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The Assessment of Happiness in Adults and Children
Abstract
There is no consensus on the single best practice to assess subjective well-being including happiness. As a result, researchers typically employ several measures. The most common approach is to use self-reports and other reports to estimate well-being, including happiness. These measures can be single or multi-item measures, and they usually correlate well. Additional methods include the Experience Sampling Method which typically uses some form of a pager to signal participants at random times throughout each day over a period of a week or two. When paged, the participants rate their current levels of well-being as well as some additional information (e.g., who they are with and what they are doing). Alternatively, the Day Reconstruction Method requires participants to systematically reconstruct from memory their previous day, reporting their activities and experiences. Because self-report and other report measures are vulnerable to response biases, positive psychologists are also attempting to develop implicit measures (i.e., disguised measures) and biological assays.
... Self-esteem has been linked to happiness and life-satisfaction from childhood to late adulthood (Diener et al., 2003;Holder, 2012). Various studies, in fact, have found that variables associated with positive mood, such as extraversion and sociability, positive cognitive factors, such as feeling competent and having a purpose, and positive self-concept such as. ...
This study examines how family functioning, the parent-child relationship and personal factors are related to happiness in 1549 children aged 7 to 14 years old (53% females) in Italy. Children and pre-adolescents completed a set of questionnaires on self-rated happiness, self-concept and loneliness. At least one of their parents filled in questionnaires on family functioning, attachment and their child's happiness level. No gender differences were found in the direct measure of happiness, but younger participants were happier than older participants, according to both the children's and parents' evaluations. Happiness is influenced by positive self-concept, self-esteem and low levels of satisfaction but family functioning does not seem to play a major role. The clinical and social implications of the study are discussed.
... (2) bajos niveles de afecto negativo y (3) evaluación afectiva de las propias emociones positivas, dentro de las cuales se incluye la noción de felicidad (Holder, 2012). La felicidad es el componente que más se refiere a una evaluación afectiva global de la propia situación de vida (DeNeve & Cooper, 1998), así, esta variable resulta adecuada como un indicador del bienestar subjetivo en los niños para explorar sus asociaciones con las estrategias cognitivas de regulación emocional. ...
Synchrony effects regarding mood diurnal fluctuations (i.e., better mood at optimal and worse mood at suboptimal times-of-day, corresponding to the interaction between chronotype* time-of-day) have been studied in adolescents and adults. However, evidence in children is lacking. We investigated the interactive effect of chronotype and time-of-day on primary school children’s momentary emotional states, in a naturalistic setting. From an initial pool of 298 3rd/4th graders (7–11 years-old), 134 Morning (M)-type and Evening (E)-type children were selected using the parental-report Children ChronoType Questionnaire (CCTQ). Potential covariates were assessed based on parental questionnaires. Students completed emotional states’ measures on the first (9 a.m.) and last lessons (4 p.m.) of the school day, in a counterbalanced order. Given the intercorrelations between emotional measures, a composite score of momentary emotional states was determined. There was a small-to-moderate significant interactive effect of chronotype*time-of-day in the overall momentary emotional states score. M/E-types showed better overall momentary emotional states when tested at their optimal time-of-day. Chronotype or time-of-day main effects were non-significant, and the overall momentary emotional states score did not correlate with sleep or psychopathological symptoms. In the present study, children overall momentary emotional states in a naturalistic setting varied depending on chronotype combined with time-of-day.
College students, especially women, demonstrated negativity toward math and science relative to arts and language on implicit measures. Group membership (being female), group identity (self = female), and gender stereotypes (math = male) were related to attitudes and identification with mathematics. Stronger implicit math = male stereotypes corresponded with more negative implicit and explicit math attitudes for women but more positive attitudes for men. Associating the self with female and math with male made it difficult for women, even women who had selected math-intensive majors, to associate math with the self. These results point to the opportunities and constraints on personal preferences that derive from membership in social groups.
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 convergent validity with other scales and with other types of assessments of subjective well-being. Life satisfaction as assessed by the SWLS shows a degree of temporal stability (e.g., 54 for 4 years), yet the SWLS has shown sufficient sensitivity to be potentially valuable to detect change in life satisfaction during the course of clinical intervention. Further, the scale shows discriminant validity from emotional well-being measures. The SWLS is recommended as a complement to scales that focus on psychopathology or emotional well-being because it assesses an individuals’ conscious evaluative judgment of his or her life by using the person’s own criteria.
