Myers diener who is happy

How do people decide how happy they are? In principle, a number of models are possible and the current chapter highlights three of them. People could subdivide their life into various domains, consider their progress in these domains, and then integrate the results of this bottom-up activity. Alternatively, people could omit such a systematic process and simply base their judgments on whatever information is currently accessible.

Finally, it is possible that people already know their happiness levels, in which case they could directly retrieve such evaluations. The plausibility of these models is examined with respect to issues of stability, change, and context in well-being judgment.

People have fairly stable ideas about how happy they are and well-being judgments seem somewhat resistant to priming. Nonetheless, well-being sometimes changes in response to life events. Accordingly, some combination of judgment models might be necessary to fully account for current findings.

Robinson, M. What do subjective well-being judgments mean? Sources and distinctions, processes and mechanisms. Diener, S. Tay Eds. For most people, happiness is not just a pleasant occurrence. Rather, it is a guiding principle in their lives. Given the importance of happiness to individuals as well as societies, it is important to understand its basis.

A first point worth making here is that happiness is a subjective phenomenon. The present chapter is primarily concerned with life evaluations rather than emotional experiences. People have been asked to evaluate their lives in a number of ways.

In addition, though, a number of multi-item measures of life satisfaction exist. In principle, people could engage in a number of different strategies in answering these questions.

Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers posited a somewhat complex mental calculus. Somewhat similarly, Michalos suggested that people make an extensive set of comparisons e. Both survey researchers and well-being researchers should be interested in these sorts of influences. However, the possible presence of priming effects does not preclude the additional presence of more stable sources of information in well-being judgment. Indeed, it is reasonable to propose that people think about their lives a lot of the time and they think about happiness in this connection Myers, This renders it possible that asking people about their happiness is asking them to answer questions that they have already answered, for an internal audience.

If so, people may not need to construct an answer when they are asked about their life satisfaction. Rather, they may be able to recall a pertinent answer more-or-less directly from memory. For example, asking the novice coffee drinker how much they like coffee could lead to a complex mental calculus. It is feasible that some people, if not many, think of their lives in a way akin to an experienced coffee drinker.

To summarize, there are at least three perspectives on life satisfaction judgment that deserve attention see Table 1. Under some circumstances, people will think about their standing and standards in various life domains before giving a life satisfaction judgment Campbell et al. However, people are efficient thinkers and may curtail some of this activity in favor of quicker, more heuristic ways of answering the question Gigerenzer, Finally, we have suggested that people who have thought about their lives extensively may be able to evaluate them somewhat directly, thereby omitting a lengthy deliberation process at the time of judgment.

The last perspective should assume that life satisfaction judgments are stable, much as accessible attitudes are Fazio, We will revisit these three perspectives, in one way or another, throughout the course of the review.

When making well-being judgments, people enumerate their life domains, review their progress in each life domain, compare that progress to standards, and average across these computations. When they are asked such questions, they use whatever information is currently accessible and are therefore vulnerable to temporary and irrelevant priming factors. People have thought about how happy they are previously. When making well-being judgments, they directly retrieve these pre-stored evaluations.

Highlights potential influences due to mood and communication rules. Overemphasizes the malleability of well-being judgments. It is intuitive to think that life satisfaction judgments should be about life.

The relationship between age and well-being is an illustrative example. One could therefore expect some decreases in well-being with age. Instead, the relationship between age and well-being seems puzzling. However, another contention is that well-being increases with age Carstensen et al. It is difficult to make sense of these divergent ideas and the truth of the matter may be that aging effects are either subtle or sample-dependent. In a famous study of this type, Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman compared the happiness levels of lottery winners, controls, and people who had encountered fairly serious spinal cord injuries.

The authors concluded that the lottery winners were not happier than the control group and the paralyzed accident victims had rebounded such that their happiness levels were surprisingly high.

Such considerations led to a different, top-down view of well-being judgment Diener, Top-down influences are sources of belief, affect, or disposition that stabilize well-being judgments, potentially in a way that is independent of objective life circumstances Diener, ; Watson, There are several basic properties of well-being judgment that seem consistent with top-down influences.

