Ryan Howell

San Francisco State University | SFSU · Department of Psychology

The current research synthesis integrates the findings of 111 independent samples from 54 economically developing countries that examined the relation between economic status and subjective well-being (SWB). The average economic status-SWB effect size was strongest among low-income developing economies (r = .28) and for samples that were least educ...

Once basic needs are satisfied, the relation between income and subjective well-being is small, and materialism leads to diminished well-being. This study attempts to determine: (1) whether experiential purchases, as opposed to materialistic purchases, are likely to increase well-being and (2) whether these increases are likely to be due to increas...

There is growing support that money spent on experiential items increases an individual's happiness. However, there is minimal research on the causes and long-term consequences of the tendency to make experiential purchases. Given the importance of experiential buying for improving well-being, an understanding of the preference for experiential pur...

Numerous studies have demonstrated that experiential purchases lead to more happiness than material purchases. However, prior research suggests that some characteristics of the purchase and person may moderate this experiential advantage. Our goal was to determine if the happiness gained from experiential purchases varies for individuals with diffe...

The experience recommendation—if you want to be happier, buy life experiences instead of material items—is supported in empirical research. However, this evidence is primarily based on the dichotomous comparison of material items and life experiences. The goal of this article is to examine the effects of consuming experiential products––purchases t...

Introduction: Despite broad consensus about multicultural experience's benefits, there is a lack of research on the antecedents to multicultural experiences. Research has indicated that awe shifts attention away from the self towards larger entities, which could include elements of other cultures. Methods: Four studies (N = 2,915) tested whether...

The original 26‐item Self‐Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff, 2003) and 12‐item Short‐Form Self‐Compassion Scale (SF‐SCS; Raes et al., 2011) are scales commonly used in cross‐sectional and longitudinal research to assess the global self‐compassion construct and its six facets. We introduce the Single‐Item Self‐Compassion Scale (SISC; “I have high self‐com...

Asians are not immune to racial discrimination and discrimination against Asians has heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic because they were blamed as the origin of the virus. A pre-registered 14-day diary explored if self-compassion was associated with subjective well-being and protective behaviors for Asians (U.S. & Canada) who faced COVID-19 d...

We examined associations between time perspective dimensions and substance use, after controlling for personality traits in adolescents. Time perspective was defined as feelings and orientations toward the past, present, and future, and substance use included tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and illicit drugs. The Five-Factor Model of personality (extr...

We examined time perspective and self‐esteem in adolescents, young adults, middle‐aged adults, and older adults. Time perspective was measured with scales that assess relative orientations and relationships among the past, present, and future. Age effects were examined with standard analytic strategies to determine categorical differences between a...

Spending money on experiences, compared to materials, is often associated with more happiness. This experiential advantage, however, is developed based on samples from Western cultures. To investigate the boundaries of this effect, we studied participants from three divergent cultures (Iran, Malaysia, and the United States; N = 1,718) and examined...

Spending money on experiences, compared to materials, is often associated with more happiness. This experiential advantage, however, is developed based on samples from Western cultures. To investigate the boundaries of this effect, we studied participants from three divergent cultures (Iran, Malaysia, and the US; N = 1718), and examined the benefit...

The economy has been in downward movement in the past few years in the United States as well as different parts of the world. Consumers’ financial situations have been found to influence their purchase behaviors. While some personal finance experts blame consumers’ (lack of) spending plans for their financial situations, others suggest that consume...

The economy has been in downward movement in the past few years in the United States as well as different parts of the world. Consumers’ financial situations have been found to influence their purchase behaviors. While some personal finance experts blame consumers’ (lack of) spending plans for their financial situations, others suggest that consume...

The dynamic mediation model (Wilt, Noftle, Fleeson, & Spain, 2012) explains the associations between personality traits and happiness through links between personality states and daily well-being. To test this model, and the mediators of these relations, we examined if between- and within-person variation in personality was associated with daily we...

In an effort to provide a measure of time perspective that can be used across the life-span, we examined the psychometric properties of the Adolescent Time Inventory-Time Attitude Scale (ATI-TA; Mello & Worrell, 2007) in three independent samples of young (N = 388), middle (N = 201), and older adults (N = 189). Results provided strong psychometric...

Money management is essential for financial health, and more research is needed to better assess people’s money management practices. Therefore, we factor-analyzed 205 scaled questions from previous money management measures to select the best items and examined their internal consistency and convergent validity. Our resulting 18-item Brief Money M...

