Edward Diener

Edward Diener is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Professor Diener received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for the past 32 years. Diener has been the president of both the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. He was the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology from 1998 to 2003, and is the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science.

Diener has over 210 publications, with about 170 being in the area of the psychology of well-being. Professor Diener is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information, with over 11,000 citations to his credit.

He won the 2000 Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, and has won several teaching awards.

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 is currently writing a popular book on happiness with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, and a book on policy uses of national accounts of well-being.

Ed Diener first met Carol at age 16 and they have been married for 40 years; she is a clinical psychologist and attorney. 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 Ed Diener. Because of the exotic groups involved, including the African Maasai, Greenlandic Inuit, the Amish, the homeless, 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.