It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that the vast majority of the people on this earth prefer more happiness to less happiness and prefer lives with which they are more often satisfied than dissatisfied. Although some have questioned the value of happiness and life satisfaction and the wisdom of people who value it or study it (e.g., Perez-Alvarez, 2016), being happy and satisfied with one's life is of great importance to the vast majority of people all over the world (Diener & Oishi, 2000). This alone makes happiness and life satisfaction - typically referred to collectively as subjective well-being - worthy subjects of study by social scientists. One does not have to believe that they are important enough to be worth studying and understanding.
A good working definition of subjective well-being is "the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one's life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile" (Lyubomirsky, 2013, p. 32). The study of subjective well-being is,
the scientific analysis of how people evaluate their lives - both at the moment and for longer periods such as for the past year [including] people's emotional reactions to events, their moods, and judgments they form about their life satisfaction, fulfillment, and satisfaction with domains such as marriage and work.
(Diener, Oishi, & Lucas, 2003, p. 404)
Subjective well-being(SWB) is a psychological construct concerned not with what people have or what happens to them but with how they think and feel about what they have and what happens to them. The study of subjective well-being makes a distinction between the objective conditions of someone's life and that person's subjective evaluations of and feelings about his or her life. Plenty of relatively rich, healthy people are miserable, and plenty of relatively rich or unhealthy people lead lives of meaning and joy. Average SWB is greater in some relatively poor countries than in some relatively poor countries than in some relatively rich countries (Myers, 2000). In addition, as rich nations have become richer over the past several decades (as measured by per capita gross domestic product), the average SWB of their citizens has, in general, not increased (Myers, 2000). While acknowledging the importance of objective economic well-being - what people think about ad how they feel about their lives and how they feel as they go about their lives. (See Angner, 2010, for a more detailed discussion of this distinction.)
It feels good to be happy and satisfied with life, but enhancing people's sense of well-being and life satisfaction is not simply about making them feel better; enhancing subjective well-being has practical value. People with greater subjective well-being are more successful in many life domains, and their success is at least partly due to their greater sense of well-being. They are more social, altruistic, and active; they like themselves and other people better, have stronger bodies and immune systems, and have better conflict resolution skills (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener, 2005). Higher SWB promotes creative thinking (Eid & Larsen, 2008). People with higher SWB are likely to earn more money (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2008). (...) In a variety of practical ways, being relatively happy and satisfied with one's life is better than being unhappy an dissatisfied.
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The scientific study of SWB is at least 90 years old. These early studies were largely concerned with marital satisfaction and included Hamilton's A Research in Marriage (1929) (...)
In the 1960s and 1970s, sociologists and quality of life researchers were studying the influence of demographic factors such as income and marriage on SWB (e.g., Bradburn, 1969; Andrews & Withey, 1976; Campbell et al., 1976; Diener et al., 2003) (...)
For several decades social psychologists have studied the personalities, beliefs, and behaviors of happier and unhappier people and people who are more satisfied or less satisfied with their lives (e.g., Wessman & Ricks, 1966; Diener et al., 2003; Brickman & Campbell, 1971; Parducci, 1995; Lyubomirsky, 2001). This book offers a summary of theory and research on the social psychological factors (including to some extent personality factors) that influence subjective well-being and life satisfaction.
Conceptions of SWB
As noted previously, SWB is a psychological construct concerned with what people think about and how they feel about their lives. Research on psychological constructs requires clear conceptions of the constructs and clear theories of the constructs. (...) Theories of constructs are concerned with explaining and predicting how the phenomena described by the constructs develop and change.
Clear and concise conceptions of psychological phenomena must precede theories of them because we have to know what we are trying to explain or predict - and how we are going to measure it - before we can conduct research to try to explain and predict it. Clear and concise conceptions of psychological constructs are essential because unless different studies of a psychological construct employ the same or equivalent measures based on the same or equivalent conceptions, comparing findings across studies can be difficult or impossible, and the progress of the science concerned with that phenomena will be hobbled.