Current research on awe is limited to Western cultures. Thus, whether the measurement, frequency, and consequences of awe will replicate across non-Western cultures remains unanswered. To address this gap, we validated the dispositional awe scale (Shiota, Keltner, & John, 2006) in 4 countries (United States, Iran, Malaysia, and Poland; = 1,173) wit...

We propose that escape theory, which describes how individuals seek to free themselves from aversive states of self-awareness, helps explain key patterns of materialistic people's behavior. As predicted by escape theory, materialistic individuals may feel dissatisfied with their standard of living, cope with failed expectations and life stressors l...

In this chapter, we review the literature on the relations between time perspective and well-being. Time perspective is shown to be a stronger influence on individuals’ happiness than personality. The evidence we review suggests that time perspectives influence well-being through both direct and indirect pathways. The past time perspectives exert a...

The economy has been in downward movement in the past few years in the United States as well as different parts of the world. Consumers' financial situations have been found to influence their purchase behaviors. While some personal finance experts blame consumers' (lack of) spending plans for their financial situations, others suggest that consume...

Hedonism is the prioritizing of pleasure over other life values and is theorized to be independent of well-being. However, popular culture depicts hedonists as unhappy, as well as selfishly unconcerned with oth-ers' well-being. Because the current literature has not differentiated between people's value of pleasure and their maladaptive pursuit of...

Pro-social spending is associated with greater happiness than spending money on oneself (Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). However, research has yet to identify who is most likely to benefit from spending money on others, and why pro-social spending leads to greater happiness. The current study had two goals: (a) to examine whether values moderate the...

In spite of the experiential advantage, people consume material items in the pursuit of happiness. We conducted three studies to determine if people commit forecasting errors when deciding between purchasing life experiences and material items. Study 1a showed that people expect life experiences to result in more well-being, whereas material items...

Zimbardo and Boyd (1999) developed the 56-item Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI). It has become the leading measure used in the study of subjective time. In this article, we report an abbreviated ZTPI that only includes 15 total items (SZTPI-15). We tested the psychometric characteristics of the SZTPI-15 by focusing on: (a) convergent and...

Despite the presumed national economic benefits that result from high levels of discretionary spending, past studies suggest that material consumption decreases individual economic and subjective well-being. However, most research on the development of materialistic values has examined how persuasive materialistic messages cause materialism. We rec...

Although numerous studies have demonstrated the hedonic benefits of spending money on life experiences instead of material possessions, there has been no attempt to determine how different motivations for experiential consumption relate to psychological need satisfaction and well-being. Across five studies (N = 931), guided by self-determination th...

What kind of spending will increase happiness? There is growing support that spending discretionary money on experiential rather than material purchases leads to greater happiness. The purpose of this chapter is to review the intentional monetary activities that maximize happiness, economic value, and psychological needs. We determine the costs and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to validate a shortened measure of consumers’ satisfaction with the service quality at sporting events. The scale's ability to predict both customer satisfaction and future behavioral intentions is also measured. Design/methodology/approach – The measure, entitled Eventserv‐Short, was tested across the five m...

Religiosity has been found to be associated with lower alcohol use by college students. The majority of studies on this topic, however, fail to differentiate religiosity and spirituality. This is potentially problematic due to the changing face of religion in America today. A study was conducted to explore similarities and differences between self-...

The goals of this study were to determine the relations between having a balanced time perspective (BTP) with various measures of subjective well-being (SWB) and to test how various operationalizations of a BTP might impact the relation between having a BTP and SWB. We operationalized a balanced time perspective using: (a) Drake et al.’s Time Soc 1...

Because of the rich ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic diversity in Malaysia, a growing number of studies have investigated the subjective wellbeing of Malaysians. Also, the results from past studies suggest that Malaysians are, comparatively, a bit less happy than citizens in Western countries. We examined the average life satisfaction scor...

The most prominent theory to explain the curvilinear relationship between income and subjective well-being (SWB) is need theory, which proposes that increased income and wealth can lead to increased well-being in poverty because money is used to satisfy basic physiological needs. The present study tests the tenets of need theory by proposing that m...

The two strongest predictors of affect are extraversion and neuroticism. Previous research has demonstrated the extraversion-positive affect and neuroticism-negative affect relations are both strong and positively correlated. To explain these relations, researchers have hypothesized two extensions of the temperament model: the affect-level and affe...

