Yorokonde Morau: the shared well-being experience of making others happy (and feeling happy because of it)

This paper introduces yorokonde morau (YM), a novel concept of well-being originating from lay discourse on happiness in Japan. YM describes the experience of making someone happy and feeling happy because of it. Existing approaches to the measurement of well-being do not explicitly account for this interactive and reciprocal understanding of well-being. The concept presented here is the outcome of a sequential mixed-methods research project designed to expand upon this perspective, focussing on the ‘positive feedback loop’ of reciprocal well-being we observed in high-trust communities. We began with semi-structured interviews to develop a theoretical outline of YM, emphasizing its inherently bidirectional nature as a shared experience. We then developed a YM Scale, which we validated using a quantitative survey comparing its relative pattern of predictor importance with that of more established concepts of well-being, specifically interdependent happiness. By triangulating our qualitative and quantitative findings, we found that the reciprocal experience of YM is characterized less by negative social capital and more strongly linked to generalized trust in others than interdependent happiness, highlighting their discriminant validity. Grounded in the real-life experiences of everyday Japanese people, this approach represents a new reciprocal facet of sociocentric well-being.