Under some conditions, cheerfulness promotes health, but cheerfulness also has been associated with unfavorable health outcomes. This study follows up the inverse relation between childhood cheerfulness and longevity found among 1,215 men and women first assessed as children by Lewis Terman in 1922. Risky hobbies, smoking, drinking, and obesity, as well as cause of death, are examined, along with adulthood personality and adjustment. Several hypotheses about mediating variables can be eliminated by these analyses; these data do hint, however, that cheerful children grow up to be more careless about their health. Although correlational and survival analyses suggest that health behaviors play a role, they are unable to explain the observed cheerfulness-mortality link, thus supporting the idea that cheerfulness is multifaceted and should not be assumed to be related to health in a simple manner.
OVERVIEW Socially desirable responding (SDR) is typically defined as the tendency to give positive self-descriptions . Its status as a response style rests on the clarification of an underlying psychological construct. A brief history of such attempts is provided . Despite the growing consensus that there are two dimensions of SDR, their interpretation has varied over the years from minimalist operationalizations to elaborate construct validation . I argue for the necessity of demonstrating departure-from-reality in the self-reports of high SDR scorers : This criterion is critical for distinguishing SDR from related constructs. An appropriate methodology that operationalizes SDR directly in terms of self-criterion discrepancy is described. My recent work on this topic has evolved into a two-tiered taxonomy that crosses degree of awareness (conscious vs . unconscious) with content (agentic vs . communal qualities) . Sufficient research on SDR constructs has accumulated to propose a broad reconciliation and integration .
One of the most reliable and perplexing findings from surveys of
sexual behavior is that men report substantially more sexual partners
than women do. We use data from national sex surveys and studies of
prostitutes and their clients in the United States to examine sampling
bias as an explanation for this disparity. We find that prostitute
women are underrepresented in the national surveys. Once their
undersampling and very high numbers of sexual partners are factored in,
the discrepancy disappears. Prostitution's role in the discrepancy is
not readily apparent because men are reluctant to acknowledge that
their reported partners include prostitutes.
This study examined the accuracy of measuring happiness by a single item (Do you feel happy in general?) answered on an 11-point scale (0-10). Its temporal stability was 0.86. The correlations between the single item and both the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI; Argyle, Martin, & Lu, 1995; Hills & Argyle, 1998) and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985; Pavot & Diener, 1993) were highly significant and positive, denoting good concurrent validity. Moreover, the single item had a good convergent validity because it was highly and positively correlated with optimism, hope, self-esteem, positive affect, extraversion, and self-ratings of both physical and mental health. Furthermore, the divergent validity of the single item has been adequately demonstrated through its significant and negative correlations with anxiety, pessimism, negative affect, and insomnia. It was concluded that measuring happiness by a single item is reliable, valid, and viable in community surveys as well as in cross-cultural comparisons.
The Implicit Association Test, developed by Greenwald and colleagues in 1998, was adapted to measure satisfaction with life by assessing the strength of automatic associations of My life with Good- versus Bad-related words. A series of studies explored some psychometric as well as methodological properties of the Implicit Life Satisfaction measure (ILS). The ILS demonstrated good internal consistency and moderate temporal stability. Studies revealed that: (i) the type of stimuli used for target and attribute categories influences the magnitude of the ILS effect; (ii) participants could voluntarily suppress their satisfaction with life on the ILS, but not enhance it; and (iii) handedness of categories did not affect the participants’ performance on the ILS. Overall, the ILS measures are: (i) independent of traditional life satisfaction self-report measures; and (ii) positive for most people.
J. Millham and L. I. Jacobson's (1978) 2-factor model of socially desirable responding based on denial and attribution components is reviewed and disputed. A 2nd model distinguishing self-deception and impression management components is reviewed and shown to be related to early factor-analytic work on desirability scales. Two studies, with 511 undergraduates, were conducted to test the model. A factor analysis of commonly used desirability scales (e.g., Lie scale of the MMPI, Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale) revealed that the 2 major factors were best interpreted as Self-Deception and Impression Management. A 2nd study employed confirmatory factor analysis to show that the attribution/denial model does not fit the data as well as the self-deception/impression management model. A 3rd study, with 100 Ss, compared scores on desirability scales under anonymous and public conditions. Results show that those scales that had loaded highest on the Impression Management factor showed the greatest mean increase from anonymous to public conditions. It is recommended that impression management, but not self-deception, be controlled in self-reports of personality. (54 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Using a ''subjectivist'' approach to the assessment of happiness, a new 4-item measure of global subjective happiness was developed and validated in 14 studies with a total of 2 732 participants. Data was collected in the United States from students on two college campuses and one high school campus, from community adults in two California cities, and from older adults. Students and community adults in Moscow, Russia also participated in this research. Results indicated that the Subjective Happiness Scale has high internal consistency, which was found to be stable across samples. Test-retest and self-peer correlations suggested good to excellent reliability, and construct validation studies of convergent and discriminant validity confirmed the use of this scale to measure the construct of subjective happiness. The rationale for developing a new measure of happiness, as well as advantages of this scale, are discussed.
