课文翻译 英美报刊阅读教程中级精选本 第五版 端木义万 Lesson19

Lesson 19 It's a Glad, Sad, Mad World

主观幸福感

Where you live, as much a show you live, is a key influence on the feel-good factor

你住在哪里，就像你在现场表演一样，是影响你感觉良好的关键因素

By Walter Kirn

It's almost impossible for most people in well-off countries to begin to understand how it feels to live in the extreme poverty of Calcutta, surviving in India's third largest city in a shack, or on the street with little access to clean water,food or health care.

对于生活在富裕国家的大多数人来说，他们几乎不可能开始理解生活在印度第三大城市加尔各答的极度贫困中是什么感觉，在一个简陋的棚子里生存，或者在没有干净的水、食物或医疗保健的街道上生存。

The filth. The crowds. The disease.

污秽、人群、疾病。

From the perspective of the comfortably housed and amply fed, these conditions sound hopeless, and the suffering they must breed seems unimaginable.

从那些住得舒舒服服、吃得饱的人的角度来看，这些条件听起来让人绝望，它们所带来的痛苦似乎难以想象。

But not as unimaginable as this: according to a researcher who employs a method of ranking human happiness on a scale of 1 to 7, poor Calcuttans score about a 4, meaning they' reslightly more happy than not.

但没有这么不可思议:根据一位研究人员使用一种方法给人类幸福打分，分值从1到7，贫穷的Calcuttans给出的了4分，表示他们的幸福程度稍微高一些。

And that's certainly happier than one might expect. The assumption behind this finding, of course, is that happiness, like Olympic figure skating, can really be scored numerically at all and that the judges who score it don't even need to come from the same countries or speak the same languages as the people they' re judging.

这当然比人们预期的要快乐。当然，这一发现背后的假设是，快乐，就像奥运会花样滑冰一样，真的可以用数字来打分，给它打分的裁判甚至不需要来自相同的国家或说相同的语言。

Robert Biswas-Diener, has worked extensively with his father, the noted University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener, to evaluate what they term the Subjective Well-Being(SWB) of people around the globe, from Masai warriors in East Africa to Inughuit hunters in Northern Greenland, inviting them to answer questions about their moods and outlook.

罗伯特•比斯瓦斯-迪纳为他的父亲做了大量的工作,指出伊利诺斯州大学的心理学家Ed Diener,评估他们的术语主观幸福感(主客观)世界各地的人们,从东非的马赛勇士极地因纽特人猎人在格陵兰岛北部,邀请他们来回答关于他们的心情和前景问题。

The results have led them to one sweeping conclusion: human beings, no matter where they live, and almost without regard to how they live, are, in the elder Diener’s words,"preset to be happy."

结果让他们得出了一个笼统的结论:人类，无论他们住在哪里，也几乎不管他们如何生活，用老迪纳的话来说，都是“预设的幸福”。

He thinks of this predilection as a "gift" bestowed on people by evolution that helps us adapt and flourish even in fairly trying circumstances.5 But there are other theories.

他认为这种偏爱是进化赋予人类的“礼物”，即使在相当艰难的环境中，它也能帮助我们适应和繁荣。但是也有其他的理论。

Maybe, he says, we're "socialized" to be happy, "in order to facilitate smooth social functioning."

也许，他说，我们“社会化”是为了快乐，“为了促进平稳的社会功能。”Whatever the reasons for this gift, however, its benefits don't seem to beevenly distributed around the globe.

然而，无论这份礼物的原因是什么，它的好处似乎并没有均匀地分布在全球各地。

Latin Americans, for example, are among the happiest people in the world, according to study after study.

例如，根据一项又一项的研究，拉丁美洲人是世界上最幸福的人之一。

A survey of college students in the mid-1990s compared so-called national differences in positivity and ranked Puerto Rico, Colombia and Spainas the three most cheerful locales.

上世纪90年代中期，一项针对大学生的调查比较了所谓的国家积极性差异，并将波多黎各、哥伦比亚和西班牙列为最快乐的三个地方。

This may surprise those who equate happiness with flat-screen TVs and ice-cube-dispensing refrigerator doors. But not to Ed Diener.

这可能会让那些把幸福等同于平板电视和冰箱门的人感到惊讶。但Ed Diener不是。

For him, the high spirits of the relatively poor Puerto Ricans and Colombians stem from a "positivity tendency" that"may be rooted in cultural norms regarding the value of believing in aspects of life in general to be good."

对他来说，相对贫穷的波多黎各人和哥伦比亚人的高昂情绪源于一种“积极的倾向”，这种倾向“可能根植于文化规范中，认为生活的各个方面都是好的。”Translation: Latin Americans are happier because they look on the sunny side of life.

换言之:拉丁美洲人更快乐，因为他们看到生活的光明面。

That tendency does not seem to be popular in East Asia.

这种趋势似乎在东亚并不流行。

Among the bottom five in the study are Japan, China and South Korea, the outliers of unhappiness.

在这项研究中，排名最后五名的国家是日本、中国和韩国，它们都是不快乐的局外人。

"We have found that East Asians tend to weight the worst areas of their lives when computing their life satisfaction," Diener reports.

迪纳在报告中说:“我们发现，东亚人在计算生活满意度时，倾向于把生活中最糟糕的方面考虑在内。”

That may be a reflection of a difference in cultural expectation, says Shinobu Kitayama, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who does research on the connection between culture and well-being.

密歇根大学(University of Michigan)的心理学教授北山信(Shinobu Kitayama)说，