Can happiness make a house a home?

ABSTRACT

Four studies addressed the question, can happiness make a house a home? Studies 1 and 2 showed that the hominess of a residence, whether self-rated (Study 1, N = 797) or coded from narratives (Study 2, N = 815) was predicted by subjective well-being, controlling for demographics, personality traits, and objective ratings of a photo of the residence. Study 3 (N = 277) extended these findings to people’s workspaces. The link between well-being and hominess was partially explained by basic psychological need satisfaction in Studies 1 and 2. Basic need satisfaction in one’s office fully explained the link between well-being and hominess of an office space in Study 3. In Study 4 (N = 660), induced positive mood did not affect the hominess ratings of photos. Happy people describe their residences and offices as homier and this is not simply due to positive moods.

KEYWORDS:

• Happiness
• home
• well-being
• hominess
• homey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2325457.

Data availability statement

Open practices statement: None of the studies reported in this article were formally preregistered. The data and materials for all the studies are available at https://osf.io/evnf9/?view_only=e24271e6c7c4465study 388c18aee9d485e175.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2325457

Notes

1. The data and materials for all the studies are available at https://osf.io/evnf9/?view_only=e24271e6c7c446588c18aee9d485e175.

2. Since no research has examined the effect of mood on perceived hominess, we conducted a power analysis using a conservative estimate of a small effect size (d = 0.20).