The relation between temperament and happiness was assessed in 311 children aged 9–12. Parents rated their children’s temperament
using the Emotionality, Activity, and Sociability Temperament Survey (EAS) and rated their children’s happiness. Children
rated their own temperament using the EAS and the Piers–Harris Self Concept Scale for Children Second Edition, and they rated
their own happiness using a single-item measure, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire Short Form, and the Subjective Happiness
Scale. Parents’ and children’s temperament ratings conformed to the four factor structure proposed by Buss and Plomin(Temperament:
Early developing personality traits, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, 1984) supporting the use of children’s self-reports as an additional measure of temperament. Temperament accounted for between
9 and 29% of the variance in children’s happiness depending on the measures. Children who were more social and active, and
less shy, emotional, and anxious were happier. These results parallel the well-established relation between happiness and
personality in adults; temperament traits akin to extraversion (Sociability) were positively associated with happiness whereas
traits akin to neuroticism (Emotionality) were negatively associated with happiness. Additionally, children who were rated
higher in the temperament trait Activity were happier.
KeywordsHappiness-Temperament-Personality-Children-Well-being
A large group of infants from a longitudinal study of mother–infant interaction was assessed using the Carey Infant Temperament Questionnaire (ITQ) at 6 months of life. Temperament diagnoses of “easy,” “intermediate low,” “intermediate high,” and “difficult” were derived from the ITQ dimension scores, and were related to a variety of maternal characteristics and attitudes measured at the infant’s third postnatal month as well as to behaviors observed during feeding and play interactions at the infant’s sixth postnatal month. The only significant relationships were between the ITQ diagnostic categories and maternal variables measured at 3 months. Maternal characteristics and attitudes were related more frequently to maternal behavior at 6 months than to infant behavior. It is concluded that, for this sample, the Carey ITQ is an assessment of maternal characteristics as well as of maternal perceptions of infant temperament.
Measurement of affective states in everyday life is of fundamental importance in many types of quality of life, health, and psychological research. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is the recognized method of choice, but the respondent burden can be high. The day reconstruction method (DRM) was developed by Kahneman and colleagues (Science, 2004, 306, 1776-1780) to assess affect, activities and time use in everyday life. We sought to validate DRM affect ratings by comparison with contemporaneous EMA ratings in a sample of 94 working women monitored over work and leisure days. Six EMA ratings of happiness, tiredness, stress, and anger/frustration were obtained over each 24 h period, and were compared with DRM ratings for the same hour, recorded retrospectively at the end of the day. Similar profiles of affect intensity were recorded with the two techniques. The between-person correlations adjusted for attenuation ranged from 0.58 (stress, working day) to 0.90 (happiness, leisure day). The strength of associations was not related to age, educational attainment, or depressed mood. We conclude that the DRM provides reasonably reliable estimates both of the intensity of affect and variations in affect over the day, so is a valuable instrument for the measurement of everyday experience in health and social research.
The validity of self‐report measures of subjective well‐being (SWB) was examined and compared with non‐self‐report measures using a sample of 136 college students studied over the course of a semester. A principal axis factor analysis of self‐ and non‐self‐report SWB measures revealed a single unitary construct underlying the measures. Conventional single‐item and multi‐item self‐report measures correlated highly with alternative measures, with theoretical correlates of SWB, and with a principal axis factor underlying five non‐self‐report measures of well‐being. Comparisons of family versus friend informant reports demonstrated the considerable cross‐situational consistency and temporal stability of SWB. Evidence of the discriminant validity of the measures was provided by low correlations of the various SWB measures with constructs theoretically unrelated to well‐being. It was concluded that conventional self‐report instruments validly measure the SWB construct, and that alternative, non‐serf‐report measures are useful for providing a comprehensive theoretical account of happiness and life satisfaction.
Eighteen years of research using the Happiness Measures (HM) is reviewed in relation to the general progress of well-being measurement efforts. The accumulated findings on this remarkably quick instrument, show good reliability, exceptional stability, and a record of convergent, construct, and discriminative validity unparalleled in the field. Because of this, the HM is offered as a potential touchstone of measurement consistency in a field which generally lacks it.
