This document contains a comprehensive summary of all literature for the Science of Happiness course. All book chapters of The Science of Subjective Well-Being and articles to be studied for the exam are included.
Complete summary for the course Science of Happiness UU
Summary The science of subjective well-being
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Psychologie
Science of Happiness (201900028)
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Content
Week 1 .................................................................................................................................................... 2
Ch1. Ed Diener and the Science of Subjective Well-Being ................................................................ 2
Ch14. Two New Questions about Happiness: “Is happiness Good?” and “Is Happier Better?” ......... 4
Ch24. Myths in the Science of Happiness, and Directions for Future Research ................................ 6
Very Happy People – Diener & Seligman (2002)................................................................................ 9
Is the Study of Happiness a Worthy Scientific Pursuit? – Norrish & Brodrick (2007) ....................... 10
Week 2 .................................................................................................................................................. 15
Ch6. The Structure of Subjective Well-Being.................................................................................... 15
Ch7. The Assessment of Subjective Well-Being............................................................................... 22
Happiness Scales ............................................................................................................................. 25
Week 3 .................................................................................................................................................. 26
Ch12. The Frequency of Social Comparison and Its Relation to Subjective Well-Being ................. 26
Ch13. Regulation of Emotional Well-Being: Overcoming the Hedonic Treadmill ............................. 27
Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want – Wilson & Gilbert (2006) ........................................ 29
On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-
Being – Ryan & Deci (2001).............................................................................................................. 31
Week 4 .................................................................................................................................................. 36
Ch21. Interventions for Enhancing Subjective Well-Being ............................................................... 36
Ch22. Promoting Positive Affect ....................................................................................................... 38
Ch23. Gratitude, Subjective Well-Being and the Brain ..................................................................... 40
Week 5 .................................................................................................................................................. 43
Asessing the Impact of the Size and Scope of Government on Human Well-Being – Flavin, Pacek &
Radcliff (2014) ................................................................................................................................... 43
Can and Should Happiness Be a Policy Goal? – Oishi & Diener (2014) .......................................... 46
Well-being in metrics and policy – Graham & Pinto (2018) .............................................................. 48
Week 6 .................................................................................................................................................. 49
Ch3. Sociological Theories of Subjective Well-Being ....................................................................... 49
Ch20. Comparing Subjective Well-Being across Cultures and Nations ........................................... 53
Social state of the Netherlands 2017 – Ch1. How is the Dutch population faring? .......................... 56
Social state of the Netherlands 2017 – Ch12. Quality of life: life situations and happiness ............. 57
Wealth and Happiness Across the World: Material Prosperity Predicts Life Evaluation, Whereas
Psychosocial Prosperity Predicts Positive Feeling – Ed Diener et al. (2010) ................................... 58
Week 7 .................................................................................................................................................. 60
Ch15. Material Wealth and Subjective Well-Being ........................................................................... 60
Relative Income, Happiness, and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other
Puzzles – Clark, Frijters & Shields (2008) ........................................................................................ 63
Week 8 .................................................................................................................................................. 69
Ch2. Philosophy and the Science of Subjective Well-Being ............................................................. 69
Ch5. The Pursuit of Happiness in History ......................................................................................... 72
Normative ethics – Kagan (1998) ..................................................................................................... 74
1
,Week 1
Ch1. Ed Diener and the Science of Subjective Well-Being
In 1980 most of the research that had been done on happiness and related constructs was
survey research. And so Ed Diener and his research team set out to do some basic
descriptive and measurement evaluation research.
Structure of Subjective Well-Being
Diener and Emmons (1984) wrote an influential paper demonstrating that trait measures of
positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) were essentially uncorrelated, meaning that
how much of one affect a person tended to experience had no bearing on how much of the
other he or she experienced. Today, many researchers view this hedonic component of
subjective well-being as the ratio of PA to NA, over time, in a person’s life and view it as an
important component in the overall structure of subjective well-being.
