Southeast Asian countries lead in positive experiences

WASHINGTON - The Gallup Global Emotions 2024 report offers a snapshot of Gallup’s latest measurements of people’s positive and negative daily experiences.

The findings are based on nearly 146,000 interviews with adults in 142 countries and areas in 2023.

Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles - feelings and emotions - that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture.

In 2023, several Southeast Asian countries topped the Positive Experience Index and ranked low on the Negative Experience Index. These scores indicate how pervasive positive and negative emotions are in each country.

Southeast Asian Countries Again Led in Positive Experiences

The 2023 findings reveal that Southeast Asia’s representation on the Positive Experience Index is strong, with several countries reporting some of the highest positive experiences worldwide.

While the Latin American countries of Panama and Paraguay had the highest scores globally at 86, Indonesia was close behind with an index score of 84, and Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand all recorded scores of 82.

Nine in 10 adults in Indonesia (90 per cent) said they smiled or laughed a lot the day before the survey.

In the Philippines, 75 per cent of adults learned or did something interesting, well above the global average of 54%. Vietnam (92%) and Malaysia (90%) led the world in feeling well-rested.

Vietnam Reported the Lowest Negative Experiences Globally

The report also explores the prevalence of negative emotions worldwide.

On a global level, negative emotions declined for the first time since 2014. Scores ranged from a high of 53 in Guinea to a low of 11 in Vietnam, which appeared at the bottom of this list for the second time.

Countries and areas with the lowest negative scores do not necessarily have the highest positive scores. Some Southeast Asian countries that ranked highly on the Positive Experience Index did not rank exceptionally low on the Negative Experience Index. Thailand and the Philippines both reported high positive experiences, with index scores of 82, but neither country had low negative experiences, reporting scores of 26 and 35, respectively.

Loneliness Significantly Increases Likelihood of Experiencing Negative Emotions

Given the substantial threat that loneliness and isolation pose to people’s health and wellbeing, Gallup recently added loneliness to the list of negative emotions that it asks the world about.

An analysis of the relationships between loneliness and other emotions reveals that people who said they felt lonely were substantially more likely than those who did not to experience the five other negative emotions and were less likely to experience the positive ones.

Reported loneliness varied across Southeast Asia, from a high of 33 per cent in the Philippines to a low of six per cent in Vietnam. - BERNAMA