The Construct and Measurement of Peace of Mind

Previous studies have shown that Asian American or Chinese individuals value low-arousal positive affect and a harmonious state of happiness more than European Americans do. However, the affective component of subjective well-being has mostly been defined as the presence of positive affect and the absence of negative affect. This definition emphasizes the importance of hedonic pleasure but fails to include the affect valued in Chinese culture. The present study developed the construct of peace of mind to describe the affective well-being valued in Chinese culture. Peace of mind was defined as an internal state of peacefulness and harmony. To develop a measure to assess peace of mind, three studies were conducted. Study 1 developed the Peace of Mind Scale (PoM), Study 2 established its validity as an affective well-being measure, and Study 3 found that individuals from Chinese cultures score higher on this scale than those from Western cultures. The results indicate that the PoM has good reliability and validity for measuring affective well-being. The cross-cultural validation also found that Taiwanese individuals scored higher on the PoM than European Americans, which provides further evidence of good construct validity of the PoM. Y.-C. Lee National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan Y.-C. Lee (&) Department of Psychology, Chung Yuan Christian University, 200, Chung Pei Rd., Chungli 32023, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] Y.-C. Lin Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan C.-L. Huang Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan B. L. Fredrickson Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA 123 J Happiness Stud DOI 10.1007/s10902-012-9343-5