Ed Diener is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for the past 34 years. Dr. Diener was the president of both the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. Currently he is the president of the International Positive Psychology Association. Diener was the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the editor of Journal of Happiness Studies. He is the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Diener has over 240 publications, with about 190 being in the area of the psychology of well-being.
Dr. Diener is a fellow of five professional societies. Professor Diener is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information, with over 12,000 citations to his credit. He won the Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, the first Gallup Academic Leadership Award, and the Jack Block Award for Personality Psychology. Dr. Diener won several teaching awards, including the Oakley-Kundee Award for Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Illinois. With over 50 publications he is the most published author in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Professor Diener's research focuses on the measurement of well-being; temperament and personality influences on well-being; theories of well-being; income and well-being; and cultural influences on well-being. He has edited three recent books on subjective well-being, and a 2005 book on multi-method measurement in psychology. Diener just completed writing a popular book on happiness with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener (Happiness: Unlocking the mysteries of psychological wealth), and is authoring a book on policy uses of accounts of well-being with Richard Lucas, Ulrich Schimmack, and John Helliwell.
Dr. Diener was born in 1946 in Glendale, California. He grew up on a farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California, near Fresno. He attended San Joaquin Memorial High School in Fresno, where he met his wife, Carol. Ed and Carol met at age 16 and have been married for 40 years; she is a child clinical psychologist and attorney who recently retired from the University of Illinois. The Dieners’ twin daughters, Marissa and Mary Beth, teach psychology at the University of Utah and the University of Kentucky, respectively. Marissa is a developmental psychologist and Mary Beth is a clinical psychologist. The Dieners’ son Robert has collected well-being data in collaboration with Dr. Diener. Because of the exotic groups involved in Robert's research, including the African Maasai, Greenlandic Inuit, the Amish, and slum dwellers in Calcutta, Robert has been called the Indiana Jones of well-being research. He was branded in a rite of manhood by the Maasai. Two other daughters, Kia and Susan, are not psychologists.
Ed Diener's Career Highlights
1. Deindividuation research (1974-1980)
2. Scholarship on subjective well-being (1981-present)
3. Editorships of JPSP (1998-2003) and Journal of Happiness Studies(1999-2005); Associate editor JPSP (1985-1988)
4. Planning National Accounts of Well-Being (2005-present)
5. Founding new journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science (2005)
6. Endowed mid-career investigator awards for social psychology and personality psychology, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology