Jordan ranks low in Gallup’s Global Emotions Report

AMMAN — Jordan ranked seventh among countries with lowest positive experiences on Gallup’s latest Negative Experience Index (NEI).

The 2022 Global Emotions Report offers a snapshot of Gallup’s latest measurements of people’s positive and negative daily experiences.

The findings are based on nearly 127,000 interviews with adults in 122 countries and areas in 2021 and early 2022, according to the report.

For the report, Gallup asked interviewees whether they had five negative experiences on the day preceding the survey. The questions centre on whether they had physical pain, were worried, feeling sad, stressed and angry one day before the survey.

According to Gallup, contributors to the rise of global unhappiness include: Poverty, bad communities, hunger, loneliness and the scarcity of good work.

“The world is also struggling from a silent pandemic — loneliness,” Gallup CEO Jon Clifton said.

“A world filled with negative emotions makes people behave differently. Our emotions influence our decisions, actions and even our cognition — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse,” Clifton added.

According to the Global Peace Index, riots, strikes and anti‐government demonstrations increased by 244 per cent from 2011 to 2019. In 2020, unrest increased with 15,000 protests estimated worldwide.

In this year’s NEI, Afghanistan leads as being the least positive globally, followed by Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Nepal, Tunisia, Jordan, Bangladesh, Algeria and Ukraine, respectively.

The NEI showed that the world has become “slightly sadder, more worried and more stressed”.

“Life in Jordan is becoming harder year by year. With the deteriorating living conditions people must be acting out on negative emotions,” Hala Bashiti, 41, told The Jordan Times on Sunday.

The fast paced life, lack of communication, price hikes, harder living conditions and “unstoppable” obligations, all create an environment in which stress and negative experiences radiate, Bashiti added further.

“People are not well-rested, they are always feeling tired, stressed out and anxious about everything,” said Abu Harth, a Jordanian father of four. He added that financial stress is significantly impacting Jordanians.

In Jordan, unemployment rate reached 22.6 per cent during the second quarter of 2022, according to the Department of Statistics (DoS).

The DoS also indicated that unemployment among males amounted to 20.7 per cent during the second quarter of 2022 against 29.4 per cent for females.

In 2022, Jordan also ranked as the second unhappiest country regionally and 134th happiest nation globally on the World Happiness Report 2022, which was powered by data from the Gallup World Poll.

Commenting on the findings of sociologist Hussein Khozahe said that “the current challenging economic conditions and the difficulties of the daily lives of Jordanians definitely reversely impact their emotions”.