Traditional religion is often assumed to contribute to partner abuse, although empirical tests of this assumption have been hampered by coarse measurement of religion, socially desirable responding, and neglect of contextual moderators, such as whether an abuse victim's behavior upholds or violates religious values. In an attempt to address these issues, we asked 90 undergraduates to complete measures of religious orientation, then read about a woman who was abused by her boyfriend after she refused his marriage proposal because she wished not to marry outside her faith (value-affirming), was not sure that she loved him (value-neutral), or thought that she might be a lesbian (value-violating). Intrinsic religious orientation predicted liking for the victim and justification of her behavior when she upheld religious values, whereas it predicted liking for the abuser and sympathetic attributions for his behavior when the victim violated religious values. Thus, whether religion discourages or encourages tolerance for abuse may depend on who is being abused.
Participation in the diverse institutional spheres of industrial society requires that individuals coordinate their competing obligations in varying ways at different stages of the life cycle. Because of the rigidity of the work commitments of males it seems that they tend to change their definitions of happiness, rather than their behaviors. Happiness is constantly redefined to be consistent with one's positions in the different institutional spheres. During the stage of being a parent to young and school-age children, men tend to define happiness in terms of family life. During earlier and later family stages men look beyond the family for sources of satisfaction. Using a national probability sample, items reflecting satisfaction with a variety of institutional areas were correlated with a measure of overall happiness for each of six family stages. It was found that the principal correlates of happiness vary as one proceeds through the family life cycle.
Level of agreement between self-reports and other-reports obtained from a large two-wave study of older adults was examined. Various measures of subjective well-being (affect, happiness, and life satisfaction) and behavioral manifestations (smoking and sleep quality) were assessed. Results indicate that the SWB measures were highly stable over a 9-month period, and that good agreement between the self- and other-reports was found for the SWB measures. In addition, SWB was related to behavioral manifestations and that these ratings were corroborated through the other-reports. This study furthers the support for the reliability of SWB over time and advances the criterion validity of SWB measures through use of collateral assessments.
This paper reports the findings from two studies which examined the tendency of sexually-active college students to provide socially desirable (i.e., positively biased) responses to questions concerning condom use. The first study found that while female attitudes toward condom use and intentions to use a condom were not associated with social desirability, such attitudes and intentions were significantly related to two measures of impression management for males. The second study attempted to identify conditions under which the relationship between condom use responses and impression management might be attenuated. Specifically, we tested whether participants would report more negative attitudes toward using condoms, and weaker behavioral intentions, when questionnaire instructions emphasized (1) participant anonymity, (2) the scientific importance of obtaining accurate responses, or (3) a combination of these two instructional sets. Results suggest that, compared to a no-instruction control group, self-reported male attitude toward and intention regarding condom use become more negative when anonymity is stressed. Female responses were unaffected by any of the instruction sets compared to the control group. The two studies provide converging evidence that college males positively bias their responses to questions regarding condom use, and suggest the need for further research on the attenuation of such misrepresentation.
In the study of self-concept, as in many other areas of psychological research, poor measurement is often a weak link connecting theory, empirical research, and practice. The multidimensionality of self-concept typically is emphasized in most theoretical accounts, but until recently this multidimensionality has not been well represented in the most widely used instruments. The purpose of our investigation is to test the construct validity of preadolescent children's responses to three instruments that are claimed to measure multiple dimensions of self-concept (e.g., physical, social, and academic):Marsh's (1988)Self-Description Questionnaire I (SDQI),Harter's (1979)Perceived Competence Scale (PCS), and the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scales (PH) (Piers, 1984). Tests of this multidimensionality included factor analyses, multitrait-multimethod analyses, and patterns of correlations with academic achievement. Also included was an examination of the use of negatively scored items. The findings strongly supported the SDQI, reasonably supported the PCS, and weakly supported the PH.
To consciously bolster behaviour that is disapproved by others (i.e., stigmatised behaviour) people may hold and report a favourable attitude toward the behaviour. However, achieving such bolstering outside awareness may be more difficult. Explicit attitudes were measured with self-report measures, and the Implicit Association Test was used to assess implicit attitudes toward behaviour held by stigmatised actors (smokers) and nonstigmatised actors (vegetarians and omnivores). Smokers' showed greater attitude-behaviour consistency in their explicit attitudes toward smoking that in their implicit attitudes. By contrast, vegetarians and omnivores showed attitude-behaviour-consistency at both implicit and explicit levels. Smokers' implicit negative attitudes toward smoking may reflect its status as a stigmatised behaviour, or its addictive nature.