In this study we compared the relationships between time perspectives, the Big Five personality traits, and life satisfaction. Our results replicated past work in that personality traits and time perspectives were both associated with life satisfaction. Individuals high on extraversion and those having a past positive and a present hedonism time pe...

Alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use pose serious health problems on college campuses. A significant body of research shows student religiosity to be a protective factor, but a very little research has examined influences of sexual identities on alcohol and other drug use among college students, and its associations with religious or spiritual iden...

Psychological well-being correlates positively with psychological need satisfaction—primarily the needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The current study explores momentary happiness (defined as experienced enjoyment minus experienced stress over the course of an hour) as a function of momentary psychological need satisfaction. Results de...

The present study investigates how the Big Five personality traits may play a role in explaining the negative association between maximization and well-being. Contrary to expectation that conscientiousness drives one’s tendency to maximize, neuroticism emerged as the strongest predictor. Further, when controlling for personality traits, the negativ...

Alcohol-related sexual assault on college campuses is a significant public health problem. Despite increased prevention efforts over the last two decades, rates of college binge drinking have changed little. The Core survey has been used at over 1000 colleges and universities to monitor the effectiveness of substance use prevention programs on coll...

Internet research is appealing because it is a cost- and time-efficient way to access a large number of participants; however, the validity of Internet research for important subjective well-being (SWB) surveys has not been adequately assessed. The goal of the present study was to validate the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Lar...

The Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory (SASSI) is a 10 scale indirect screening instrument used to detect substance use disorders. The current meta-analytic study described reliability reporting practices across 48 studies involving the SASSI. Reliability generalization methods were then employed to evaluate typical score reliability for th...

psychological well-being reduced the risk of mortality in both healthy population studies (n = 36 598; HR 0.82, 95% CI 0.76 to 0.89, p,0.001) and disease population studies (n = 15 711; HR 0.98, 95% CI 0.95 to 1.00, p,0.05). The results were similar when a positive affect was considered separately from positive trait-like disposition in the healthy...

Understanding score reliability is a necessary step in examining the validity of acculturation instruments. Thus, the authors evaluate the aggregate reliability of three multigroup, bidimensional acculturation instruments: General Ethnicity Questionnaire– Abridged, Stephenson Multigroup Acculturation Scale, and Vancouver Index of Acculturation. Rel...

This study describes the reliability reporting practices in empirical studies using eight adolescent alcohol screening tools and characterizes and explores variability in internal consistency estimates across samples. Of 119 observed administrations of these instruments, 40 (34%) reported usable reliability information. The Personal Experience Scre...

What do eyewitness identification experiments typically show? We address this question through a meta-analysis of 94 comparisons between target-present and target-absent lineups. The analyses showed that: (a) correct identifications and correct-nonidentifications were uncorrelated, (b) suspect identifications were more diagnostic with respect to th...

Meta-analytic reliability generalizations (RGs) are limited by the scarcity of reliability reporting in primary articles, and currently, RG investigators lack a method to quantify the impact of such nonreporting. This article introduces a stepwise procedure to address this challenge. First, the authors introduce a formula that allows researchers to...

This research synthesis integrates findings from 150 experimental, ambulatory and longitudinal studies that tested the impact of well-being on objective health outcomes. Results demonstrated that well-being positively impacts health outcomes (r=0.14). Well-being was found to be positively related to short-term health outcomes (r=0.15), long-term he...

Meta-analytic methods provide a framework around which an inquiry into MAST and SMAST score reliability was completed. Of the 470 measurement opportunities observed between 1971 and 2005, 62 (13.2%) were coupled with accurate reliability information. Weighted reliability estimates centered on .80 suggesting that the MAST and SMAST generally produce...

We have recently reported the role of environmental exposure in the ethnic diversity of bone mineral density (BMD). Potential genetic difference has not been adequately assessed. To determine allele frequencies of BMD-affecting genes and their association with BMD in Africans. Allele frequencies at 18 polymorphic sites in 13 genes that affect BMD i...

Recent studies investigating need theory and the extent to which money can buy happiness have called for more research within culturally homogeneous samples from developing countries to explore this relationship. We examine wealth as a measure of possessions and savings and relate this to subjective well-being (SWB) among poor indigenous farmers in...

Racial/ethnic difference in bone mineral density (BMD) exists. The underlying mechanism is unclear and needs investigation. To determine BMD and its relation to environmental exposure in recent African immigrants. BMD in recent sub-Saharan Sudanese immigrants (55 men and 88 premenopausal women) in the United States was measured. Analysis of covaria...