It turns out that the typical intensity with which people experience their affective
states, has no impact on overall subjective well-being. Rather, what turns out to be the best
predictor of global subjective well-being, in terms of affective experience, is the frequency of
positive compared to negative states in a person’s life over time.
Subjective well-being has another component in addition to the hedonic component;
it includes a cognitive judgment about one’s life, as a whole, as satisfying. Some researchers
refer to this as life satisfaction. In most populations the life satisfaction component and the
hedonic component of subjective well-being are at least moderately and sometimes highly
correlated.
Can happiness be measured?
Because subjective well-being refers to affective experiences and cognitive judgments, self-
report measures of subjective well-being are indispensable. Ed Diener developed the
Satisfaction with Life Scale, which became the standard measure of life satisfaction in the
field and has been translated into many languages. His main messages concerning the
measurement of subjective well-being are:
1. that subjective well-being can be assessed by self-report with substantial reliability
and validity.
2. that each measurement method has advantages and pitfalls.
3. that the more complete assessment of subjective well-being requires a multimethod
assessment tool.
People overestimate their emotional intensity and underestimate the frequency of their
positive affect when recalling emotional experiences. This finding shows that there is a bias
in the recall of affective experiences that only can be detected by using several methods.
Determinants of Subjective Well-Being
Diener’s research indicates that there is no sole determinant of subjective well-being. No
single condition or characteristic is sufficient to bring about happiness in itself. Personality
factors, especially extraversion and neuroticism, are important contributors to subjective
well-being. Extraversion most likely influences subjective well-being because it is related to
feeling more positive emotions and having a lower threshold for activating positive affect. On
the other hand, neuroticism is strongly related to feeling more negative emotions and a lower
threshold for activating negative affect.
Diener and Seligman found that very happy people were highly social, with strong
romantic and other close social relationships, compared to less happy groups. They were
more extraverted, more agreeable, less neurotic, and lower on several Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) psychopathology scales. Good social relations
are necessary for happiness. However, even very happy people have a responsive emotion
system that reacts appropriately to life events.
2
,Some researchers, and many popular writers, have interpreted the genetic evidence to
mean that happiness is determined by DNA endowment. This is not true for several reasons:
1. In most genetic studies, there is a fair amount of variability in happiness over time.
2. Early family environment has an influence on levels of positive affect that people
experience as adults. Something about the shared family environment in childhood
predisposes individuals to later feeling less or more positive emotions, such as joy,
enthusiasm, and engagement.
3. People who become unemployed are less happy, and they remain so for many
years, compared to people with steady employment.
4. Women who get married are, on average, somewhat happier than their unwed
counterparts for several years.
5. Widows remain less happy for several years after their partner dies.
In sum, happiness is not solely genetic—the environment matters too. Furthermore, there is
evidence that different conditions and outcomes make different people happy.
Consequences of Subjective Well-Being
Happy people are successful in many life domains and that this success is at least partly due
to their happiness. Happy people are more social, altruistic, active, like themselves and
others more, have strong bodies and immune systems & have better conflict resolution skills.
Cross-Cultural Research on Subjective Well-Being
There are strong inter- and intracultural differences in the way people appreciate happiness
and in the routes to happiness. There are strong national differences in citizens’ overall
satisfaction with life. International differences in subjective well-being are positively
correlated with international differences in income, individualism, human rights, and societal
equality. There are universal predictors of subjective well-being that have been found in
several nations, such as extraversion and marriage, but there are also differences between
nations. In individualistic nations, for example, judgments of subjective well-being are
more strongly based on the emotions people experience and their self-esteem, whereas
financial satisfaction was a stronger predictor in poorer countries. Life satisfaction is more
strongly related to autonomy, feelings of meaning, and growth in Western cultures than in
Eastern ones. However, in collectivistic cultures, those higher in autonomy are also higher
in levels of problems such as suicide and divorce.
