What will values do for me?

Values…."So what? Who cares?" Why bother clarifying what my values are or trying to live more congruently with them?  I realize now that I probably should have started with this at the beginning of February - but better late than never.  I will

actually break the so what question down into two questions because psychologists have quite a lot to say about values and well-being.  First we will talk about which values allow us to live better.  On February 7th, I talked about the fact that materialistic values don’t really make us happy.  But which values do lead to happiness and health?  The second question is about how we act on our values.  Does behaving according to our values matter in terms of well-being?

I will get to the second question tomorrow.  

For today I am going to focus on which values allow us to live better.  The study that I will talk about used the VIA measure of character strengths to look at this question.  Peterson and his colleagues (2007) surveyed more than 12,000 people in the US and 445 in Switzerland and asked about their VIA strengths and life satisfaction.  In both countries, people reported that love, hope, curiosity, and zest were linked to life satisfaction.  In addition, gratitude was related to satisfaction in Americans and perseverance to satisfaction among the Swiss.  

If you took the VIA test and you found that one of your important signature strengths was love, hope, curiosity, gratitude or (perseverance if you are Swiss), then you are probably pretty happy right now.  If you didn’t yet take the test, you still can at https://www.viacharacter.org/www/The-Survey.  But if you took it and your signature strengths are different than the ones named above, please don’t despair.  First, this is a single study and we should never take one piece of research as the final answer.  But more than that, tomorrow I will talk about values-behaviour congruence - how what you do may be more important than which value you hold.  We’ll talk. 

Reference

Peterson, C., Ruch, W., Beermann, U., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2007). Strengths of character, orientations to happiness, and life satisfaction. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2, 149-156. doi:10.1080/17439760701228938