New Research Links Happiness and Peace

2025 marks the release of the first joint Gallup and World Health Summit report, “State of the World’s Emotional Health.” Gallup has conducted 145,000 interviews over two decades across 144 countries, using a scale developed by former Princeton Psychology Department Chair Hadley Cantril, in which subjects evaluate their level of well-being by rating feelings of laughter, enjoyment, respect from others, anger, worry, and stress.

The report correlates the Gallup findings with two widely used global metrics from the Institute for Economics & Peace. The Global Peace Index (GPI) measures peace as it exists today—the absence of violence and conflict driven by crime, political instability, and militarization. The Positive Peace Index (PPI) measures conditions that create enduring peace: attitudes, institutions, and structures, including good governance, equitable resource distribution, and social cohesion.

The Global Emotional Landscape

The findings include outcomes that might be expected given global events of the past decade:

• Emotional “vital signs” that impact health outcomes, such as worry, stress, sadness, and anger, are down from pandemic highs, except for physical pain. All remain higher than they were 10 years ago.
• Where peace is fragile, negative emotions intensify. In 163 countries, riots, strikes, and anti‑government demonstrations rose 244 percent from 2011 to 2019.
• Lack of peace above all shapes negative emotions. Sadness, worry, and anger are more common in less peaceful countries, along with experiencing physical pain.
• Countries reporting the most negative emotions and experiences were fragile or conflict-affected states. In Ukraine, worry rose from 31 percent in 2021 to 52 percent after Russia’s 2022 invasion and is now at a new high of 57 percent. In Lebanon, worry jumped from 40 percent in 2018 to 65 percent in 2019 during the country’s economic collapse, and has remained high since.
• Negative emotions indicate fragile peace, which is more common in countries with higher levels of violence and conflict.

Positive Experiences Are Broadly Shared

There are also encouraging correlations.

• More people than ever feel respected. Feeling treated with respect at 88 percent is at the highest level Gallup has measured.
• The two-decade gender gap between women (24 percent) reporting higher levels of sadness, worry, pain, and stress leading to life-limiting health problems and men (22 percent) was the smallest in five years.
• Despite reporting higher levels of sadness, worry, pain, and stress than men, women remain as likely as men to rate their lives positively enough to be considered “thriving” on Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index. In 2024, 29 percent of women and 27 percent of men worldwide were thriving, indicating that higher daily distress does not necessarily translate into lower overall life evaluations.
• Daily experiences of laughter, enjoyment, and feeling well-rested hold at long-term averages, while learning or doing something interesting the previous day dipped slightly but remains higher than it was a decade ago. Women and men report nearly identical levels of enjoyment and learning something interesting.
• Sadness and worry among younger groups are easing. People aged 15 to 49 report higher enjoyment, laughter, and learning than older adults, even though they report feeling anger more, which spiked during the pandemic and remains above 2014 levels.
• Positive emotions such as laughter, enjoyment, and respect are remarkably stable and endure even in times of crisis. Globally, daily positive experiences are more durable than negative ones—and, in some cases, have even strengthened. The report cites psychological research confirming that positive emotions broaden awareness and help people build lasting resources, such as coping strategies, relationships, and resilience, which generate additional positive experiences. These deeper foundations make positive experiences more permanent than negative, more transient emotions generated by instability and eased when stability improves.

Denmark, Paraguay and Indonesia rank among the highest for positive daily experiences like laughter, enjoyment and feeling treated with respect.

Source: State of the World's Emotional Health Report / Gallup

It’s Not Just the Economy

Although national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been the political metric of choice to measure national well-being, and a healthy GDP more greatly impacts positive emotions than peace, Gallup polls indicate that positive emotions also arise outside the world’s wealthiest or safest nations.

Mexico, Panama, and Guatemala frequently top the charts for positive emotions. According to Gallup, positive emotions thrive where culture and social life play a strong role and where people are encouraged to show joy.

In less peaceful countries, high GDP correlates with higher enjoyment, feeling respected, being well-rested, laughing, and smiling. However, high GDP doesn’t improve negative feelings of anger, sadness, and physical pain associated with bad governance, inequitable resource distribution, and low social cohesion.

Peace and high GDP both reduce stress, but losing peace jolts human emotions far more than gaining peace lifts them. The report attributes this to what psychologists call a negativity bias: Adverse events and feelings weigh more on people’s minds than good ones.

Peace and Health Goals Are Intertwined

The absence of violence and conflict, coupled with institutions and structures that sustain long-term stability, correlates with reduced anger and sadness. The researchers suggest that Gallup’s emotion metrics reflect the deeper foundations of sustainable peace—the kind of peace that depends on justice, well-being, and security in daily life—and that these patterns matter for physical and mental health. They also find that positive daily emotions increase life expectancy from the day one is born.

According to Gallup and the World Health Summit, health, well-being, peace, justice, and strong institutions cannot be separated—peace, health, and emotional well-being rise and fall together. Positive emotions are the foundation of stability, good governance, peace, and reduced conflict. When peace is present, health and emotional well-being have space in which to grow.

Their message to leaders is that emotions are vital signs of systemic health. They introduce the novel concept of recognizing emotions as infrastructure—real-time indicators of social health—and suggest interweaving both peace and health policies. Carsten Schicker, CEO of the World Health Summit, sums it up: “Humor, respect, and shared experiences are not distractions; they are part of the foundations of peace and health.”