Recent theories suggest an important role of neuroticism, extraversion, attitudes, and global positive orientations as predictors of subjective happiness. We examined whether positivity mediates the hypothesized relations in a community sample of 504 adults between the ages of 20 and 60 years old (females = 50%). A model with significant paths from neuroticism to subjective happiness, from extr...

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbei...

Happiness in this context is defined as `the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his life-as-a-whole positively', or in short: how well one likes the life one lives. In this way, happiness belongs to a wider class of subjective appraisals of life, which is usually referred to as ‘subjective well-being’ (SWB) or ‘life satisfaction’. (cf. Chapter 2). We will confine this d...

PURPOSE The purposes of this study were to explore the effects of family cohesion and subjective happiness on death anxiety of Korean elders and to identify other factors contributing to death anxiety. METHODS The participants were 280 elders who lived in P metropolitan city. Data were collected between November 5, 2011 and January 12, 2012 using the Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire...

We examined the relationship between the character strength of kindness and subjective happiness (Study 1), and the effects of a counting kindnesses intervention on subjective happiness (Study 2). In Study 1, participants were 175 Japanese undergraduate students and in Study 2, participants were 119 Japanese women (71 in the intervention group and 48 in the control group). Results showed that: ...

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 adu...

Many governments around the world are considering measures of happiness or subjective wellbeing as alternatives to gross domestic product (GDP) for the purpose of guiding economic policymaking. Compared to GDP, happiness measures promise to better capture the quality of life of a nation’s citizens and lead to policies that are more effective and equitable. However, there are a number of problem...

This study aims to investigate the relationship between subjective happiness and autobiographical memories having a controlled emotional state from three aspects: high ratio of positive emotional memories; intensity of positive emotions; and differences in expression or transmission of the experienced events. The participants were 186 Japanese undergraduates who were administered the Japanese v...

Subjective happiness has been assessed in the U.S. since 1972 by the General Social Survey (GSS). We examine trends in happiness over the last 25 years, and investigate the objective causes of these trends. We present a model of how objective indicators of QOL (such as GDP/person, crime rates, etc.) affect satisfaction with domains of life, with overall happiness of citizens, and with behaviora...

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic g...