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Unfortunately, one of the continuing problems with research on SWB is lack of consensus on the conception and measurement of SWB. The major ongoing debate concerns the distinction between hedonic conceptions (and measures) of SWB and eudaimonic conceptions (and measures) of SWB. Although sometimes labeled as theories of SWB, there are not theories of how SWB develops and how it can be changed but simply different conceptions of SWB that lead to different ways of measuring it. This debate has both scientific aspects and moral ethical aspects.
In hedonic (or hedonistic) conceptions, SWB is defined by the balance of pleasant and enjoyable versus unpleasant events in a person's life (Haybron, 2008). A "good life" is one in which there is more pleasure and enjoyment than pain and suffering, regardless of the sources of these events and experiences. The individual's moral attributes, values, goals, achievements, and contributions to other people and society are largely irrelevant. What matters is to what extent the person enjoys his or her life, generally feels good as opposed to bad, experiences pleasure as opposed to pain and discomfort, and is satisfied versus dissatisfied with his or her life. In hedonic conceptions, the individual is the sole judge of his or her happiness and life satisfaction. The opinions of other people (including philosophers and psychologists) as to whether the person is leading a "good" or "meaningful" life are irrelevant.
Theorists and researchers generally agree on the conception and measurement of hedonic well-being. The conception of hedonic well-being most commonly employed in research is Diener's (1984) tripartite structure consisting of measures of positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction. A person with high SWB experiences more positive affect than negative affect and is relatively satisfied with his or her life. The vast majority of other theorists and researchers have provided conceptions and measures of hedonic well-being that essentially include these same components or minor variations of them (Huta & Waterman, 2014). Because most of the measures commonly used in research do not actually measure the experience of pleasure or pain, they do not fully capture a hedonic (hedonistic) conception of well-being as traditionally defined by philosophers, but they are nonetheless referred to as hedonic measures (Disabato et al., 2015).
Eudaimonic conceptions of well-being emphasize the idea that "we flourish by fully exercising our human capacities" (Haybron, 2008, pp. 25-26). This conception can be traced back to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, written in 350 BC, in which he used the term eudaimonia to refer primarily to the idea that a "good life" involves "achieving the best that is within us, each according to his or her unique talents and capacities" (Ruini & Ryff, 2016, pp. 153-154) or "a life conditioned upon self-truth and personal responsibility" (Ruini & Ryff, 2016). In this conception, well-being is determined not by the quality of one's sensual and emotional experiences but by the extent to which one is living up to one's potential; making progress toward attaining one's valued goals; and living a life of meaning, purpose, and virtue. In this way, eudaimonic conceptions strive to "capture core aspects of what it means to be human" (Ryff, 2014, p. 33) (See Haybron, 2008; Kashdan, Biswas-Diener, & King, 2008; Ryan & Deci, 2001; and Ryff, 2014, for more detailed discussions of the distinctions between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being).
Translating the concept of eudaimonic well-being from philosophy to psychology has been problematic due to a lack of consensus among eduaimonia researchers on how to define it and measure it (Diswas-Diener et al., 2009, p. 209; Kashdan et al., 2008). A recent review of the research on eudaimonic well-being reported 11 different conceptions involving various combinations of 12 basic components (Huta & Waterman, 2014). For example, Ryff's (1989, 2014) model proposes six components: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, personal growth, purpose in life, environmental mastery, and autonomy. Keyes' (2006) model proposes six components: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, personal growth, purpose in life, environmental mastery, and autonomy. Keyes' (2006) model proposes the same six as Ryff but adds five components of social well-being: acceptance, actualization, contribution, coherence, and integration. Ryan and Deci's model (Ryan et al., 2013) focuses mainly on the three components of autonomy, competence, and relatedness but includes several others that overlap with the Ryff and Keyes models.
The nested model (Henriques, Kleinman, & Asselin, 2014) proposes four domains of well-being; subjective (happiness and life satisfaction); health and functioning domain (biological and psychological); environmental (both material and social environments); and values and ideology domain (the moral and ethical perspective of an external observer and evaluator). The PERMA model Seligman (2011) offers five components: positive emotions, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment (Additional conceptions can be found in Huta & Waterman, 2014). Among the many measures for eudaimonic well-being that have been proposed, Ryff's model has been the subject of the most empirical research regarding both its psychometric properties and its predictive utility (Ryff, 2014).
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