Appraising Unhappiness in the Wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake

Autor: Shoko Yamane, Katsunori Yamada, Fumio Ohtake
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Japanese Economic Review. 67:403-417
ISSN: 1352-4739
DOI: 10.1111/jere.12099
Popis: Considering the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake, we use the experienced-utility approach to appraise the psychological distress from disaster-related news. We take advantage of the serendipitous timing of our original nationwide weekly panel survey that became a fitting resource for the investigation of subjective well-being in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Although all of Japanese society was affected, we found geographical heterogeneity between the affected areas (Sendai and Tokyo) and the unaffected areas in terms of mental costs. Our finding reminds us of the focusing effect (Kahneman et al., 2006; Dolan and Kahneman, 2008) as captured by Schkade and Kahneman (1998) in the maxim “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it”.
Databáze: OpenAIRE