National Indicators of Subjective Well-Being
The happiness of citizens has many benefits for society. According to Diener and Seligman
(2004) national indicators are needed to inform policy makers about the well-being of their
citizens. Citizens that are high in well-being might facilitate governance, they can increase
the wealth of a nation by earning more money and creating more opportunities for others,
they might be more productive and profitable, they might be healthier and live longer, they
might be less prone to mental disabilities and create more satisfying social relationships.
Summary
What is “new” in Ed Diener’s work and the positive psychology movement? The empirical
methods of scientific psychology to build up the knowledge base on subjective well-being, to
create reliable and valid measures of subjective well-being, and to empirically test
predictions derived from theories about subjective well-being. Diener’s scientific method is
useful for several reasons:
1. It is self-correcting.
2. It emphasizes on how happiness is important, in and of itself.
3. Subjective well-being appears to lead to many good outcomes in life.
4. Diener has recently moved beyond science into the realm of social policy and has
shown that nations with higher mean subjective well-being have longer life
expectancy, more job security, more political stability, lower divorce rates, better
records of civil liberty, and more gender equality.
3
, Ch14. Two New Questions about Happiness: “Is happiness Good?” and “Is Happier
Better?”
There was a lack of agreement on the definition of happiness which led to an impoverished
state of empirical research on happiness. In 1984, however, Ed Diener broke the ground for
the psychology of happiness and legitimized it for the rest of us psychologists and social
scientists. He answered three major questions:
1. “What is happiness?” = happiness is a latent construct best indicated by a general
sense of life satisfaction.
2. “Who is happy?” (the contribution of personality to subjective well-being) = extraverts,
optimists, and persons with great social relationships.
3. “What makes people happy?” (external factors such as resources and life events) =
not so much positive life events per se, but rather goal attainment made possible by
the match between individuals’ talents, resources, and their goals.
He also called attention to the importance of culture to the meaning and construction of well-
being.
Consequences of Happiness
Many researchers must have felt that if happiness is the ultimate goal, why should we care
about the consequences of this ultimate goal? The consequences of happiness should be of
great interest to well-being researchers, for several reasons:
1. If happiness harms us in some ways, the normative analysis on happiness becomes
irrelevant in real life as the ultimate goal. Thus, the empirical evaluation of this issue
is essential.
2. Philosophical discussions about happiness often lack any consideration of individual
and cultural differences. The consequences of happiness might vary systematically
across individuals and cultures that differ in the eagerness with which they pursuit
happiness.
We briefly summarize key review articles in this area: Veenhoven (1988, 1989), Lyubomirsky
et al. (2005), and Pressman and Cohen (2005).
Veenhoven (1988, 1989)
The purpose of Veenhoven’s review was to evaluate some of the negative views on
happiness. He asked a number of questions about the consequences of happiness:
- “Does happiness reduce sensitivity to others?” = no, persons in good moods felt
more “concerned about peers” than those in bad moods.
- “Does happiness lead into idleness?” = no, people were more active on the day when
they felt happy. People are more likely to help others, perform better on cognitive
tasks, and show more expansive writing movements when they are in a happy mood.
- “Does happiness breed voting dummies?” = no, because political participation was
not associated with life satisfaction.
- “Does happiness loosen intimate ties?” = no, because participants in a happy mood
behaved more generously toward others and felt more positively toward others.
Happy people were more likely to remarry than unhappy people.
- “Is happiness healthy?” = yes, because happy people had slightly better health as
assessed by physicians. Multiple studies found that happy people lived longer than
unhappy ones.
- “Does happiness buffer stress?” = no.
- “Does happiness heal cancer?” = no convincing evidence (at that time).
Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) and Pressman and Cohen (2005)
Lyubomirsky et al.’s meta-analysis is monumental both in terms of the number of studies
analyzed (225 papers) and the diversity of outcome measures. The effect size for happiness
was almost never negative, suggesting that harmful effects of subjective well-being are
4
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