Les indices de qualité de vie et les politiques publiques: Revue de la littérature et perspectives de recherche. Plusieurs gouvernements et institutions publiques ont développé des indices de qualité de vie, indices statistiques destinés à établir une mesure de la qualité de vie à l'échelon national ou régional. Nous utilisons 14 critères afin de déterminer la validité et l'utilité de tels indices à des fins de politiques publiques. Nous passons en revue 22 des indices les plus utilisés dans les pays les plus divers. Notre conclusion est que beaucoup de ces indices sont efficaces; s'ils sont réalisés avec sérieux, s'ils sont basés sur des séries temporelles et s'ils peuvent être désagrégés au niveau des sous-populations. Cependant beaucoup sont limités selon quatre points de vue: (1) ils varient énormément en ce qui concerne l'amplitude des domaines pris en compte et des définitions données de la qualité de vie; (2) aucun ne distingue les entrées, les flux et les sorties, concepts utilisés en général par les analystes de politiques publiques; (3) on ne voit pas de lien entre les politiques publiques mises en oeuvre et les résultats en termes de qualité de vie; (4) il n'y a pas eu d'études de comparaison d'indices. Nous concluons que ce n'est que potentiellement que ces indices peuvent être utiles pour la détermination des politiques publiques et nous recommandons des recherches afin de les améliorer.

Two studies provide evidence for social comparison effects of income on subjective well-being (SWB). The 1st study of 7,023 persons from nationally representative samples in the United States shows that the range and skew of the income distribution in a community affects a person's happiness, as predicted by range-frequency theory. The 2nd study of 8 nations over a period of 25 years shows that decreasing the skew (inequality) of the income distribution in a country increases average national SWB. Both studies strongly support social comparison effects of income within a community, and both results are predicted by range-frequency theory. These studies are the first to successfully extend earlier results of R. H. Smith, E. Diener, and D. H. Wedell (1989) from the laboratory into naturalistic situations. The magnitude of the social comparison effects is smaller than the main effect of income, which implies that nations can avoid creating a "hedonic treadmill."

The impact of the feeling of warmth created by a commercial, as measured by the "warmth monitor," is explored in a series of three studies. The first study examines the relationship between warmth and arousal as measured by skin response. The other studies explore the relationship between warmth and advertising responses such as liking of the ad and purchase likelihood through testing ads with warm and other execution strategies. They also test the effects of sequences of commercials on warmth responses and on the impact of the ad.T he last two decades have seen an emphasis upon information processing models of advertising. However, it is increasingly being realized that such models are incomplete or inadequate (Bagozzi 1982;Holbrook and Hirschman 1982) and that it is important to model the execution-focused effects of advertising (Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann 1983). One such effect is the affective/experiential response of audience members (Batra and Ray 1985).Interest in affect has been spawned by recent work on emotions and on the relationship between affect and cognition. Zajonc (1980; Zajonc and Markus 1982) has proposed separate affective and cognitive processes. Isen (Isen et al. 1982), Johnson andTversky (1983), and others have recently demonstrated that even relatively mild affective states can substantially influence cognitive processing and social behavior. Finally, the understanding of emotions has recently resurged with interest centered on facial movement (Ekman, Friesen, and Ellsworth 1972;Izard 1977), cognitive theories (Lazarus, Kanner, and Folkman 1980;Mandler 1975), and neurochemistry (Brown and Wallace 1980).

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economic growth, progress, quality-of-life, trend in happiness, cross national,