by Ed Diener
Conclusions
Our book has the ambitious goal of describing how you, and the next generations, should live your life. We do not describe the concrete details or the differing paths people might take. We do describe the components of psychological wealth that are essential for a good life. To have the highest quality of life, you must live a life full of meaning, values, purpose, and strong social connections: a life filled primarily with positive emotions, including the spiritual emotions, such as love and gratitude, with occasional negative emotions in situations where they are helpful; a life built around activities in which you enjoy working toward your values.
People have values besides their own happiness, and therefore we must sometimes sacrifice our own short-term enjoyment to obtain those other valued goals. We might, for example, visit people in the hospital because we value their friendship and want to cheer them up, even though we find a hospital visit unpleasant. We do activities that we think are required or the right thing to do, even when we don't enjoy them, in order to act morally. Here it is important to keep the different types of happiness in mind, and the difference between enjoyment and life satisfaction. Many valued activities, even when unpleasant, can increase our long-term life satisfaction because they make our overall lives better, even if they lead to less pleasure at the moment. And they may even bring greater pleasures in the future, because they improve our circumstances, or strengthen our relations with others. Regardless, we often do the right thing without considering whether it will increase our own happiness, and that should increase our psychological wealth.
Money will do us no good if it does not increase our psychological wealth, and at times the pursuit of money can detract from psychological wealth by distracting us from other important values. To flourish, we need to feel competent, have the ability to make important decisions about our lives, and help others. We need meaning and purpose that take us beyond immediate hedonism. In the end, our psychological wealth includes not only our happiness and life satisfaction, but also the degree to which we are flourishing. When we are psychologically wealthy, we have the "good life," as it has been described by wise people throughout history. Rather than making income our major goal in life, we need to design our lives, including how we pursue money, around the goal of being psychologically wealthy.
As authors, we have the extremely lofty goal of changing both you, the reader, and the society in which you live. We hope to ensure that you are a happy person, and that should be beneficial to you, your family and friends, and your society. Our vision of the future is one in which relationships are supportive, work is interesting and engaging, you feel competent in the tasks required of you, people seek happiness in working for their long-term values, and stress is rare. We have shown in this book what we think is a revolutionary idea - that happy societies are more likely to be successful ones, and happy individuals are more likely to be successful as well. Achieving psychological wealth is, ultimately, the most important goal in life. Now it is up to you.
14
Measuring Psychological
Wealth: Your Well-Being
Balance Sheet
Measuring Your Satisfaction With Life
Below are five statements with which you may agree or disagree. Using the scale below, indicate your agreement with each item by placing the appropriate number on the line preceding that item. Please be open and honest in your response.
Interpretation
Extremely satisfied
You feel that your life has gone very well, and the circumstances of your life are excellent. Most people who score in this range feel that the major areas of their lives are positive - work, leisure, relationships, and health. They don't feel that their lives are perfect, but that their lives are very rewarding.
Satisfied
Your life is rewarding, but you would like to see improvement in some areas. People in this range are happy and feel very good about their lives.
Slightly satisfied
You feel that generally your life is going well, although you would like to see improvement in some domains. Some areas of your life need improvement, or most areas are going modestly well, but you have not yet achieved the level you would like to attain in many areas.
Neutral
There is a mix of good and bad in your life. There are about as many things going well as things you would like to improve. Things are not terrible, but neither are they as rewarding as you would like.
Slightly dissatisfied
If your score on life satisfaction has dropped recently due to specific bad events, then a score in this range is not of concern. However, if your score is chronically in this somewhat low range, you might want to ask why, and what you can do to increase your satisfaction. Perhaps there are things in your life that cannot be changed at this point, but in this case, should you change your expectations? Perhaps there are conditions that you can change? If your life is on an upward trajectory and you are optimistic about the future, there is probably no concern.
Dissatisfied
Life satisfaction scores in this low range can be a matter of concern, and you should think about how to improve things. Would seeing a clergyperson or mental health professional help? Perhaps you are just going through a temporary bad time or have not achieved many of the things you hope to, in which case your score might not be of concern. However, in other cases, scores in this range point to some areas of your life needing strong improvement.
Extremely dissatisfied
Perhaps some recent extremely bad event has influenced your current life satisfaction. However, if your life satisfaction has been in this low range for some time, some things in your life are in need of change, and you might need the help of others, including professionals, to improve your situation. A number of things may be drastically wrong, and it is time to make very serious efforts to turn your life around.
