Happiness360

A: Subjective well-being is defined as how a person evaluates his or her own life. These evaluations can be more focal (e.g., marital satisfaction, or satisfaction with one's car) or broader (e.g., life satisfaction or satisfaction with the self). In addition, these evaluations can be more cognitive - in terms of satisfaction judgments - or they can be more affective (moods and emotions, which are reactions to what is happening in one's life). Thus, there appear to be at least three major components to subjective well-being - pleasant emotions and moods, lack of negative emotions and moods, and satisfaction judgments. Other variables such as optimism and feelings of fulfillment are also a part of SWB, perhaps a 4^th component.

Global measures of SWB which simply ask people how satisfied or happy they are have been proven to have some validity. At the same time, such measures do suffer certain drawbacks and limitations. Thus, we have used a set of additional measures, in order to measure SWB with a number of assessment devices that complement one another: 1. Informant reports - what do your friends and family say about your SWB?, 2. Experience sampling - how happy are you over time when we beep you at random moments, and then aggregate those moments?, 3. Memory measures - can you quickly recall good events (and not bad events) in a timed period, and 4. Interview or qualitative measures. Although we have not used biological measures of SWB in our lab very frequently, a number are available: 1. Frontal brain asymmetry, 2. Facial electromyography, 3. Saliva cortisol levels, and 4. Eye blink startle response. There are other measures as well, for example based on performance speed, which we review in some of our measurement review chapters.

Last updated on September 14, 2007 by Dr. Walt