The Role of Love and Social Interaction in the Global Differences Between Happiness and Satisfaction

In this paper we work with the idea that happiness and life satisfaction are different social phenomena even though they share some of their explanatory variables and literature has already built indicators of subjective well-being mixing both of them. We draw attention on those factors making the difference between both phenomena. Our main hypothesis is that happiness is strongly constituted by social interaction variables whereas satisfaction has more materialistic and individual basis. Specifically, we are interested on the role of love, kindness, the concern for others well-being and the pro-social behaviors. We focus on the articulation of visions and actions shaping what we call love and its relation to happiness. It give us the key to understand the power of love for turning the material satisfaction into non-material happiness. Our theoretical contribution attempts to go beyond the individualistic models from Economy or Psychology, towards a social and interactive understanding of happiness in the world. We explore in what extent and how the different roles take place across the globe. And we look for cross-cultural patterns of happiness causation. Even though we use individual data we focus on variables with clear social conceptualization. In order to achieve those goals we use data from 6^th wave of World Value Survey and apply multivariate analysis and statistics tools and use its results to create a global map of happiness explanation. We conclude that happiness is not satisfaction.