The Causes of Life Satisfaction
For most people, life satisfaction depends on doing well in major areas of life, such as relationships, health, work, income, spirituality, and leisure. When a person is doing badly in one of these areas, it can color his or her overall life satisfaction. People who score high on life satisfaction usually have close and supportive family and friends, often have a close romantic partner (although this is not absolutely necessary), have rewarding work or retirement activities, enjoy their leisure, and have good health. They feel that life is meaningful, and have goals and values that are important to them. People who score high in life satisfaction usually do not have problems with addictions, such as gambling, drugs, or alcoholism.
The first three items of the SWLS focus primarily on a person's current life, whereas the last two items ask how one's life has been previously, up until the present. Some people score high on the first three items of the life satisfaction scale, but score lower on the last two items. This suggests that their lives are going well now, but that they are not entirely satisfied with their pasts. Other individuals might score low on the first three items, but higher on the last two items. This pattern suggests the respondent sees his or her past as more desirable than the present. Thus, a discrepancy in the scores between the first three items and the last two items can reveal whether people view their lives as improving or declining.
Measuring Your Emotional Well-Being
Please think about what you have been doing and experiencing during the past four weeks. Then report how much you experienced each of the following feelings, using the scale below. For each item, select a number from 1 to 5, and write that number on the line next to the feeling:
A Pleasant feelings: Add up your scores on items 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 14, and 16 (8 items), and place your score here:
B Unpleasant feelings: Add up your scores on items 2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 15 (8 items), and place your score here:
Pleasant feelings
Unpleasant feelings
Your happiness balance
Besides your overall pleasant and
unpleasant scores, we can also examine the relation between the two, in what we call "hedonic balance," or the amount of pleasant feelings you experience minus the frequency of your unpleasant feelings.
Subtract your Unpleasant Feelings Score from your Pleasant Feelings Score and put your answer here:
Balance scores
Individual emotion items
Besides the summed scores and their balance score, you can also examine individual items.
You ought to be feeling general positive feelings, such as "good" or "positive," the majority of the time, unless some bad event has just occurred in your life. If you are not feeling positive, good, or pleasant most of the time, and only experience these feelings rarely, you should examine why.
You should be feeling negative feelings only rarely. If you feel stressed sometimes, but not often, you may feel that this is not too much. But for some feelings, such as "depressed" and "angry," feeling these emotions only rarely or very rarely is usually most beneficial.
Do any of your individual emotions stand out? That is, which of the positive feelings do you have less often? If you are interested and positive most of the time, this is a very good sign. When you examine your negative feelings, are there any that you feel substantially more often? If you are frequently afraid, angry, sad, depressed, or stressed, are there steps you can take to reduce these emotions, which can interfere with your happiness and with your effective functioning?
The Causes of Emotional Well-Being
To some degree our levels of pleasant and unpleasant feelings are due to our inborn temperaments. Some people don't feel that positive simply because they are "low-key" individuals. This might not be a matter of concern as long as the amount of positive emotions you are feeling does not bother you. But remember that there are ways of thinking and living that can also influence our emotional lives, and that we can probably increase our pleasant feelings if we take efforts to do so. Low levels of pleasant feelings are of most concern when levels of unpleasant feelings are equal to or exceed the pleasant feelings. When a person is low in pleasant feelings and high in unpleasant feelings, this is a true matter of concern. However, if a person scores only in the middle on pleasant feelings, but is extremely low in unpleasant feelings, this might mean that she or he is just not an emotional individual, but might still be very happy. When a person scores high on both pleasant feelings and unpleasant feelings, this means he or she is intense-but hopefully still higher on the pleasant feelings than the unpleasant ones.
Psychological Flourishing Scale
Below are twelve statements with which you may agree or disagree. Using the scale below, indicate your agreement with each item by placing the appropriate number on the line preceding that item.
Add up your scores on the twelve items of the psychological flourishing scale and place your answer here:
Possible scores range from 12 to 84:
In this flourishing scale, we assess aspects of psychological wealth that go beyond positive emotions and life satisfaction to also measure how you are doing in other essential areas of your life. This scale measures not only that you generally feel good about your life, but also whether key aspects of psychological wealth, such as strong social relationships, self-respect, competence, engaging work, and spirituality, are in place, and whether your life has purpose and meaning. Flourishing indicates aspects of your life that psychologists such as Carol Ryff, Corey Keyes, Ed Deci, and Richard Ryan believe are missing from pleasure and simple emotional feelings of happiness. Flourishing goes beyond an individual's pursuit of her own happiness to include her contributions to society and the happiness of others. At times you might be flourishing despite having emotional troubles, and at other times you might be having a fun time without truly flourishing. It is, of course, best when the various elements of psychological wealth all come together.
