Science of happiness samenvatting (9.8)

Virtue (relats to EWB)= morally good. They are good characteristic or habit. Like
conscientiousness bravery justice .
Concept most frequently used to indicate hedonic well-being is subjective well-
being
 Even though subjective well-being encompasses a broader range of
experiences than simple hedonic pleasure, inl values, goals and need
fullfilmnt, subjective well-being is seen as the hedonic side
 Hedonic=presence positive, absence negative
Flourishing= expressing high levels of hedonic and eudoimonic well-being
Psychological well-being -> eudaimonic mostly, whereas subjective -> hedonic


Week 1
Article 1 (Lucas,2018): reevaluating the strengts and weaknesses of self-report
measure of subjective well-being
Main points
 Well-being= subjective evaluation of live as whole
 Self-report only measure for subjective well-being
 Underlies certain limitations (e.g. judgement), but generally psychometric
properties (validity and reliability) are quite good
Intro
 Different life circumstances are likely to affect different people in different
ways, depending on the value a person weight on it,
 Subjective well-being fousses on these differences: it is the subjective
evaluation of life as a whole
o Own evaluation is prioritized
o Acknowledges that different people can evaluate the same life
circumstance I different ways
o Acknowledges that different life domains are different in value for
people
o Life as whole definition
 Total of ones experiences and circumstances add up to sense
quality of life
 Circumstances could balance each other out
 SWB vs objective
o Objective is a limited set of measurable dimension considered
 Without input subject, quality of life is obtained
 Almost impossible bc people weight domains differently
 There is no gold-standard measure for self-report which can be compared
to
o So subjective, internal thought and feeling

Self-report approaches to measuring subjective well-being
 Judgement life satisfaction cognitive in nature

, o Requires reflect life, and consciously select response that fits
 Cognitive judgement could be contrasted with affective evaluation
o Level and frequence of Positive affect and negative affect
 Tripartite model of SWB: life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect
o Complete evaluation of one life as whole
 Problems in (retrospective) evaluation of affect
o Different processes are used to make judgement of current affective
experiences, very recent affective experiences, one’s experience
from far in the past
o Current-> intro section, some degree of ease
o Past-> episodic and semantic knowledge
 How more recent, more likely to rely on episodic of actual
experience
 How more distant, more like semantic, more stereotype about
how one typically feels in similar situation
 Feelings are influence by schemata
o So: different time lags, differential accuracy
o Biases in aggregation process leading to global evaluations that do
no match with actual experience
 So, distinguish between retrospective evaluation-> life satisfaction, and
emotionall reaction to life as it is lived
o Experience sampling methods: diary of daily emotion
 +: no recall biases, objective
 -: time, resource intensive
o Day reconstruction method
 Breaking day fown in episodes (e.g. walking dog), describing
episodes, report affect,
 + accurate episodic memories of recent event (if
completed relatively close)
 + single assessment occasion
Reliability and Validity of subjective well-being Measures
 Problems -general
o Misremember affective experiences
o Disproportionately weigh certain irrelevant sources of information
for judgement life satisfaction
o Unable translate internal feeling
o Unwilling provide honest response
 Reliability
o Multiple item: Cronbach A, internal consistency
 Overall good- moderate strong
o Single item: test-retest (like life satisfaction)
 Reasonable reliability
 Validity
o Face validity: high, but weak form of validity
o Content validity : all aspects of construct
 Concern multifaced measure: does the item reflect and aspect
of construct that is measured

,  Concern affective components: debate of numer and nature of
affective dimensions
 Positive negative affect- doesn’t specify happy/sad
o Convergent/discriminant validity
 Convergent: strong correlate
 Discriminant: weak to none
 Reasonable convergent/discrimant validity for SWB, even
when different methods
o Construct validity: does is measure the construct as expected given
the theories
 Relatively strong (impressive degree)
 Correlates of swb: income social relationships, relevant
behavior
 High income related high swb
 Low life satisfaction predict suicidal behavior
 Also domain specific like work
o Problems single item
 Reliability
 Validity: psychological construct are complex
 But SWB construct like life-satisfaction more simple
o When multiple item measures are included worse
performance than straightforward items
o When single- and multiple item measures are
compared: perform similary
 So no loss in validity when sinle item measure are used for
SWB
Judgement model of subjective well-being
 Biggest challenge for validity of SWB
 The process of constructing a judgment for well being
 Not the ability or motivation to consider all relevant domains of their live
when making judgement
o Rely on various heuristics to quickly derive an appropriate response
 Current mood as proxy for how they feel about their life overall
 Sources of information use when evaluating SWB van be influenced by
contextual factors
o Quality of life is based on quality of different domains (e.g. weathe)
o Therefore, Depending on which domain is salient at time of
judgement
Concerns judgement model
 At the time of findings supporting judgment model, the norm was
questionable research practices, therefore new evidence IS NEEDED
 Small sample sizes,
 Effect sizes were to large to be plausible
o Effect of mood induction on mood should be higher than mood on
life satisfaction
o Effect sizes were equal or even exceed to manipulation sizes
 Analytic flexibility

,  Recent research
o Effect were small- to not significant
o Mood only has weak effect on life satisfaction
o Context influence no to very weak evidence for validity and
reliability SWB
 Reasoning: some domains are chronically salient, so likely to
be considered in global judgement (like health, romance)
 Domains that are not chronically salient (e.g. weather) are
unlikely to be considered relevant for lie satisfaction, thus will
not affect judgements even when made salient
o Thus item order shouldn’t be a influence
o However: one context effect was found in large sample
 Politics: lowered SWB
 Only when asked right before life satisfaction question
 The question is not whether the processes of judgment exist, rather how
much they affect the psychometric properties of wellbeing judgement


Comparing psychometric properties of global and experiential measures
 Global measures: retrospective
 Experiential measures: assessing affective reaction at time they occure
o Argued to have more desirable psychometric properties
o But also possile to have unique problemes that don’t affect global
measures
o Often short time assessed: generalize to stable sense of well-being?
 External validity
 Research generalizeablity
o Tested stability of one day reconstruction methods
o And it was short-term stability and long term stability to measure
well-being (moderate)
 Slightly lower than global
o So relatively stable trait like measure of well-being can be obtained
even from a single days worth of reports
o Multiple items lower measurement error and ambiguity fom single
item
 Research Convergent
o Global measure correlate as strongly or stronger with alternative
measure as compared to experiential measures DRM
 Why isn’t experiential not superior in psychometrics that globl
o Maybe two distinct underlying construct are measured
 Global measures are better at tapping experiences that are
contextualized within a person’s life schema-: wider range
meaningful outcome
o Experiential validation threats: asking question repeatedly changes
interpretation, response-style
 Due to repeated questioning changes from situation to
situation are emphasized rather than the stability they
experience