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By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter Latest Mental Health News

THURSDAY, March 12, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Offering a fresh spin on the red-blue political divide, new research suggests that Americans who lean liberal may be a little bit happier than their conservative counterparts.

The finding -- though far from definitive -- comes from a series of related studies that attempted to grade happiness based on the way roughly 5,000 people of varying political stripes spoke and smiled.

"When we looked at both behavior and political ideology, we found that liberals actually express greater happiness than conservatives," said study lead author Sean Wojcik, who conducted the research while a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

"But it's worth noting that the difference was pretty small," Wojcik added. "So I want to be cautious. The results were significant. And strikingly consistent. But it's not that liberals were elated, and conservatives were depressed. We did find a happiness gap. But that gap was small."

Wojcik and his colleagues reported their findings in the March 13 issue of the journal Science.

Wojcik said the finding that liberals seem slightly happier runs counter to several recent studies that found a small happiness gap favoring conservatives. That earlier research was based on "self-reports" -- meaning happiness levels were graded on whether study participants agreed or disagreed with statements such as: "In most ways my life is close to ideal."

But Wojcik said there can be problems with self-reports. An initial life satisfaction survey that Wojcik's team conducted with more than 1,400 men and women found that, while conservatives say they are happier, they're also more likely than liberals to enhance and elevate their own testimonials. This may owe to conservatives' political ideology that can emphasize traits such as individualism, he said.

With that in mind, Wojcik and his team based their happiness evaluations not on survey responses but on documented behavior.

The researchers started with the 113th Congress, which concluded its two-year run on Jan. 3, 2015. Texts drawn from the congressional record of 2013 -- along with 18 years of prior congressional notes -- were analyzed. The result: more conservative members of Congress were a little less likely to use positive language than their liberal colleagues, the study authors said.

See the rest here:
Are Liberals Happier Than Conservatives?