Subjective Well-Being (062721)

Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress

First, the causal direction of the correlates of happiness must be examined through more sophisticated methodologies. Although the causal priority of demographic factors such as marriage and income is intuitively appealing, it is by no means certain. Second, researchers must focus greater attention on the interaction between internal factors (such as personality traits) and external circumstances. As we shall see, demographic factors have surprisingly small effects on SWB, but these effects may depend on the personalities of those individuals being studied. Thus, future research must take Person X Situation interactions into account. Third, researchers must strive to understand the processes underlying adaptation. Considerable adaptation to both good and bad circumstances often occurs, yet the processes responsible for these effects are poorly understood. Research that examines how habituation, coping strategies, and changing goals influence adaptation will shed much light on the processes responsible for SWB. Finally, theories must by refined to make specific predictions about how input variables differentially influence the components of SWB. In the past, many researchers have treated SWB as a monolithic entity, but it is now clear that there are separable components that exhibit unique patterns of relations with different variables.

The Field of Subjective Well-Being

Growth in the field of SWB reflects larger societal trends concerning the value of the individual, the importance of subjective views in evaluating life, and the recognition that well-being necessarily includes positive elements that transcend economic prosperity. The scientific study of subjective well-being developed in part as a reaction to the overwhelming emphasis in psychology on negative states. (...) SWB researchers recognize that people approach positive incentives and do not just avoid misery, and thus they study the entire range of well-being from misery to elation.

In addition, SWB researchers believe that social indicators alone do not define quality of life (Diener & Suh, 1997). People react differently to the same circumstances, and they evaluate conditions based on their unique expectations, values, and previous experiences. (...)

The vast majority of college students around the world consider happiness and life satisfaction to be extremely important. Indeed, almost all respondents believe happiness is more important than money (Diener & Oishi, in press). Furthermore, happy people are judged to have a more likely to be admitted into heaven (King & Napa, 1998)! However, few people would argue that subjective well-being is the only ingredient of a good life (Diener, Sapyta, & Suh, 1998).

The Components of Subjective Well-Being

Subjective well-being is a broad category of phenomena that includes people's emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgments of life satisfaction. Each of the specific constructs need to be understood in their own right, yet the components often correlate substantially, suggesting the need for the higher order factor (Stones & Kozma, 1985). Thus, we define SWB as a general area of scientific interest rather than a single specific construct. Table 1 presents the major divisions and subdivisions of the field.

(...) 

In addition to studying affective reactions, SWB researchers are interested in cognitive evaluations of life satisfaction. Andrews and Withey (1976) found that life satisfaction formed a separate factor from the two major types of affect.

Research Method

The field of SWB has deep roots in survey research, and the most common assessment technique is the single-occasion, self-report Happiness scale. Although this tradition has encouraged the use of broad, representative samples that may be more generalizable than samples used in most areas in the psychological sciences, our methods have been limited in some important ways.

Theory

(...) These postulates (which Wilson himself proposed in his 1960 doctoral dissertation) were as follows: (a) "The prompt satisfaction of needs causes happiness, while the persistence of unfulfilled needs causes unhappiness"; and (b) "The degree of fulfillment required to produce satisfaction depends on adaptation or aspiration level, which is influenced by past experience, comparisons with others, personal values, and other factors" (1967, p.302). By examining the correlates of avowed happiness, Wilson hoped to identify which needs were of central importance to SWB. (...)

Bottom-Up Situational Influences

In his 1984 review, Diener distinguished between top-down and bottom-up processes that influence SWB. The major focus of early theoretical formulations was to identify the bottom-up approach is built on Wilson's idea that there are basic and universal human needs, and that if one's circumstances allow a person to fulfill these needs, he or she will be happy.

(...) Yet, researchers are often disappointed by the relatively small effect sizes for the external, objective variables that were explored in most early studies. Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers (1976) found that demographic factors (e.g., age, sex, income, race, education, and marital status) accounted for less than 20% of the variance in SWB. Andrews and Withey (1976) could only account for 8% by using these variables. Moreover, on the basis of his review of the literature, Argyle (in press) suggested that external circumstances account for about 15% of the variance in SWB reports. Because of the small effects, researchers turned to top-down areas to explain variability in SWB, structures within the person that determine how events and circumstances are perceived.

