UBC, Danes tend to identify happiness as a feeling of contentment or satisfaction – a sign of its practical culture.

“It’s not about feeling joy every day; it’s about feeling like nothing is wrong,” Havemose adds. “In Denmark, if I have food, I have a house, and I have a good life, or like relatively [a good life], it’s fine.”

Born and raised in Denmark, Havemose notes that Danes may not openly share their feelings, but their sense of contributing to a community is strong– even when that contribution is in the form of taxes.

“I think a lot of people are happy and content with paying their taxes because it creates a safety net, not just for the individual, but for the whole as a group,” she adds.

The Danish idea of hygge – the feeling of coziness and comfort within a small community– also plays a role in the cultural understanding of happiness. The lecturer shares that her Danish social circle tend to spend on things that benefit the community, such as purchasing food for a movie night. Havemose also observes how Danish culture treats time as a commodity, a reflection of its historic worker’s movement to secure a work-life balance.

“If we think about spending, it’s not only money,” she adds. “It’s also time and giving time, so volunteering for things or participating in association work…like my parents are part of an art group that go and purchase art, spent time together, go on vacations to look for more art.”

Havemose also points to the Law of Jante or Janteloven for potentially shaping Danish ideas surrounding money. Originating from a 1930s satirical novel, these ‘laws’ include rules that dictate how people should behave in society, including not feeling as though one is more special than another.

“People with a lot of money are not as keen to show it off as people in countries where, being the best, or being the richest, or being the smartest dressed is important,” she explains. “Because in Denmark, if you show off, you are considered a bad person.”

The lecturer notes that other Danes may have different perspectives. However, her lived experience suggests that money does not buy happiness in Danish culture, although it is necessary for ensuring people’s basic needs are met.

For Havemose, a key difference between North American and Danish cultures is their understanding of freedom: the former recognize it as a “freedom to” something, while the latter sees it as a “freedom from” something.

“You have freedom from worry,” Havemose adds of the Danish experience. “You have freedom from having to think about when’s your next meal? When’s your next paycheque?”

For more information on International Day of Happiness, see www.un.org/en/observances/happiness-day

For more information on Lara Aknin’s Helping and Happiness Lab, see www.sfu.ca/psychology/research/hhl.html

For more information on Ann-Kathrine Havemose, see cenes.ubc.ca/profile/ann-kathrine-havemose