Fear of Happiness
Cherophobia
Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers identify four beliefs behind an aversion to happiness, and they are separable rather than variations on one theme. That being happy brings trouble down on a person. That happiness will cause the person to become a bad person. That expressing happiness is bad for the person and for others. That pursuing happiness is bad for the person and for others.
The first is superstition, the second is moral, and the third and fourth concern other people. A single attitude covering all four is doing more than one job.
Why the happiness rankings are unsettled
A six-country study, adjusted for measurement invariance so that the comparison holds, found that cultures genuinely differ in their levels of fear of happiness. The ranking from highest to lowest was Turkey, the United States, Korea, Canada, Poland and Portugal.
The implication is stated in the material and is the most consequential thing in this entry. In cultures where worldly happiness is associated with sin, shallowness and moral decline, people will report lower satisfaction when their lives are by other measures going well. Measures of personal happiness therefore cannot be treated as a yardstick for satisfaction with life, and attitudes like this one have serious implications for measuring happiness across cultures and ranking nations on happiness scores.
A country lower in a happiness index may be a country that thinks less well of happiness.
What predicts it
A machine learning analysis of twenty-two potential predictors produced a clear ordering in both Turkey and the United States. Two came out on top: a settled sense that nothing means anything, and trouble managing one's own emotions. Insecure attachment came next, in both its anxious and its avoidant form, with perfectionism behind that.
What contributed little is as informative. Gender, age and education added almost nothing to predictive accuracy, and neither did religiosity or fatalism. That is a striking result for an attitude usually explained by culture and belief: the ideological variables did not predict it and the psychological ones did.
Taken together the authors read it as one face of a wider fragility: distress about existence itself, emotions that will not regulate, relationships held insecurely, and perfectionism of the damaging kind.
Correlational work adds a longer list:
- perfectionist habits
- loneliness
- a childhood the person remembers as unhappy
- belief in the paranormal
- a collective rather than individual idea of what happiness is
- low self-esteem, and a life that feels short on meaning
Why happiness is believed fragile
Fear of happiness is associated with fragility of happiness beliefs, which suggests one of its causes is the view that happiness is unstable and easily lost.
That is a coherent position rather than a distortion. Someone who expects happiness to be brief has a reason to be wary of it, and the wariness protects against the fall rather than against the state. The belief underneath is stated without hedging, and it is held in Western and Eastern cultures alike: misfortune goes looking for the contented. Suffering, unhappiness and death arrive preferentially at the doors of people who were doing well.
The belief that a negative event will arrive to taint any satisfaction, as though punishing it, is described as more prevalent in non-Western cultures.
What the Western position assumes
Western cultures are described as taking for granted that happiness is among the most important values guiding people's lives, driven by an urge to maximise happiness and minimise sadness, with a failure to appear happy giving cause for concern. Positive psychology and subjective wellbeing research echo the same valuation.
Set against the six-country finding, that is not a neutral background against which an aversion looks strange. It is one position among several, and the one the measuring instruments were built inside.
Aversion to happiness is described as a specific instance of ideal affect, from affect valuation theory, in which cultures vary in how much they value experiencing different emotions.
Whether cherophobia counts as an illness
Aversion to happiness is not a recognised mental health disorder in its own right, though it can contribute to and worsen existing problems. The 2008 printed encyclopedia carries fear of happiness or gaiety and describes its manifestations as anxieties triggered by being happy, or by fears that the happiness will produce disaster.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Happiness
- Fear of PleasureHedonophobia names an aversion to pleasure specifically. Aversion to happiness covers the expression and pursuit of a state rather than the enjoyment of a sensation, and it has a research literature the other does not.
- Fear of ImperfectionPerfectionism appears as a predictor of fear of happiness in both the machine learning analysis and the correlational studies, ranking behind existential nihilism, emotion regulation difficulty and insecure attachment.
- Existential DreadExistential nihilism was the single strongest predictor of fear of happiness in both countries analysed, which places the two closer than their descriptions suggest.
Common questions
Questions about Cherophobia
- What are the four beliefs behind it?
- Joshanloo and Weijers identify them as separable: that happiness will cause bad things to happen, that it will make the person bad, that expressing it is bad for the person and others, and that pursuing it is bad for the person and others. The first is superstitious, the second moral, and the last two social.
- Do cultures really differ?
- A six-country study adjusted for measurement invariance found that they genuinely do, ranking from highest to lowest as Turkey, the United States, Korea, Canada, Poland and Portugal. The adjustment matters, since it establishes the comparison is between actual levels rather than between different ways of answering.
- What does that do to happiness rankings?
- It undermines them. In cultures where worldly happiness is associated with sin, shallowness and moral decline, people report less satisfaction when their lives are by other measures going well. Measures of personal happiness therefore cannot serve as a yardstick for life satisfaction across cultures, and a country low in a happiness index may simply be one that thinks less well of happiness.
- What predicts it best?
- Existential nihilism and difficulties in emotion regulation, in a machine learning analysis of twenty-two predictors across Turkey and the United States, followed by insecure attachment and perfectionism. Gender, age, education, religiosity and fatalism contributed little, which is unexpected for an attitude usually explained by culture and belief.
- Is being wary of happiness irrational?
- Not obviously. Fear of happiness is associated with beliefs about the fragility of happiness, and somebody who expects a good state to be brief has a reason to be careful of it. The wariness guards against the fall rather than against the state, and the underlying belief, that misfortune tends to follow happiness, is held in both Western and Eastern cultures.
- Is it a disorder?
- No. It is not a recognised mental health disorder in its own right, though it is described as able to contribute to and worsen existing problems. It is also framed as a specific instance of ideal affect, in which cultures vary in how much they value experiencing particular emotions.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of PleasureOne proposed origin is solidarity with the world's poorest countries, which turns enjoying anything at all into something that feels unearned.
- Fear of ImperfectionMaladaptive perfectionism has a name most people have not met, and a dated trend: rising among young people in higher education since the late 1980s.
- Existential DreadMarcel coined existentialism and later abandoned it, Sartre rejected it before adopting it in 1945, and the nineteenth-century figures died before the word existed.
- CounterphobiaThe minority response to anxiety seeks the feared thing out. Fenichel's warning is the useful part: dismantling the defence is only the first step of treatment.
- Eco-AnxietyNot a diagnosis, and the researchers say so before anything else. Two people are credited with the name, and every figure in circulation is self-described.
- Fear of ChangeCommensal rodents are thought to have evolved higher neophobia because humans kept inventing new ways to kill them. Two thirds of the food form is genetic.