A number of studies have reported that politically right-leaning conservatives rate themselves as having better mental health and greater happiness than their liberal counterparts.

But what is behind this happiness gap? The answer was unclear, so researchers from Tufts University set out to uncover the reasons behind the difference in how conservative and liberal participants perceived their state of mental health.

According to a 2025 Gallup poll, 37 percent of American voters identify as "conservative" or "very conservative", 34 percent as "moderate," and 25 percent as "liberal" or "very liberal."

Conservatives feel a stigma around the phrase “mental health.” They're more comfortable rating their mental health in terms of “mood.”

Conservatives' responses may have had more to do with the way the questionnaire phrased things, the Tuft's researchers found, than reflecting a stronger sense of wellbeing.

The results are based on a representative survey of 60,000 American adults from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study survey, a national online survey conducted before and after United States presidential and midterm elections. It asks participants about their mental health, political ideology and demographics including their age, whether they own a home, and their marital status among other questions.

Pollsters and market researchers know that how survey questions are worded can have a big effect on the responses they elicit. In 2023, the researchers returned to the Cooperative Election Study survey. This time they surveyed 1,000 American adults. Half were asked the same questions as in 2022. The other half had their questions framed differently: they were asked to rate their “mood” rather than their “mental health.”

“Yes. Conservatives report that their mental health is better than Liberals do. But that gap disappears entirely when we ask instead about each group's overall mood.”

The change in the wording of the question made a significant difference. Here's what the study found:

  • Conservatives rated themselves on average 19 points higher for mental health than the liberals in the 2022 survey. But when conservatives were asked to rate their “overall mood” instead of their “mental health” in the 2023 survey, the remaining differences disappeared.
  • Once traits reflecting positive mental health such as age, marital status and church attendance were accounted for, the gap between conservatives and liberals was reduced by 40 percent to 11 points.
  • While 29 percent of liberals rated their “mental health” as fair or poor, only 17 percent rated their “overall mood” the same way.

Why the dramatic difference from one survey to the next? The researchers suggest that conservatives feel a stigma around the phrase “mental health” whereas they're more comfortable rating their mental health in terms of “mood.”

“Yes. Conservatives report that their mental health is better than Liberals do,” the author of the study, Brian Schaffner of the Department of Political Science at Tufts University, Massachusetts, said in a press release. “But that gap disappears entirely when we ask instead about each group's overall mood.”

“The ideological gap in mental well-being [between liberals and conservatives] is clearly not as straightforward or consistent as it is often made out to be,” Schaffner added. “What our experiment shows is that it really depends what you ask about.”

The study is published in PLOS One.