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 reveal that happiness and life satisfaction are similarly available to the young and the old, women and men, blacks and whites, the rich and the working-class Better clues to well-being come from knowing about a person's traits, close relationships, work experiences, culture, and religiosity We present the elements of an appraisal-based theory of happiness that recognizes the importance of adaptation, cultural world-view, and personal goals
Past research on cross-cultural psychology has shown that North Americans have self-enhancing attitudes, evaluating themselves more favorably than others, including friends. The present research identifies a discrepancy — this self-enhancement in relation to friends did not appear when measured implicitly. Using American and Japanese university students as subjects, the present studies investigated responses to explicit (self-report) and implicit measures (the Implicit Association Test) toward three targets: self, best friends, and fellow university students. Results revealed that North Americans showed more positive implicit attitudes toward best friends than toward self, a very different pattern from the explicit results. For the Japanese, best friends were evaluated slightly more positively than the self on implicit measures, which contrasted with previous findings with explicit measures that showed best friends being evaluated more positively.
This study was designed to explore preadolescent children's body image dissatisfaction and to identify psychometrically sound measures of dissatisfaction for this population. Participants were 109 male and 95 female elementary school students ranging from 8 to 10 years of age. Children completed Child Figure Drawings, a revised version of the Body Dissatisfaction scale of the Eating Disorder Inventory (Revised EDI-BD), Anxiety and Happiness and Satisfaction subscales of the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale, and the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI), and each child's gender, race, height, and weight were also recorded. The Child Figure Drawings and the Revised EDI-BD were readministered after 2 to 3 weeks. The Revised EDI-BD emerged as a psychometrically sound measure of body dissatisfaction within this age range. Girls demonstrated significantly higher levels of body dissatisfaction and lower levels of self-esteem than boys. The results are discussed in terms of the development and implications of body dissatisfaction in preadolescent children.
Compared to conventional interviewer-administered questions about attendance at religious services, self-administered items and time-use items should minimize social desirability pressures. In fact, they each reduce claims of weekly religious attendance by about one-third. This difference in measurement approach does not generally affect associations between attendance and demographic characteristics. It does, however, alter the observed trend in religious attendance over time: In contrast to the almost constant attendance rate recorded by conventional interviewer-administered items, approaches minimizing social desirability bias reveal that weekly attendance has declined continuously over the past three decades. These results provide support for the hypothesis that America has become more secularized, and they demonstrate the role of mode of administration in reducing measurement error.
This article discusses the need for more satisfactory implicit measures in consumer psychology and assesses the theoretical foundations, validity, and value of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of implicit consumer social cognition. Study 1 demonstrates the IAT's sen-sitivity to explicit individual differences in brand attitudes, ownership, and usage frequency, and shows their correlations with IAT-based measures of implicit brand attitudes and brand re-lationship strength. In Study 2, the contrast between explicit and implicit measures of attitude toward the ad for sportswear advertisements portraying African American (Black) and Euro-pean American (White) athlete-spokespersons revealed different patterns of responses to ex-plicit and implicit measures in Black and White respondents. These were explained in terms of self-presentation biases and system justification theory. Overall, the results demonstrate that the IAT enhances our understanding of consumer responses, particularly when consumers are either unable or unwilling to identify the sources of influence on their behaviors or opinions.
