What do Cubans think about happiness?

The present chapter summarizes the results from two recent studies (Galati, Manzano, & Sotgiu, 2006; Sotgiu, Galati, Manzano, & Rognoni, 2011) which empirically investigated how Cuban citizens represent the concept of happiness and its semantic space. Overall, findings indicate that the naive conceptions of happiness put forward by participants were organized around a set of prototypical meaning components, including family, health, and love. Moreover, it was found that both the perceived importance of some of these components and the sociodemographic variables predicting the participants’ levels of overall happiness significantly differed between adult and older citizens. In the last part of the chapter, the author discusses the similarities and differences between the Cuban conceptions of happiness and the ones found in other cultural contexts.