Your Happiness Profile
Place an "X" in each row to denote the box where your scores fall on each of the four scales.
Although psychological wealth requires all four elements above, a degree of it can often be experienced by those who score well in only two or three of them. A very low positive feelings score or a very high negative feelings score is likely to make life less rewarding even if the person has a high degree of flourishing. Indeed, it will be difficult to be high on flourishing or life satisfaction if you are depressed. You need not aim for ecstasy to be happy, but achieving some success in each type of well-being is an eminently reasonable goal.
Your Overall True Wealth
You probably did not make the Forbes list of billionaires, but are you a billionaire when it comes to psychological wealth? Here is how to interpret your score:
If you are high in psychological wealth, congratulations on a life that is well-lived. If you are impoverished, or poorer than you would like to be, now is the time to increase your wealth, and hopefully this book has given you knowledge to help you get started.
Epilogue
About the Science of Happiness
Why do we rely on science rather than on great philosophers, selfhelp books, or our mothers for our understanding of happiness?
Opinions and the People Who Belong to Them
Recently, a man who claimed to be a vampire announced plans to picket the White Castle fast food chain. Presumably, the protest would be staged at night. What would prompt such an unusual political action? The man told local news reporters that he was incensed by a new menu item: a garlic hamburger. Clearly, the restaurant had neglected to consider the obvious problems the new sandwich could cause for Cincinnati's nocturnal blood-sucking population. The garlic burger, according to the picketer, "angered the undead." As amusing as this true story is, it highlights the fact that the modern world is a place where it is easy to form strong opinions on just about any topic. In a world as full, complex, and ever-changing as ours, it seems that there is little that escapes controversy, whether it is fast food or happiness.
Happiness has been a human concern for the length of our recorded collective memory. Aristotle, perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time, wrote a book on the topic, in which he equated happiness with the desirable state that comes with virtuous action and positive life circumstances. In contrast, the hedonists believed that happiness was the result of satisfying passions in pleasurable pursuits. The Greek Stoics, the hedonists' intellectual rivals, believed that it was best to avoid unhappiness through self-control and mastery. In the Christian tradition, Jesus of Nazareth spoke of well-being in his famous Sermon on the Mount, in which he suggested that people with good character would be specially blessed.
European history is packed full of philosophical luminaries, such as St. Augustine and Immanuel Kant, who offered opinions about happiness. In modern times, respected thinkers, such as the Dalai Lama, have turned their attention toward happiness. The Dalai Lama's book The Art of Happiness was a worldwide bestseller, proof that this emotion is of mainstream interest and speculation. Although these iconic cultural figures might disagree about the best way to achieve happiness, they all believed that happiness was worth the pursuit. The Diener family also agrees.
Science offers a new way to examine happiness. In the past, this much-sought-after emotion was the domain only of philosophers, religious scholars, and armchair thinkers. Throughout the ages, people have applied common sense, logic, folk wisdom, and personal experience to questions of happiness and have come up with contradictory conclusions. Some folks have argued that money creates misery (not true, according to the data) while others, such as Flaubert, have looked down their noses at happiness as a fool's errand (again, the data tell a different story). While many valuable insights have been offered up over the centuries, science brings new ideas to its pursuit. It is one thing to come to the conclusion that divorce leads to misery based on the single instance of your best friend, and quite another to assess the impact of thousands of divorces.
By using the scientific method, we have been able to debunk many myth
s attached to happiness. We know, for example, that the elderly are about as happy as people in their twenties and thirties. We know that money adds to happiness, but often only a modest amount. We know that in many nations religious people are happier on average than their nonreligious peers, but not in all societies. We know that long commutes to work drag down a person's happiness, even when people are traveling to a better, higher paying job. Just as science once helped humanity understand that the world is not flat, and later produced vaccines, electricity, and hurricane-warning systems, it is now expanding our understanding and control of the subjective world. Scientific inquiry is not a replacement for religious understanding or philosophical insights, but causality and generalization add helpful new dimensions to these age-old sources of wisdom.