Emotional Philippines tops the ranks in survey

Filipinos cry a lot, laugh a lot, scream a lot, get angry a lot, pray a lot, curse a lot.
Come hell or high water, they don’t hold back on expressing emotion, especially in public says a new survey from Gallup that suggests Filipinos are among the most emotional people in the world.

According to Gallup's 2017 Global Emotions Report, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Philippines are among the most emotional people in the world with nearly 60 percent of people surveyed saying they experienced both positive and negative emotions the day before they were interviewed.

To complete the survey, Gallup interviewed over 147,000 adults in 140 countries.

Questions asked of the individuals were taken from two indexes: the Positive Experience Index and the Negative Experience Index.
Participants were asked questions ranging from whether they were well-rested yesterday and did they learn anything yesterday, to whether they experienced pain or sadness the day before they were interviewed.

Countries in Latin America led the list of countries with the most positive experiences. According to the Gallup report, the 10 countries with the highest positive experiences worldwide are: Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, Uzbekistan, Ecuador, El Salvador, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Colombia, and Switzerland.

Countries with the lowest scores in this index are Syria, Turkey, Nepal, Georgia, Serbia, Iraq, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Meanwhile the countries with the highest scores in the negative experience index are Iran, Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Cyprus, Liberia, Togo, Sierra Leone, Bolivia, Portugal, and the Palestinian Territories.

It is the third year in a row that Iran and Iraq have topped this list.

Gallup noted that "people in most of the countries with the highest negative scores in 2015 were contending with some disruption – economic or otherwise. Almost all countries at the top of the list in 2014 are at the top of the list again in 2015."

The countries with the lowest scores in the negative experience index are Uzbekistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, Belarus, Somalia, Singapore, Mongolia, and Estonia.
Gallup added: "Countries with ties to Russia and the former Soviet Union largely dominate the list of countries at the other end of the spectrum, where fewer than four in 10 residents reported experiencing any of these feelings.

According to John Clifton, managing director of Gallup Global Analytics, the 2016 Global emotions report "focuses on how people live their lives."
He added, "Leaders know that wealth isn't everything – a great society has people who see their lives well and live their lives well. This report shows the countries in which people are living their lives to the fullest."

The 2017 GER's Positive Experiences Index showed that the Philippines' index score was at 82 percent, tied with Panama. Paraguay was the highest at 84 percent, followed by Costa Rica with 83 percent.
In the major finding for "Total Emotions," the Philippines was third with 58 percent. Ecuador topped here with 60 percent while El Salvador and Liberia each posted 59 percent.

The Philippines, in the 2016 edition of the Global Emotions Report, was among four countries — together with Ecuador, El Salvador and Guatemala — with the highest emotions worldwide.
In the 2015 edition, the Philippines tied with Ecuador for second (58 percent) behind Bolivia and El Salvador (59 percent each) in terms of the most emotions.

But it was only in the 2017 edition of the Global Emotions Report that the Philippines broke into the top ten of the Positive Experiences Index.
In releasing the 2017 Global Emotions Report, the polling firm notes what it claims to be an important observation in the field of behavioral economics: only 30 percent of an individual's behavior is "rational — (and) the other 70 percent is emotional," Gallup said.

"While organizations are starting to apply this (said) concept at a microlevel, governments have been slow to do it at a macro-level," Gallup wrote.