Subjective Wellbeing (Happiness)

Subjective Wellbeing
Hi everyone, today I want to start by looking at the definition of subjective wellbeing, the scientific term for happiness.

Definition: How people evaluate their lives and consists of 3 components.

Life Satisfaction

Positive Affect (Pleasant emotions)

Negative affect. (Unpleasant emotions)

The evaluation of your life may be in the form of cognitions (a conscious evaluative judgement about satisfaction with life as a whole or about specific aspects of your life. It may also be about evaluating your affects (moods and emotions in reaction to life circumstances.)

Having high SWB means you are satisfied with life and have frequent joy and only infrequent unpleasant emotions. If you have low SWB you are dissatisfied with life and have more unpleasant emotions than pleasant.

Subjective wellbeing covers the entire range from agony to ecstacy.

It is not the same as mental or psychological health. A more full description of mental health includes environmental mastery, personal growth and purpose in life as well as SWB. It would seem however that SWB is a necessary condition for mental health but is only one aspect of it. A person cannot be functioning well if they are depressed or psychotic over a long period of time.

Each of the 3 main facets of SWB can be broken into sub divisions.

Global Satisfaction can be divided into satisfaction with various domains. Eg marital, recreation etc.

Pleasant affect can be divided into specific emotions eg joy affection and negative affect into emotions such as guilt, sadness anger and anxiety. We will look at these more in another section..

We tend to experience similar levels of wellbeing across different aspects of our lives.

Until next time, may your day be filled with subjective wellbeing.

Nevin