First, the average person does not have neutral levels of life satisfaction. Rather, the average person is more satisfied than dissatisfied with his or her life and this is true across many measurement instruments and countries Cummins, That is, people who are more satisfied with their lives tend to remain more satisfied with their lives across time and circumstance Watson, Thus, there seem to be dispositional stable, but person-varying top-down influences on life satisfaction judgments that warrant serious attention Diener et al.

Alternatively, top-down influences could follow from self-esteem given that a number of theories of well-being implicate processes concerning the self e. The link to self-evaluative processes seems appealing in another way.

In particular, people from Asian cultures like China, Japan, and Korea tend to report lower levels of life satisfaction Diener et al. Top-down influences should be particularly apparent for global or retrospective reports of well-being Tay et al. We are generally convinced that there are top-down influences on well-being judgment. However, the framework is not entirely satisfactory. To ascribe well-being to personality traits, or to self-esteem, does not explain where personality traits or self-esteem come from.

In the well-being literature, the set point is a sort of happiness default that one might return to in the absence of unusual events. Consistent with this idea, Cummins converted a number of happiness and life satisfaction measures to a 0 to scale.

This probably means that set points also slowly change, either due to maturation processes or lifestyle choices that create new personal trajectories. Along these lines, Headey et al. In contrast with classic research in this area e. Using a different sample and somewhat different methods, Anusic et al.

Summarizing a number of studies of this type, Lucas suggests that people adapt to changes in marital and family status, but may not be able to fully recover from periods of unemployment or disability. Thus, there could be an asymmetry with respect to positive and negative events. Positive events like marriage or promotion or winning the lottery: Brickman et al. On the other hand, some negative events — such as unemployment or disability — can have a lasting impact Lucas, , possibly because they permanently alter our capacity to pursue our goals.

Also, positive events and activities, per se, do not seem to be sufficient. These perspectives suggest that we have the opportunity to intentionally increase our well-being, but considerable skill may be necessary in doing so Lyubomirsky et al. In either case, there are top-down influences that keep happiness judgments within acceptable, accustomed ranges Cummins, Yet, such fixed ideas about happiness are not entirely insensitive to recent life events Robinson, or to significant life changes Lucas, Yet, the research adopted a puzzling view of well-being.

The contention, more or less, was that people rarely evaluate their lives as a whole and are therefore susceptible to a range of biases when making life satisfaction judgments. Moreover, this idea is clearly correct at some level.

Consistent with these ideas, Eid and Diener found that subjective well-being SWB was strongly trait-like over the period of 12 weeks and momentary mood states had small, largely inconsequential influences on SWB judgment also see Yap et al.

In a large-scale study, current weather conditions did not predict life satisfaction judgments in any straightforward manner, and most weather conditions did not predict them at all. Hence, life satisfaction biases due to current mood seem to be slight Lucas et al.

Turning to item-order effects, Strack et al. These results indicate that it may be possible to alter happiness judgments by priming more specific sources of information first e. In the domain of happiness judgments, it appears that priming effects can either take the form of assimilation increased use of primed information or contrast decreased use of primed information. This has resulted in complicated findings.

For example, Eiser and de Mey found complex priming effects depending on whether positive or negative sources of information were first recalled and whether the recalled information was vivid or not.

The exact form of the results did not seem expected. Concerning the relationship between marital happiness and general happiness Schwarz et al. Further, when priming effects are found, the results involving correlations and means can differ. There are also reasons to wonder about the typical magnitude of item-order effects Lucas et al. In speaking to this literature, Schimmack and Oishi conducted a meta-analysis and several replication attempts.

The meta-analysis revealed that item-order effects were heterogeneous across 16 previous studies. Furthermore, several direct replication attempts failed to produce significant findings and the authors concluded that item-order effects may typically be fairly small in effect size.

When these studies are considered in light of inconsistencies among previous studies e. Thus far, we have primarily examined how people make well-being judgments by examining questions of process — stability, personality correlates, vulnerability to contextual influence, etc.

