“The world was beset by conflict in 2023 — as the war between Ukraine and Russia dragged on and a new one broke out between Israel and Hamas — but it was in a better place emotionally than it was at the
height of the pandemic. Negative emotions dipped for the first time in a decade, and positive emotions rebounded to their pre-pandemic highs. The Gallup Global Emotions 2024 report offers a snapshot of Gallup’s latest measurements of people’s positive and negative daily experiences. The findings are based on nearly 146,000 interviews with adults in 142 countries and areas in 2023. Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles — feelings and emotions — that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture. Each index provides a real-time snapshot of people’s daily experiences, offering leaders insights into the health of their societies that they cannot gather from economic measures alone. Negative Experience Index Slipped – On a global level, Gallup’s Negative Experience Index declined for the first time since 2014. All five negative emotions that make up the index fell between 2022 and 2023, with stress dropping the most. Thirty-seven percent of adults worldwide felt stressed in 2023, down three percentage points from the previous year but well above where it was a decade ago (33%) and the years before…”