Hot answers tagged well-being
13
Many single item measures of mood can be found in the literature. Those two are based on the idea that affect is bidimensional and that one's current state can be reported using a grid:
Russell, J.A., Weiss, A., & Mendelsohn, G.A. (1989). Affect Grid: A Single-Item Scale of Pleasure and Arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57 (3), ...
10
First - you might want to redefine you search. Are you looking for happiness or rather positive affect? Happiness is fairly ambigious term, and it's much more associated with positive psychology studies on well-being. If you are interested in more global definition of happiness, check the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
On the other hand, there is a ...
9
Particulalry short wavelengths (such a UV light) have been shown to suppress melatonin[1], a hormone that regulates sleep. The authors also show that:
All subjects had an elevated cortisol level in the 90 minutes prior to
onset of light exposure compared with the corresponding clock time on
the previous day
So there's a kind daily memory in the ...
7
The classic reference for exactly what you are describing is Gilovich & Medvec, 1995 (LINK), the primary thesis of which is that "Actions, or errors of commission, generate more regret in the short term; but inactions, or errors of omission, produce more regret in the long run" (from the abstract). The authors explain that there are many factors that ...
6
I believe 'psychosomatic' describes a way the mind has effects on the your body which might result in somatic symptoms. Often psychosomatic disorders are diagnosed as such when:
no somatic correlate to the experienced symptoms can be found
somatic correlates do not sufficiently explain the experienced symptoms
This often results in patients who visit ...
6
In general, having multiple items will increase your reliability of measurement. A common measure of what the literature calls "subjective well-being" is a combination of the following scales.
The PANAS: A measure of positive and negative affectivity. A 20 item measure of positive and negative affect (see Watson et al, 1988).
Diener's Life Satisfaction ...
5
Diener et al's (1999) review in Psychological Bulletin provides an excellent entry point into the well-being literature. It reviews the literature with regards to the many causes and correlates of well-being.
Individual Differences
First, individual differences explain a lot of variance in well-being. This is often seen in terms of personality traits such ...
5
Does the relationship between positive mood and motivation for sex differ between males and females?
In men, Mitchell et al (1998) found that positive mood induced by music affected greater sexual arousal, and that musically induced negative mood affected reduced sexual arousal. In women, Ter Kuile et al (2010) found similar results for women.
However, your question is not quite addressed by these studies. Whereas these studies address the effect of mood ...
4
Is husband and wife intelligence corelated?
By way of background, Mascie-Taylor (1989) report IQ correlations between husbands and wives in two british samples to be r=.40 and r =.37 respectively. I had a little difficulty discerning the sample size as it's not reported in the 1989 paper. But from another paper I got the sense that each sample might have ...
4
One method of estimating assertiveness would be to look at scores on self-report tests that aim to measure assertiveness. Measuring in this way suggests that assertiveness, as with other traits, is on a continuum. Thus, classifying someone as assertive or not assertive would involve a judgement call.
Nonetheless, once you have an estimate of the proportion ...
4
Dysphoria following drug use
Though their acting mechanisms can be vastly different, the general basis of drug addiction is its influence on the reward system, particularly through dopamine pathways[1]. It's thought that the stimulation of the dopamine system leads to dopamine depletion[2] and without dopamine, there's no rewarding behavior and thus no ...
4
There are definitely studies on this, but I don't have the references at hand. I've heard about this in the online Harvard courses on positive psychology by Tal Ben-Shahar.
In terms of "crashing", there are studies about baseline-happiness, showing you bounce back up after a setback, and back down, after a positive event, like winning the lottery. Only ...
3
I did a little search and found an article by Moen (1996) which seems relevant.
Moen summarised the existing evidence as follows:
Poor physical health is frequently a reason for retiring (Anderson &
Burkhauser, 1985; Bound, 1991; Chirikos & Nestel, 1989; Palmore,
Burchett, Filenbaum, George, & Wallman, 1985), leading to a view of a
...
2
Personality is generally theorised to be a stable individual difference variable. Research has shown it to be highly stable over time. Thus, from a theoretical perspective it typically has a primacy in causal models.
Stress can be an ambiguous construct. It can refer to the objective existence of stressful stimuli or the way that individuals perceive ...
1
(this was supposed to be a sub-comment in the answer supplied by Jeromy, but I somehow made it an answer. Keeping it here because @what supplied some further info)
@what: the answer to your question is in the table. Female IQ has a small (.1ish) correlation with both male and female-reported satisfaction. At N=81, this wouldn't be considered a significant ...
1
The World Values Survey seems like a good starting point for examining nation level life satisfaction and then correlating it with other indicators.
Diener (2000) summarises this research on
mean levels of life satisfaction for selected nations from the World
Values Survey (World Values Study Group, 1994), conducted with
representative ...
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