White Guys Are Happier Research Shows They Don’t Have All That Much To Be Angry About

Despite being downsized, vilified and generally kicked around in recent years, white, middle-aged, suburban-dwelling males are still the happiest Americans, a new study says.

They seem to be clad in a psychological armor that makes them the least likely of all Americans to suffer from depression or other negative moods, according to the study in the National Center for Health Statistics’ current issue of Advance Data.

If happiness can be defined as the absence of bad feelings, then leading the pack overall are white males, who score the lowest on the negative mood scale at only 5.8 percent.

Unhappiness rises rapidly for the rest of the population, climbing to 8.1 percent of white females, 10.7 percent of black males and 16.4 percent of black females, a 183 percent higher rate than for white males.

When the federal government decided to find out what it is in people’s lives that make them either more resistant to depression or more prone to it, they found that psychological well-being can be measured by five factors - education, race, sex, age and place of residence, in that order.

The single most important factor that appears to protect people from negative moods is education, said behavioral scientist Bruce Jonas of the National Center for Health Statistics.

Happiness, it seems, depends on things people can do for themselves, such as educational achievement and where they live, as well as factors that are more difficult to deal with - race, gender and age.

The center’s study asked nearly 44,000 adults across the country if they had been depressed, restless, bored, upset, lonely or anxious in the past two weeks.

Among white males, white females and black males, those with less than 12 years of education had twice the rates of depression than those who had more than 12 years of education. For black females, 20 percent of those who didn’t finish high school had negative moods, compared to 14.6 percent among those who completed some level of higher education.

The most dramatic difference occurred among less-educated black females, who had more than four times the rate of negative moods as better-educated white males.

Education is directly linked to socioeconomic status: People with more education generally have better jobs and make more money.

“If you have less education and you make less money, there is a stronger likelihood that you will experience more of these negative moods,” Jonas said.

“You’re depressed for good reason,” he said. “Without education you have more economic problems and other worries, and you don’t have as many means to cope with those stresses.”

But, knowing that depression and less education can go together may encourage some people to make changes in their lives, Jonas said. Acquiring more education could help prevent negative moods, he added.

Probably some of the same reasons that make education such a good protector against unhappiness also apply to race, Jonas said. Minorities often don’t have the same opportunities for education and advancement, he said.

The study found that 14 percent of blacks reported negative moods, 90 percent higher than the rate reported by whites. Among black males, those with less than 12 years of schooling had twice the rate of negative moods as those who went on to college.

Gender is a different story. Women generally report more negative moods than men, a trend that was borne out in the National Center for Health Statistics study. It found that women reported negative moods more than 30 percent more often than men.

“Nobody really understands why,” Jonas said. “Is it because women really have more negative moods or are they just more open to reporting them?” Negative moods decline with age, dropping by 20 percent after people grow out of the 25-to-44-year age bracket, a period when family and job pressures tend to be high.

Where people live is the newest factor influencing the degree to which certain individuals may be more at risk of experiencing negative moods.

The riskiest places to live in terms of mental health are large cities, particularly the inner city, and isolated rural areas.

After eliminating education, race, sex and age, people who live in cities or in distant rural areas report about 25 percent more bad feelings than people who live either in the suburbs or farther-out metropolitan areas.

“Maybe living in small-town America really is the best thing for you,” Jonas said. “You get a lot of support that’s available in a metropolitan area but fewer of the stresses that go along with living in a big city or isolated rural area.”