Reeskens and Wright divided national pride into two species. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ethnic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d nationalism sees ancestry\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtypically expressed in racial or religious terms\u00e2\u20ac\u201das the key social boundary defining the national \u00e2\u20ac\u0153we.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Civic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d nationalism is more inclusive, requiring only respect for a country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s institutions and laws for belonging. Unlike ethnic nationalism, that view is open to minorities or immigrants, at least in principle.<\/strong><\/p>\n The authors analyzed the responses to four key questions by 40,677 individuals from 31 countries, drawn from the 2008 wave of the cross-national European Values Study. One question assessed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153subjective well being,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d indicated by general satisfaction with life. Another measured national pride. The other two neatly indicated ethnic and civic national boundaries\u00e2\u20ac\u201dasking respondents to rate the importance of respect for laws and institutions, and of ancestry, to being a true . . . fill in the blank . . . German, Swede, Spaniard. The researchers controlled for such factors as gender, work status, urban or rural residence, and the country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s per capita GDP.<\/p>\n Like other researchers, they found that more national pride correlated with greater personal well-being<\/strong>.\u00c2\u00a0 But the civic nationalists were on the whole happier, and even the proudest ethnic nationalists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 well-being barely surpassed that of people with the lowest level of civic pride<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The analysis challenges popular feel-good theories about nationalism. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been a renaissance of arguments from political theorists and philosophers that a strong sense of national identity has payoffs in terms of social cohesion, which bolsters support for welfare and other redistributive policies,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Wright. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve finally gotten around to testing these theories.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The conclusion: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You have to look at how people define their pride.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n The findings, he adds, give a clue to what popular responses we might expect to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153broad macro-economic and social trends\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat is, millions of people crossing borders (usually from poorer to wealthier countries) looking for work or seeking refuge from war or political repression. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unclear what the political implications of the happiness measure are\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthough unhappy citizens could demand many politically dangerous, xenophobic responses. Ethnic nationalists, proud or not, appear relatively less happy to begin with and more likely to lead the charge as their nation diversifies around them.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: Research shows that feeling good about your country also makes you feel good about your own life\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand many people take that as… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[108,57,12,98,142],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/splash\/SmilingMan1.jpg\" "\\"happy\\"")
Research shows that feeling good about your country also makes you feel good about your own life\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand many people take that as good news. But Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium, suspected that the positive findings about nationalism weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t telling the whole story. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine to say pride in your country makes you happy,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Wright. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But what kind of pride are we talking about? That turns out to make a lot of difference.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The intriguing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand politically suggestive\u00e2\u20ac\u201ddifferences they found appear in a commentary in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n