Prior research has not concurred on whether withdrawn children are at-risk for maladjustment, and therefore whether intervention is of value to them. The present study hypothesized that when assessing possible future maladjustment one must look not only at introversion but also emotional stability (neuroticism). Participants were 243 grade 7 and 8 students identified by self-report measures as stable introverts, stable extroverts, unstable introverts, and unstable extroverts. Results confirm that unstable introverts regarded themselves as less happy and popular than other subjects. They saw themselves as less academically self-efficacious than extroverts and emotionally stable, introverted adolescents. Introverts and unstable adolescents regarded themselves as less socially self-efficacious than extroverts or stable children. The results in general suggest that it is not simply introversion that determines negative social consequences, but that emotional stability or neuroticism must also be considered and that unstable introverts may be more likely than stable introverts to suffer from maladjustment. The findings may help psychologists, teachers, and counsellors determine which socially withdrawn children benefit from intervention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The pursuit of happiness is an important goal for many people. However, surprisingly little scientific research has focused on the question of how happiness can be increased and then sustained, probably because of pessimism engendered by the concepts of genetic determinism and hedonic adaptation. Nevertheless, emerging sources of optimism exist regarding the possibility of permanent increases in happiness. Drawing on the past well-being literature, the authors propose that a person's chronic happiness level is governed by 3 major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness-relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant activities and practices. The authors then consider adaptation and dynamic processes to show why the activity category offers the best opportunities for sustainably increasing happiness. Finally, existing research is discussed in support of the model, including 2 preliminary happiness-increasing interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study demonstrates the potential utility of the Behavioural Style Observational System (BSOS) as a new observational measure of children's behavioural style. The BSOS is an objective, short and easy to use measure that can be readily adapted to a variety of home and laboratory situations. In the present study, 160 mother–child dyads from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project (CLRP) were observed during an 11-min behavioural sample. Videotaped interactions were coded using the BSOS for children's mood, activity level, vocal reactivity, approach to toys, mood consistency and adaptability. Comparisons between the BSOS observational ratings and mothers' ratings of the child on the EAS Temperament Survey (EAS) provided support for modest congruence between these two measurement systems, and revealed a differential predictive pattern of children's functioning. Specifically, the observation-based BSOS predicted children's cognitive performance and adaptive behaviour during testing, whereas the mother-rated EAS predicted maternal ratings of children's internalizing and externalizing behaviour problems. Both measures were found to independently predict mothers' ratings of parenting stress. Overall, the findings imply that neither observational measures nor maternal ratings alone are sufficient to understand children's behavioural style, and that comprehensive evaluations of children's temperament should optimally include both types of measures. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Social desirability is one of the most common sources of bias affecting the validity of experimental and survey research findings. From a self-presentational perspective, social desirability can be regarded as the resultant of two separate factors: self-deception and other-deception. Two main modes of coping with social desirability bias are distinguished. The first mode comprises two methods aimed at the detection and measurement of social desirability bias: the use of social desirability scales, and the rating of item desirability. A second category comprises seven methods to prevent or reduce social desirability bias, including the use of forced-choice items, the randomized response technique, the bogus pipeline, self-administration of the questionnaire, the selection of interviewers, and the use of proxy subjects. Not one method was found to excel completely and under all conditions in coping with both other-deceptive and self-deceptive social desirability bias. A combination of prevention and detection methods offers the best choice available.
The current study examined the validity of a happiness Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of SWB. One hundred and fifty participants (75 pairs of friends) completed a newly developed happiness IAT and a standard self-esteem IAT. Participants also made self and informant ratings of life satisfaction and happy and sad affect. The results revealed convergent validity among the explicit measures, and among the implicit measures. Explicit–implicit correlations were lower. Self-ratings (.88) and informant ratings (.78) were more highly related with a common SWB factor than the implicit measures (.31). This finding suggests that implicit measures of well-being and happiness assess a different construct that overlaps only modestly with SWB. As a result, these implicit measures have limited utility to control for response styles in self-ratings of SWB.
Subjective well-being (SWB) comprises people's longer-term levels of pleasant affect, lack of unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction. It displays moderately high levels of cross-situational consistency and temporal stability. Self-report measures of SWB show adequate validity, reliability, factor invariance, and sensitivity to change. Despite the success of the measures to date, more sophisticated approaches to defining and measuring SWB are now possible. Affect includes facial, physiological, motivational, behavioral, and cognitive components. Self-reports assess primarily the cognitive component of affect, and thus are unlikely to yield a complete picture of respondents' emotional lives. For example, denial may influence self-reports of SWB more than other components. Additionally, emotions are responses which vary on a number of dimensions such as intensity, suggesting that mean levels of affect as captured by existing measures do not give a complete account of SWB. Advances in cognitive psychology indicate that differences in memory retrieval, mood as information, and scaling processes can influence self-reports of SWB. Finally, theories of communication alert us to the types of information that are likely to be given in self-reports of SWB. These advances from psychology suggest that a multimethod approach to assessing SWB will create a more comprehensive depiction of the phenomenon. Not only will a multifaceted test battery yield more credible data, but inconsistencies between various measurement methods and between the various components of well-being will both help us better understand SWB indictors and group differences in well-being. Knowledge of cognition, personality, and emotion will also aid in the development of sophisticated theoretical definitions of subjective well-being. For example, life satisfaction is theorized to be a judgment that respondents construct based on currently salient information. Finally, it is concluded that measuring negative reactions such as depression or anxiety give an incomplete picture of people's well-being, and that it is imperative to measure life satisfaction and positive emotions as well.