However, it might also be possible to ask people what they think about when making life satisfaction judgments. In either case, greater positivity in recalled events or in thoughts about our current life could partially explain why life satisfaction tends to be polarized in a positive direction Cummins, With respect to time frames, Ross, Eyman, and Kishchuck found that people primarily thought about their present lives when making life satisfaction judgments, suggesting that life satisfaction judgments should display some sensitivity to recent life events Robinson, Following a focus on the present, people said they were focused on the future Ross et al.

Finally, people did not report thinking about the past as frequently when making life satisfaction judgments Ross et al.

The sorts of life domains that people report thinking about also make sense. They also report thinking about their academic and career success and some mention their health Luhmann et al. Financial concerns and social comparisons were not mentioned as frequently.

Schimmack and colleagues have reported additional intriguing evidence in favor of this thought-listing method. For example, Schimmack et al. And they do not mention cultural norms, even though cultural norms have been heavily implicated in life satisfaction judgment Diener et al. Thus, people do not seem aware of some of the important top-down influences that are guiding their judgments.

There are different ways of measuring well-being and some of these distinctions are important in understanding what a given sort of judgment reflects. In that spirit, we review some useful distinctions, particularly with respect to their ability to elucidate judgment processes.

These distinctions can also be useful, however, in thinking about personality and culture and in comparing different views of what happiness should consist of.

Online Happiness versus Recalled Happiness. These emotions are typically in flux and have a noticeably reactive character to them Bolger et al. They are also highly dependent on setting. In the long-run, by contrast, unemployment would tend to undermine self-esteem and, perhaps because of this, life satisfaction Clark et al.

If this is true, one could actually study top-down factors in terms of the discrepancy between online reports of happiness and retrospective reports. Even so, online reports of happiness should not always be favored. Domain Satisfaction versus Global Life Satisfaction. There can therefore be tradeoffs such that one succeeds in some life domains e. Despite these potential tradeoffs, there tend to be positive correlations among life domains such that satisfaction in one life domain tends to predict satisfaction in another Campbell et al.

These correlations can be small, though. By averaging across a number of life domains, however, one can compute a domain-derived life satisfaction measure that correlates highly with a more generic domain-unspecified one Campbell et al.

Regardless, people consider different sources of knowledge when making domain satisfaction ratings versus when rating their satisfaction with life in general. Developments within a particular domain e. Conversely, there are top-down influences that matter more for global reports of well-being, even after controlling for satisfaction with particular domains.

Personality factors and dispositional positivity are among these Diener et al. Thus, one way to isolate dispositional positivity is to subtract domain-specific satisfaction ratings from domain-general satisfaction ratings, with larger differences indicating greater positivity Diener et al.

Relatedly, happy people self-enhance. Happy people also treat the domains of their lives differently than unhappy people.

In related terms, happy people emphasize the areas of their lives that are going well. The best domains were more predictive of global well-being for happy people and the worst domains were more predictive of global well-being for unhappy people. These results are consistent with the idea that happiness biases the selection of life domains to consider when rating happiness in general.

One could avoid these biases somewhat by measuring life satisfaction in terms of the average of multiple, more specific life domains Weinberg et al. Alternatively, biases such as these are central to more global conceptions of life satisfaction Tay et al. Bottom-Up versus Top-Down Influences. Bottom-up models contend that happiness is built on the particulars of life, including circumstances, events, and progress in specific life domains Diener, Top-down models instead emphasize factors like personality and self-enhancement, which are likely to influence life satisfaction as a whole as well as life satisfaction in particular domains like work, marriage, and leisure Heller et al.

These models are not mutually exclusive and one can find evidence for both bottom-up and top-down influences in the same study, which Brief, Butcher, George, and Link did in the area of health satisfaction.

Moreover, controlling for personality traits often reduces the correlation between satisfaction with a domain e. Support for bottom-up paths can also be found, however. Changes in the relative proportion of daily positive and negative life events can shift well-being in a corresponding direction, at least in the short term Robinson, ; Suh et al. Most notably, satisfaction with health decreases with age while satisfaction with income increases McAdams et al.