Personality

Personality is one of the strongest and most consistent predictors of subjective well-being (for a review, see Diener & Lucas, in press). Evidence for the personality -SWB link comes from a wide variety of research traditions and methodologies. Because personality is a reliable predictor of SWB, a number of theories have been developed to explain why it is related to SWB. In the following sections, we first review data showing that SWB has the properties of a disposition. We then discuss which adult personality traits are most reliably correlated with SWB and review how personality interacts with life circumstances to influence SWB. Finally, we discuss how personality correlates with more dynamic aspects of SWB such as emotional variability. 

Discrepancy Theories 

In 1985, Michalos advanced the multiple discrepancy theory of satisfaction, which borrowed from the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Wilson (1967), Campbell et al. (1976), and others. According to Michalos's theory, individuals compare themselves to multiple standards including other people, past conditions, aspirations and ideal levels of satisfaction, and needs or goals. Satisfaction judgments are then based on discrepancies between current conditions and these standards. A discrepancy that involves an upward comparison (i.e., where the comparison standard is higher) will result in decreased satisfaction, whereas a downward comparison will result in increased satisfaction.

Social comparison. Early models of social comparison emphasized contrast effects in explaining social comparison influences on SWB (see Diener & Fijita, 1997). The idea was that one should be happy if proximate others are worse off, and unhappy if proximate others are better off. In recent years, however, theories of social comparison have become more intricate, allowing for variation in the type of information that is used in comparison as well as the way that the information is used. In a recent definition of social comparison, Wood (1996) stated that social comparison is simply "the process of thinking about information about one or more other people in relation to the self" (p. 520). Three major processes involved in social comparison are (a) acquiring social information, (b) thinking about social information, and (c) reacting to social comparisons. The social information one acquires can come from proximate individuals, individuals that one reads about, or even imagined individuals (e.g., J. Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman, 1985). The process of thinking about social information includes observing similarities, differences, or both, between the other and the self. Finally, reactions to social comparison scan involve a variety of cognitive, affective, or behavioral responses and do not necessarily involve perceiving a contrast between oneself and others.

According to Wood's definition, the choice of a comparison target is a flexible process and is not determined solely by the proximity or accessibility of relevant others. In fact, social comparison may be used as a coping strategy and can be influenced by personality or performance (Diener & Fujita, 1997). Gibbons, Benbow, and Gerrard (1994), for example, found that students who performed poorly on a  test reduced the amount of social comparisons in which they engaged. Brown and Dutton (1995) stated that people "compare themselves with others when they think it will make them feel good, but shy away from comparing with others when they think it will make them feel bad" (p. 1292). In addition, Lyubomirsky and Ross (1997) found that happy people tended to use only downward comparisons, whereas unhappy people tended to compare upward as well as downward.

The second process implicated in J. V. Wood's (1996) definition of social comparison, thinking about social information, exhibits similar flexibility. McFarland and Miller (1994), for example, found that an individual's personality influenced the way he or she used social comparison information. Nondepressives and optimists tended to focus on the number of people who performed worse than they did, whereas depressives and optimists tended to focus on the number of people who performed better than they did (see also Ahrens, 1991; Wheeler & Miyake, 1992). Thus, happy people tended to be more positive as the number of comparison others grew, whereas unhappy people were less happy as the number of comparison others grew. Furthermore, the tendency to use downward or upward comparison may be a result and not a cause of increased SWB. This conclusion was supported by Diener and Fujita (1997), who found that although participants' resources (e.g., income and intelligence) were hardly correlated with each other, participants' ratings of how they compared to others on these resources were much more strongly related. This correlate disappeared when the participant's life satisfaction score was controlled, suggesting that perceptions of social comparison gaps may result from global top-down processes rather than from actual actual calculated comparisons.

to be continued (page 8)