Patriotism and personal happiness

The happier people feel about their countries the better they feel about their lives. Mike Morrison from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign led a team of researchers studying data from a Gallup World Poll of 130,000 people in 128 different countries. People were asked about their job satisfaction, household income and how they felt about their life and their country. Feeling good about one's country turned out to be highly associated with personal well-being but this association was stronger for people with low incomes, those who lived in poorer nations and those in non-Western countries. For people with high incomes and those in Western countries well-being was more closely linked to personal factors such as health, standard of living, and job satisfaction.