The relation between temperament and happiness was assessed in a sample of 441 children aged 7–14 years drawn from a population
in Northern India. Parents assessed their children’s happiness and rated their children’s temperament using the Emotionality,
Activity, and Sociability Temperament Survey (EAS). Children self-reported their own happiness using a single-item measure,
the Oxford Happiness Scale Short Form, and the Subjective Happiness Scale. Parents’ temperament ratings conformed to the four
factor structure proposed by Buss and Plomin (Temperament: early developing personality traits. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Hillsdale, 1984): Emotionality, Activity, Sociability, and Shyness. Temperament accounted for between 4 and 11% of the variance in children’s
happiness depending on the measures. Children who were more social and active, and less shy, were happier. This result parallels
the well-established relation between happiness and personality in adults and is similar to recent research on happiness and
temperament in children; temperament traits akin to extraversion were positively associated with happiness. However, despite
that neuroticism and its temperament counterpart are strongly and consistently linked to happiness in adults, the relation
between happiness and the temperament trait associated with neuroticism (i.e., Emotionality) was weak. This suggests that
the relations between temperament and happiness in children may not completely generalize across cultures.
This study examines the impact of a social desirability response bias as a personality characteristic (self-deception and impression management) and as an item characteristic (perceived desirability of the behavior) on self-reported ethical conduct. Findings from a sample of college students revealed that self-reported ethical conduct is associated with both personality and item characteristics, with perceived desirability of behavior having the greatest influence on self-reported conduct. Implications for research in business ethics are drawn, and suggestions are offered for reducing the effects of a socially desirable response bias.
The present investigation evaluated the relationship between measures of psychological well-being and social desirability in three age groups: 21–40, 41–60, and 61–82 year-old samples. Data on 330 people, consisting of community and clinical groups, yielded high correlations between three measures of well-being (the MUNSH, the LSI-Z, and the PGC) and the Edwards Social Desirability Scale for all age groups, but only moderate ones between well-being scales and the Marlow-Crown Social Desirability Scale. Partial correlations between well-being measures and an external criterion of happiness, controlling for social desirability, failed to improve on the 0-order criterion/well-being relationship. Controlling for social desirability, therefore, does not enhance the construct validity of well-being scales in adult populations at any age. These results, combined with those on the factor structure of scale totals and on the discriminant validity of the well-being measures, suggest that the high 0-order correlations between measures of well-being and the Edwards scale are more readily attributed to content similarity between the Edwards scale and measures of well-being than to a social desirability response bias in well-being measures.
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). In the present study, four potential response artifacts (social desirability, current mood, moral beliefs about happiness, and happiness image management) and their effects on self reports of SWB were studied. Using nonself-report measures of happiness, in addition to self-report measures of SWB, various modes for the prediction of SWB were constructed. A measure of social desirability was found to be a significant predictor of nonself-report as well as self-reported measures of happiness, indicating that social desirability is a substantive personality characteristic which enhances well-being, rather than being a response artifact and source of error variance. Current mood was found to sometimes contribute as a predictor of self-report measures of SWB, suggesting the need for control of or assessment of its effects. Moral beliefs in happiness and image management did not significantly correlate with measures of happiness. Implications of the results for the measurement of well-being and for future research are discussed.
A large animal literature implicates serotonin (5-HT) in the modulation of positive and negative affective behavior. In contrast, data from human studies almost exclusively emphasize 5-HT modulation of negative emotional processing. However, no previous studies have directly assessed the relation between 5-HT functioning and positive (PA) and negative (NA) affect. The present investigation tested whether individual differences in 5-HT functioning correlate with PA and NA ratings in a group of healthy subjects. Thirty-one psychiatrically healthy males completed separate assessments of affect and 5-HT functioning. Affect was examined with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule rated three times a day for two work-weeks. 5-HT functioning was indexed by the maximum prolactin response to d,l-fenfluramine. The prolactin response to d,l-fenfluramine demonstrated a significant inverse correlation with mean ratings of both PA (r=−0.49; p<0.005) and NA (r=−0.42; p<0.05). These data provide evidence that 5-HT exerts an inhibitory influence over both PA and NA in humans, such that individual differences in 5-HT functioning inversely correlate with ratings of affect.
