Nora Hansson Bittár

Since the late 2000s, concern about rising mental illbeing has grown across high-income countries. Over the same period, news coverage has become more negative and online illbeing searches more frequent. In this study we examine to what extent these three patterns are related. We combine three monthly Swedish time series for January 2010 to September 2025 (189 months in all): the negativity of news headlines, the volume of illbeing-related searches, and newly started spells of sickness absence certified for a mental health diagnosis. We test three expectations: that media negativity is followed by illbeing-related search activity, that search activity is followed by entry into sickness absence, and that media negativity is followed by sickness absence directly. All three series rise over the period. Each association holds when last month's value of one series is used to predict this month's value of the next, and each holds when the outcome's own previous month is added to the model. However, none of the associations survives first differencing. Taken together, the results give tentative evidence of a consistent long-term temporal ordering across the three domains, in which media negativity is followed by illbeing-related search, and illbeing-related search by entry into sickness absence.

Sweden consistently ranks among the world’s happiest nations in global surveys. However, such rankings—typically focused on one single life evaluation indicator—may obscure important differences across life domains and population subgroups. Using nationally representative data from 15,068 Swedish adults in the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), this article offers a multidimensional assessment of human flourishing in Sweden across seven domains: psychological wellbeing, purpose and meaning, character and virtue, psychological distress, physical health, social wellbeing, and financial wellbeing. Swedish respondents, on average, reported high levels of life evaluation and financial wellbeing, and low psychological distress, positioning Sweden favorably among the 22 GFS countries. However, comparatively lower scores were observed in purpose and meaning and character and virtue. When comparing population subgroups, a pronounced age gradient emerged, with older Swedes reporting higher wellbeing across nearly all domains compared to younger adults, and many indicators showing medium to large effect sizes (e.g., Cohen’s ds = 0.77 and 0.70 for loneliness and happiness, respectively). Gender and immigration-related differences indicated somewhat lower levels of flourishing among women and foreign-born individuals. The effect sizes were, however, relatively small (e.g., ds at 0.21 in traumatic distress and 0.22 in anxiety for gender and immigration, respectively). These findings highlight Sweden’s strengths in supporting wellbeing and flourishing later in life while also pointing to disparities, particularly among younger adults, but also women and foreign-born populations. The results underscore the value of a multidimensional flourishing framework that moves beyond life evaluations and national averages to identify wellbeing inequalities between sociodemographic groups, even in a country routinely ranked among the world’s happiest. Copyright belongs to the author(s)

Among the most common tropes in wellbeing research is that it is U-shaped over the lifespan, declining into middle age before rising again into older age. However, the thesis has come under critique or re-appraisal, including even from its original proponents, with claims the pattern is now eroding (possibly due to younger people doing worse lately compared to peers in earlier eras). To explore this question we examined Gallup World Poll data spanning 19 years (2006-2024), covering nearly 3 million participants across 169 countries/territories, exploring the age-related distribution of two forms of subjective wellbeing: evaluative (Cantril’s ladder) and affective (Positive Experience Index). With the ladder, although a very vague U-shape was evident if combining all years and regions, when analyzed individually, few years or regions came close to a simple U-shape pattern—as judged by a proposed rubric for ascertaining “U-ness”—although some did bear some resemblance. Additionally, to complement the heuristic U-score, we also developed a statistical system for assessing structural U-shaped scores that quantify the geometric coherence of age–wellbeing profiles, which indicated that the strongest U-dominant years globally occurred in 2018 and 2019, which reflect relatively deep and coherent midlife troughs. As for positive experience, this instead tended to simply decline with age, albeit with a slight uptick around age 60. But any general patterns were subject to considerable variation, both in terms of year and region. With the year, there was a general trend of both outcomes improving over time, but especially for older people, meaning the general U-shape curve (vague and imperfect as it was) was becoming more “J-shaped.” And with regions, there were striking outliers to the general trends, such as the EU with respect to the ladder (with a simple decline with age), and North America with regard to positive experiences (which did have a U-shape, with older people doing as well as younger people). The data show the complicated nature of age-related wellbeing trends and point towards the need for more research.

Though past research suggests that individuals grapple with negative emotions when dealing with their own and others’ bad (dishonest) behaviors, this symposium explores a different proposition, one where actors feel good for bad deeds in ways that explain why actors and their dishonest collaborators might find extensive support in organizational context. Across a series of studies, the papers in our symposium show that individuals feel pride and gratitude for dishonesty, explaining their motivation to engage in and support dishonesty. Additionally, we find that they are able to reconcile such feelings if they embrace the paradox of feeling bad and good at the same time. Together this research explores the emotional antecedents, consequences, and moderators of positive reactions to dishonesty, providing a more nuanced view as to why dishonesty persists in many organizational contexts.