Culture and Well-Being

material boundaries capture cultural effects? The articles contained in this volume offer initial answers to most of these questions. The culture and well-being questions are of fundamental importance to understanding in the entire eld and to scienti c knowledge in the behavioral s- ences as a whole. Unless we understand what is universal and what is speci c, we cannot hope to understand the processes governing well-being. Unfortunately, our scienti c knowledge in most behavioral science elds, including the study of we- being, has been built on a narrow database drawn from westernized, industrialized nations. This means that we have only a little knowledge of whether our ndings are generalizable to all peoples of the globe and to universal human psychol- ical processes. Fortunately, during the last decade my students and I, as well as others working in this area, have rapidly expanded our knowledge of well-being vis-a-vis ` culture. The rst attempt to summarize the ndings in this area came in 1999 with Culture and Subjective Well-Being, a book edited by Eunkook Suh and Diener. The current volume represents a renewed effort to give a broad overview of major ndings in this area and to point to the important directions for future research. Composition of This Volume I am very pleased with the articles presented in this volume because I believe that they represent true advances in our fundamental understanding of subjective we- being.

Ed Diener is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for the past 34 years. Dr. Diener was the president of both the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Currently he is the president of the International Positive Psychology Association. Dr. Diener was the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Happiness Studies, and he is the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Diener has over 240 publications, with about 190 being in the area of the psychology of well-being, and is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information with over 12,000 citations to his credit. He won the Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, the first Gallup Academic Leadership Award, and the Jack Block Award for Personality Psychology. Dr. Diener also won several teaching awards, including the Oakley-Kundee Award for Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Illinois.