Acts of kindness higher after COVID-19 - report
There's no question that times are more difficult now than ever before, but even then, a newly-released report on happiness reveals that people are still performing acts of kindness even in these trying times.
In the newly-released World Happiness Report, it was revealed that the commission of benevolent acts in 2024 is still 10 percent higher than the 2017 to 2019 levels almost everywhere in the world despite the decline from 2023 levels.
According to the executive summary on the World Happiness Report website, researchers had seen a surge in benevolent acts during the COVID-19 years, with those benevolent acts continuing even after the pandemic. Those benevolent acts include helping strangers, volunteering, and returning dropped wallets.
The Guardian quotes social psychology professor Lara Aknin, one of the report's editors, as saying that the pandemic showed that a lot of us need help from our neighbors and friends.
“I think many people have an interest in helping others, but sometimes shy away; they don't want to overstep their welcome,” she said. “The Covid-19 pandemic made it abundantly clear that many of us need help from our neighbors and friends. So maybe people felt a greater sense of obligation and lower levels of inhibition knowing their help would be welcomed.”
The report also showed that those who share meals with others have “significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect, and lower levels of negative affect” across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and regions.
The World Happiness Report is published by the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Center and done in partnership with analytics company Gallup and the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The first World Happiness Report came out in 2012, with the first happiness ranking coming out in the 2013 report. Finland has topped the ranking since 2018.
The World Happiness Report comes after the publication of a report in the National Bureau of Economic Research that revealed that today's young people no longer view their youth as the happiest time of their lives.
The study involved survey responses from young people in the United States the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with young people and particularly young women experiencing lower satisfaction and happiness over the past 10 years.
Even as far back as 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) put out a report that said nearly one billion people now have a mental disorder.
The report also pointed out the inadequacy of current mental health responses around the world. It points out that on average, countries around the world only allocate two percent of their health budget to mental health, despite the high number of mental health issues such as suicide, which is a major cause of death for young people around the world. The study also points out that for most countries, there is only one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people.
Social media has also been previously linked to the development of depression, regardless of personality. A 2022 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders Reports found that no matter the personality, social media use was closely associated with the participants developing depression in varying degrees. People with high agreeableness were 49 percent less likely to become depressed than people with low agreeableness. Meanwhile, people with high neuroticism were twice as likely to develop depression compared to those with low neuroticism.
Here in the country, the National Center for Mental Health said that 867 of 3,006 calls made to its crisis hotline during the first quarter of 2021 was related to suicide. Suicide-related calls during the same period in 2020 were only at 100.
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