Professor Cummins terms it 'subjective well-being', and last month the Australian-based academic was at Hong Kong's Polytechnic University comparing notes with Dr Lau. She is the China co-ordinator of the International Wellbeing Group, which Professor Cummins set up in the hope of extending his ground-breaking research beyond Australia.

For five years he has been compiling a national index of personal well-being that quantifies people's satisfaction with life by measures other than the number of dollars lodged in the bank account.

And he has some good news. If a score of 10 relates to feeling really happy and zero to really down, the vast majority of us exist at a steady level around 7.5.

The bad news is that we can forget about taking it much higher.

'Every one of us maintains a fairly steady state,' says Professor Cummins. 'Our sense of personal well-being is managed for us, like our body manages our body temperature. And we maintain this state fiercely.

'This is essential so we all feel good about ourselves. We all feel that we are better than most other people.'

The well-being results are based on replies to a set of seven questions on how satisfied people are with their health, standard of living, life achievement, relationships, personal safety, future security and feeling part of the community.

While Professor Cummins believes 7.5 is a typical average for people in developed western countries, the first assessment of 180 Hong Kong residents threw up an unexpected result closer to 6.5.

So are people in Hong Kong really less happy than their western counterparts? The researchers argue cultural differences explain most of the discrepancy.

'People here are less likely to rate themselves at the ends of the scale,' says Dr Lau, an assistant professor at the university's rehabilitation sciences department.

'We found that no one in Hong Kong rated themselves a 10 or a zero, whereas in Australia there were quite a number.

'When we asked people why, one of the strong things that came across was modesty. That's a large part of the cultural belief here. It advocates balance, never going to the extreme.'

For people in Hong Kong a 10 rating would also mean there was only one way to go - down. And if you voted zero, you may as well be dead.

Dr Lau, who was raised in Brisbane, Australia, and has spent the past decade in Hong Kong, was unsurprised by the responses.

'When people in Australia feel really happy they are more open and hedonistic feelings are very acceptable,' she says. 'Here people often have to mask their true feelings behind a facade. That in itself adds to the pressure, and in Hong Kong it's already a stressful living environment. They have got no real outlet.'

Cultural differences are at the heart of why Professor Cummins regards the now-regular global happiness surveys as flawed, citing Nigeria's top ranking in some studies.

'Well, you know, get a grip,' he says. 'Have you been to Nigeria recently? People don't ask why this happens, but people are conditioned by their culture to respond to questions about their internal feelings in different ways. That is the reason that people in Nigeria have a tendency to report themselves higher on their well-being. But this means zip in terms of the real level of well-being within the population.'

The same positive response, adds Professor Cummins, can be applied to Central American countries while Hong Kong is similar to Japan and other parts of Southeast Asia in its lower than average responses.

Balancing those cultural factors is now the central task facing the academics in 45 countries that make up the loose coalition that is the International Wellbeing Group.

With data so far from only 15 countries, the research is still in its infancy and Professor Cummins plans to start approaching potential sponsors for funds. But he and Dr Lau are convinced that big-city living is bad news for general wellbeing.

In Professor Cummins' latest research, he found that people living in poor, rural communities were among the happiest in Australia. By contrast, the most miserable and discontented souls resided in the nation's biggest city, Sydney. The chair of psychology at Deakin University believes the higher cost of housing and increased population density in the sprawling city of 4.5 million residents are key factors.

And Dr Lau sees many similarities in Hong Kong, particularly among young professionals working 'crazy hours' who are under severe work, family and financial pressures.

The Northern Territories are also better off than the built-up counterparts.

'Part of that is a community connectedness,' adds Dr Lau.

'Everyone knows everyone, and much more than in a metropolitan, fast-paced society where we do not know who our neighbours are.'

'This means you are actually living among strangers,' adds Professor Cummins. 'And that means there is a sense of insecurity and a lack of communication within your living space and your neighbourhood.'

Professor Cummins says his best guess is that personal well-being in Hong Kong is lower than his home country, even after cultural differences have been taken into account.

He says that could be partly explained by the wider divide in wealth, pointing to statistics that show Hong Kong has the highest proportion of Rolls-Royce owners in the world, but one in four children lives in poverty.

When the socio-economic gap isn't so pronounced, his Australian findings back research that shows money does not bring happiness.

And Professor Cummins believes that could have profound consequences for prevailing economic thought.

'If increasing national wealth does not increase the well-being of the citizens than why are you doing it? And there are all sorts of downsides in terms of things like the use of resources and asking people to become more and more productive. This is all bad news for well-being.'

Professor Cummins wants economists and government policy-makers to begin properly considering the 'subjective well-being' of the masses. 'I think the global, human tendency is to regard more as better. We do this constantly in almost everything and we are starting to see mega cities appearing.

'But we are not asking about the well-being of the people who live in them. We just say it's good because it's bigger.

'That's a childish way of looking at it, and we need to start taking a much more grown-up approach.'

Questions of scale

- Health

- Standard of living

- Achievement

- Relationships

- Personal safety

- Future security

- Community