Both social psychology e. Nonetheless, there are under-explored sorts of manipulations that may be useful in this enterprise. As a way of studying motivational influences, Wojcik and Ditto told some participants that happiness was linked to positive outcomes e.

People tended to report greater happiness in the positive outcome condition than in the negative outcome condition, though such trends were particularly apparent at higher levels of self-enhancement. It seems to us that manipulations of this type can be used to study some of the motivational factors that have been implicated in the personality and culture literatures Diener et al.

We would guess that people use both sorts of strategies, and that the relative balance of the strategies may vary by person e. Similarly, the relative influence of top-down e. Some clarity into these different routes to judgment could be achieved by manipulating processing style, how much time people have to respond, or by manipulating cognitive busyness e. In an interesting study of this type, Trent and King asked participants to make meaning in life judgments either rapidly or thoughtfully.

Meaning in life had different correlates under these different conditions and results of this type could be used to better understand the typical process of judgment. In one sort of paradigm, Robinson and Clore b showed that people switched from a data-driven to belief-based top-down judgment strategy when rating their emotions over the period of several weeks or longer.

A similar relationship between time frame and judgment speed could occur for life satisfaction or happiness judgments. Priming-related paradigms can also be used. Faster life satisfaction judgments are likely to implicate a top-down path to judgment that should be more particular to some individuals than to others.

Among other consequences, this literature would lead us to predict that people making these judgments more quickly, in comparison to more slowly, should report levels of life satisfaction that are more stable over time Fazio, In the introduction, we contrasted three different models of well-being judgment. According to a bottom-up, systematic model, people may carefully consider their standing in a number of life domains before making life satisfaction or happiness judgments Campbell et al.

According to a third model, people might judge their lives in the same way that they judge very familiar objects — by direct retrieval of their evaluations, potentially independent of corroborating evidence Fazio, However, when friends are asked to rate the happiness of the same people, their ratings also correlate with the target individual's social desirability scores.

This confirms the validity of the original answers. Another possiblity is that people only think they are happy but are actually repressing their true feelings of unhappiness a psychodynamic view. Overall, there is reason to believe that we can trust subjective reports of happiness. Correlations - many of the findings are correlational. This means that we cannot assume that a particular factor is a cause of happiness.

May be important intervening variables. The link between marriage and happiness may be due to other things in a marriage rather than the relationship.

It might be that married people have more disposable cash than single people because they have two incomes but only need one house and one car and so on, this makes them happier. A further issue with correlational data is that we do not know the direction of the relationship. If we consider marriage, research shows that happy people are more appealing as marriage partners Mastekaasa Therefore it could be that happiness makes marriage more likely than vice versa. The samples - a lot of the data is based on Western samples as the researchers are American and have conducted much of their research in the USA.

The roots of happiness may be different in other cultures. In line with … Expand. Highly Influenced. View 4 excerpts, cites background and results.

Large samples of students in the Midwest and in Southern California rated satisfaction with life overall as well as with various aspects of life, for either themselves or someone similar to … Expand.

Does Happiness Differ Across Cultures. There is a longstanding discussion on whether happiness is culturally relative or not. The available data suggest that all humans tend to assess how much they like their lives.

The evaluation draws … Expand. Although positive emotions undoubtedly confer benefits, one can have too much of it. There is probably a point beyond which enjoyment interferes with realism, yet it is unclear where that point is. View 1 excerpt, cites methods. Who Is Happy?

A flood of new studies explores people's subjective well-being SWB Frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and a global sense of satisfaction with life define high SWB These studies … Expand. View 1 excerpt, references background. The sense of relative superiority — Central to well-being. QOL research appears to show that in nearly all countries which have been studied almost all sections of the community rate their subjective well-being SWB above the mid-point of scales.

This paper … Expand. Subjective well-being. The literature on subjective well-being SWB , including happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect, is reviewed in three areas: measurement, causal factors, and theory.

Psychometric data on … Expand.