Happiness

Subjective Well-Being

Colloquially used, the term happiness can have a number of meanings. It might refer to a momentary burst of joy when one hears good news, a sense of satisfaction at a job well done, or an abstract goal that one pursues. Because so many feelings and states can be implied by the word happiness, researchers who study happiness usually talk about subjective well-being instead. This term captures a specific sense of the term happiness and conveys how behavioral scientists think about happiness—as an evaluation made by an individual that his or her life is positive. The subjective nature of happiness is emphasized by this term because it is conceptualized as a judgment resulting from an individual's own personal criteria and experience. Thus, when people describe “happy people” in this entry, they mean people high in subjective well-being.

A person's sense of subjective well-being might derive from a cognitive sense of satisfaction with life as a whole or with specific life domains such as education, work, or family. Or it might derive from a person's affective experience—moods and emotions—with positive emotions (e.g., sociable, calm) and negative emotions (e.g., depressed, sad). The three main ingredients for high subjective well-being are a sense of satisfaction with one's life and life domains, the experience of positive emotions, and a relative absence of negative emotions. Considering positive and negative emotions separately has proven to be an important advance in understanding subjective wellbeing. The amount of positive affect and the amount of negative affect that one experiences, although intuitively opposites, turn out to be somewhat independent of one another. For instance, some people might experience a lot of both positive affect and negative affect, whereas others might experience little of each, and still others more of one type than the other.

Measuring Subjective Well-Being

Determining how to best assess and measure subjective well-being is important for a scientific understanding of the subject. Yet, the phenomenon of subjective well-being poses some unique challenges. For instance, how can something subjectively experienced by one individual be measured objectively by another? Fortunately, researchers have developed a sophisticated battery of techniques for assessing whether a person is happy or not.

The first technique is to simply ask the person whether he or she is happy. Such “self-report” measures are widely used in the field for a variety of reasons. First, on a conceptual level, they are perhaps the only measures that really make sense given that subjective well-being includes the individual's experience. Second, self-report measures are easy and inexpensive to administer and score. Third, self-report measures are widely used because they generally work. They are relatively reliable, yielding responses that correlate across time and situations. In addition, the fact that self-report measures of subjective wellbeing correlate with other indicators of happiness (are higher when something good happens to a person and lower when something bad happens) suggests that such measures possess a degree of validity.

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