But our analysis of polling data shows an uneven recovery in how people feel
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THE WORLD has spent much of the past two decades in an increasingly bad mood. Levels of anger, sadness and stress crept up year after year according to polls; the pandemic pushed them higher still. Yet the latest global survey on emotional health by Gallup, a pollster, shows something unexpected: people are cheering up. Negative emotions have fallen back to roughly their pre-pandemic levels, well below where they would be if the earlier trend had continued. The Economist’s analysis of the data, however, shows that the recovery is far from even.
Every year Gallup asks people in more than 140 countries how they felt the day before they were surveyed. Unlike the World Happiness Report, which asks participants to rate their lives out of ten, this study tracks the emotions that people experience on any given day, such as anger, sadness, laughter and enjoyment.
Last year 39% of respondents said they had felt worried the previous day and 37% said they felt stressed, the lowest share since 2019. About a quarter said they had felt sad and just over a fifth were angry, both down from the highs in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Meanwhile, nearly nine in ten said they had felt respected and more than 70% said they had smiled, laughed or enjoyed themselves.
But those averages mask stark divides. In rich countries the share of people who said they were angry has fallen by seven percentage points since 2006, to 15% today. Although levels of stress have edged higher, other negative emotions have remained broadly stable. Enjoyment has dipped slightly, but more people report feeling respected.
In poorer countries the picture is reversed. People there report becoming angrier, sadder and more worried, and fewer say they feel respected than in the past. In 2006 just 23% of people in low-income countries said they had felt stressed the previous day; in 2024 the figure was 41%.
The most content corners of the world remain familiar ones. More than 90% of people in Denmark said they felt enjoyment—the highest share of any country (it also ranked second in this year’s Happiness Report, behind Finland). At the gloomier end are politically unstable states such as Chad and Sierra Leone, and those scarred by war, such as Iraq.
Age plays a part too. Young adults everywhere are angrier than older people; the middle-aged are the most stressed. Not everyone is finding reasons to smile.■
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