Since the advent of Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, unprecedented price inflation, in addition to climate change, the world seems to be sinking more and more into a wave of negative emotions which is certainly not not surprising. In a study titled “Global Emotions 2022”, the American research firm Gallup unveils a new record in its tracking history of rising misery and unhappiness around the world. Morocco is among the countries with the lowest “positive experiences”.
In its report, Gallup measures intangibles, such as feelings and emotions, that other traditional metrics are unable to capture through its Positive and Negative Experience Indexes. The survey was conducted in 122 countries in 2021 and early 2022 and involved a total of 127,000 participants, aged 15 or older.
Thus, the study reveals that the vast majority of respondents experience feelings of anger, sadness, stress and worry, among others, demonstrating suffering that has worsened due to the current situation.
For American society, five important factors have contributed to this increase, namely poverty, careless communities, hunger, loneliness and scarcity of adequate employment. In addition, the report states that about 2 billion people have insufficient incomes that they are forced to live with, while the same number of people especially do not recommend the city or country where they reside.
Moreover, these negative feelings have existed for a long time and are generally evoked by poverty and hunger which continue to increase despite all the efforts made in this direction at the international level. According to FAO data, the affected population has increased by 30% today, against a rate of 22% in 2014, underlines the study, indicating that food insecurity represents the major factor of this dissatisfaction.
Loneliness intervenes, also on the one hand, as a “phantom” reason contributing to the unhappiness of many people. Gallup discovered in this regard that “330 million adults go at least two weeks without speaking to anyone” and to add “that a fifth of adults in the world do not even have a single person on whom they can count. ”.
On the other hand, work with all its aspects, whether in terms of salary, place or the function performed, can harm the mental health of the employee, thus engendering negative emotions. According to the report, “people who are unhappy at work are statistically more likely to experience negative emotions than those who have no job at all”.
Morocco is then among the countries with the lowest positive experiences worldwide, with a score of 60, similar to that of India, Sierra Leone, Ukraine and Georgia. It is followed in the list by Algeria, Bangladesh and Jordan with a score of 58. Afghanistan also won the championship for the least positive experiences with a score of 32 and the most negative experiences with a score of of 59.
In contrast, Russia, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa topped the list for the lowest negative experiences with a score of 20 each, while Panama recorded the highest score (85) at the level of the highest positive experiences, despite the successive events that have dogged countries around the world.
The results are based on the total sample of adults surveyed in 2021. The American company thus states in its report that “ the margin of sampling error is between ±2.0 and ±5.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The margin of error reflects the influence of the data weighting. In addition to sampling error, the formulation of questions and the practical difficulties of carrying out surveys can introduce error or bias into the results of public opinion polls.“.