William Pavot

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor Emeritus at Southwest Minnesota State University

Research interest in topics such as happiness, the quality of life, and the experience of well-being has dramatically increased in the past four decades. Global measures of Subjective Well-Being (SWB) have long held a prominent position in this burgeoning body of research (Diener, 1984; Pavot, 2008). Despite their widespread acceptance and use, the...

In this chapter we suggest that “happiness,” or high subjective wellbeing, is more strongly associated with the frequency and duration of people’s positive feelings, not with the intensity of those feelings. People who rarely or never feel euphoria, for instance, can nonetheless report very high levels of well-being. We hypothesize that there are s...

Since its introduction in 1985, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 198569. Larsen , RJ , Diener , E and Emmons , RA . 1985. An evaluation of subjective well-being measures. Social Indicators Research, 17: 1–18. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]View all references) has been heavily used as a measure of...

The purpose of this paper is to trace the history of the social indicators or quality-of-life (QOL) research movement up to today, forecast future developments, and pave the way for future growth. Broadly speaking, we tried to review historical antecedents from the point of view of different disciplines, with specialists in each discipline preparin...

In recent years, a wealth of data focused on the perceived quality of life in adulthood has been produced. Strengthened by improved measures and methodologies, the findings from these research efforts have in some cases challenged, and in other cases confirmed, earlier conclusions regarding the experience of Subjective Well-Being (SWB) across the a...

This article introduces The Temporal Satisfaction With Life Scale (TSWLS), and reports data establishing its reliability and validity as a measure of life satisfaction. The addition of a temporal dimension allows the TSWLS to assess an individual's past, present, and future life satisfaction. Data relevant to reliability and validity of the TSWLS w...

The relationship between self-aspect congruence, subjective well-being (SWB), and personality was examined in two studies. In Study 1, the congruence between ‘real’ and ‘ought’ Q-sort self-descriptions was found to be positively related to measures of SWB and life satisfaction. Among the five personality factors of Costa and McCrae (1991), congruen...

Data from a 4-year longitudinal study of young adults were used to examine the causal pathways between personality and life events. To reduce measurement artifacts, analyses were conducted using reports of more objective life events. It was found that extraversion predisposed participants to experience more positive objective life events, whereas n...

The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) was developed to assess satisfaction with the respondent’s life as a whole. The scale does not assess satisfaction with life domains such as health or finances but allows subjects to integrate and weight these domains in whatever way they choose. Normative data are presented for the scale, which shows good co...

Researchers attempting to understand the experience of subjective well-being have relied heavily on self-report measurement. Recent research focused on this method has demonstrated that a number of factors, such as the current mood of the respondent and the cognitive and social context surrounding the response, can significantly influence response...

Recent work on subjective well-being has demonstrated that extraversion is a replicable correlate of emotional well-being (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1980; Emmons & Diener, 1985). In the present study, data from a national probability sample in the United States were used to explore whether extraverts report higher levles of subjective well-being regard...

Recent research indicates that happiness, or affective well-being, is related primarily to the frequency, not to the intensity, of positive affect (PA). The question arises as to why intense positive affect (PI) is not a larger contributor to subjective well-being. Whether processes that yield PI also produce intense negative affect was examined. S...

The structure of subjective well-being has been conceptualized as consisting of two major components: the emotional or affective component and the judgmental or cognitive component (Diener, 1984; Veenhoven, 1984). The judgmental component has also been conceptualized as life satisfaction (Andrews & Withey, 1976). Although the affective component of...

The degree to which response artifacts introduce error into self-report measures has long been a matter of concern in the psychological literature. For example, it has been suggested that self-report measures of subjective well-being (SWB) contain large amounts of variance due to the response style of social desirability (Carstensen and Cone, 1983)...

The relationship between extraversion and happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) is one of the most consistently replicated and robust findings in the SWB literature. The present study was conducted in order to examine three key aspects of the relationship: (1) Whether it is primarily substantive in nature, or a product of self-report response ar...