An improved instrument, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), has been derived from the Oxford Happiness Inventory, (OHI). The OHI comprises 29 items, each involving the selection of one of four options that are different for each item. The OHQ includes similar items to those of the OHI, each presented as a single statement which can be endorsed on a uniform six-point Likert scale. The revised instrument is compact, easy to administer and allows endorsements over an extended range. When tested against the OHI, the validity of the OHQ was satisfactory and the associations between the scales and a battery of personality variables known to be associated with well-being, were stronger for the OHQ than for the OHI. Although parallel factor analyses of OHI and the OHQ produced virtually identical statistical results, the solution for the OHQ could not be interpreted. The previously reported factorisability of the OHI may owe more to the way the items are formatted and presented, than to the nature of the items themselves. Sequential orthogonal factor analyses of the OHQ identified a single higher order factor, which suggests that the construct of well-being it measures is uni-dimensional. Discriminant analysis has been employed to produce a short-form version of the OHQ with eight items.
This commentary raises conceptual issues related to recent efforts to develop measures of subjective well-being (SWB). Specifically, Hills’ and Argyle's (2002) article on the development of the 29-item Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), and its predecessor, the 20-item Oxford Happiness Inventory (Argyle, Martin & Crossland, 1989). Instead of assessing the structure of subjective well-being (SWB), items of the OHQ tap into self-esteem, sense of purpose, social interest and kindness, sense of humor, and aesthetic appreciation. The item content of the OHQ fails to differentiate the assessment of SWB from the predictors, correlates, and consequences of SWB. In contrast to published SWB findings with other measures, data are presented suggesting that the OHQ has artificially inflated correlations with those constructs tapped by the OHQ: self-esteem, sense of purpose, and social interest/extraversion. The operationalization of SWB by the OHQ is not based on relevant definition and theory and appears to invite nonrandom error into the study of SWB. The article concludes with an appeal for the use of more stringent conceptual and analytic approaches.
A comparative study has been made of the positive moods generated by four common leisure activities: sport/exercise, music, church and watching TV soaps. Some 275 participants whose ages ranged from 18 to 82 were invited to indicate the intensity of their personal, positive feelings for the items of four measures designed to be representative of each of the activities. It was found that each activity was a significant source of positive moods. Factor analysis of the measures showed that they each contained a strong social component, as well as a factor characteristic of each activity. Using the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI) as a measure of happiness, only sport/exercise appeared to result in increased happiness, and the reasons for this are explained in terms of the several components of the OHI. The associations of each of the activities with the Eysenck personality traits as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) were also examined and the most frequent association is with extraversion. Church membership is atypical, in that church members exhibit significantly lower scores for psychoticism (tough mindedness) and higher lie-scale scores (social conformity).
A meta-analysis of the efficacy of five selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) against non-selective and noradrenergic re-uptake inhibitors (mainly tricyclic antidepressants, TCAs) is presented. Fifty five double- blind studies were identified after excluding those multiply reported or with methodological problems likely to bias the outcome in favour of SSRIs. Standardised effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals were calculated based on the difference in the reduction in mean Hamilton depression rating scale (HDRS) scores for the two antidepressants. For studies not reporting standard deviations, the pooled variance from complete studies was used and a variance-weighted mean effect size calculated. There were no differences in efficacy between SSRIs and comparator antidepressants for SSRIs taken together or individually. If studies were classified into high and low depression scores based on a median split of initial HDRS scores, there was a slight advantage to TCAs in the high HDRS group. In addition, SSRIs were slightly less effective than TCAs in in-patients and against combined serotonin and noradrenaline re-uptake inhibitors (clomipramine and amitriptyline). These findings were accounted for by a clinically significant lower efficacy of paroxetine in these subgroups. In contrast, SSRIs as a group were marginally more effective than noradrenergic antidepressants, a finding accounted for by two studies with sertraline. Fluvoxamine was the only SSRI to have been tested adequately in in-patients, where it displayed equal efficacy to TCAs. This meta-analysis confirms that SSRIs and TCAs are in general equally effective, but suggests that paroxetine's efficacy in in-patients and against clomipramine and amitriptyline is not proven.
This paper outlines a theory of global traits based on the seminal writings of Gordon Allport and 50 years of subsequent empirical research. Personality research needs to refocus on global traits because such traits are an important part of everyday social discourse, because they embody a good deal of folk wisdom and common sense, because understanding and evaluating trait judgments can provide an important route toward the improvement of social judgment, and because global traits offer legitimate, if necessarily incomplete, explanations of behavior. A substantial body of evidence supporting the existence of global traits includes personality correlates of behavior, interjudge agreement in personality ratings, and the longitudinal stability of personality over time. Future research should clarify the origins of global traits, the dynamic mechanisms though which they influence behavior, and the behavioral cues through which they can most accurately be judged.