A primer for reporters and newcomers

By Ed Diener, Alumni Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois

For more detailed answers to each question, please see the relevant section of Diener's list of publications.

Q: What is subjective well-being (SWB)?

Q: Is happiness really a single thing?

Q: Is SWB important?
Q: Is happiness really desirable? If we are happy, might we achieve less, be less good citizens, or be just plain dumb?
Q: People have been concerned about happiness since the beginning of time. Can you really add anything new here?
Q: Can we define and measure SWB scientifically?
Q: Is there a "key" to SWB; a secret to happiness?
Q: Many books are written explaining how to be happy. What do you think of these?
Q: Isn't SWB really genetic? That is, isn't our happiness level really just based on our genetic predisposition?
Q: Who are the happiest people?
Q: Are some societies happier than others?
Q: What is adaptation or habituation?
Q: Are rich people happier?
Q: What is your advice to those who want to be happy?

Q: Can we make ourselves happier?

Q: Is it possible to be too happy?

Q: Do different things make different people happy?

Q: Are there scientific theories of SWB?

Q: What types of personality predispositions are important?
Q: What about dampening one's emotions, being nonattached, as a method of being happier?
Q: Is it good to be emotionally intense?

Q: Isn't health a key to happiness?
Q: What about physical beauty?
Q: Are life satisfaction and happiness the same thing?
Q: Are most people unhappy?
Q: Is happiness real or just in people's imaginations? Is it an epiphenomenon, just a touchy-feely idea that some people worry about?

Q. Is religion counterproductive to high SWB?
Q: What is the most interesting group you have studied?
Q: What role do values play in SWB?
Q. What are the most important things scientists have learned about SWB?
Q. What error do reporters often make in inquiring about SWB?

Q: What is subjective well-being(SWB)?
A: Subjective well-being is the scientific name for how people evaluate their lives. People can evaluate their lives in terms of a global judgment (such as life satisfaction or feelings of fulfillment), in terms of evaluating the domains of their lives (such as marriage or work), or in terms of their ongoing emotional feelings about what is happening to them (feeling pleasant emotions, which arise from positive evaluations of one's experiences, and low levels of unpleasant feelings, which arise from negative evaluations of one's experiences). The English word "happiness" means several different things (e.g., joy, satisfaction), and therefore many scientists prefer the term "subjective well-being." However, subjective well-being is an umbrella term that includes the various types of evaluation of one's life one might make - it can include self-esteem, joy, feelings of fulfillment, and so forth. The key is that the person himself/herself is making the evaluation of life - not experts, philosophers, or others. Thus, the person herself or himself is the expert here: Is my life going well, according to the standards that I choose to use?

Q: Is happiness really a single thing?
A: As mentioned above, SWB is really an umbrella term that includes several different components, and these components are somewhat independent. That is, one can be high in one and low in another. Thus, one must to some degree understand the components separately. If one wants to be "happier," this might mean increasing positive affect or decreasing negative affect - and these two things might require very different actions. Similarly, there are even some behaviors that produce higher satisfaction (completing a boring but necessary task, for example) but produce lower positive affect.

Q: Is SWB important?
A: First, happiness is important in and of itself because it is how people evaluate their own lives. Certainly, it is hard to imagine a good society in which we think people are living in a desirable way, but they are all unhappy and dissatisfied. Thus, SWB seems absolutely necessary for the "good society," although is not sufficient for that society because there are other things we also value and would want in such a place. Thus, it can be said that high SWB is necessary, but not sufficient, for the good life.

When we ask people, they say that SWB is extremely important. For example, college students the world over rated happiness and life satisfaction as very important or extremely important in the 41 nations we surveyed. In fact, in only one country did students rate money as more important than life satisfaction, and happiness was rated as more important than money in every single country.

SWB is desirable for another reason - because it seems to lead to many good outcomes. Happy people (those high in long-term average positive emotions) seem to be more sociable and creative, they live longer, make more money and are better "citizens" in their workplace. A host of good outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction) often follow from happiness. Thus, there are many reasons to suggest that high SWB is extremely desirable.

Q: OK, so people think happiness is important. But is it really desirable? If we are happy, might we achieve less, be less good citizens, or be just plain dumb?
A: It turns out that, at least in western culture where the studies have been conducted, that SWB (high levels of positive affect, in particular) produces good outcomes in many areas. For example:
  1. Happy people on average have stronger immune systems, and there is some evidence that they live longer
  2. Happy people are more creative, at least in the laboratory
  3. Happy people are better citizens at work - they tend to help others more, skip work less, etc.
  4. Happy people are more successful - they earn more income, have better marriages, get job interviews more, etc.
  5. Happy people do better in social relationships. They are more sociable to begin with, and other people like them more. They seem to be more     successful in leadership work positions.
  6. Happy people are better able to cope with difficult situations.
  7. Happy people like themselves and other people more, and others like them in return. They are also more helpful and altruistic, on average.
  8. Judgment and decision making. It is in this realm that laboratory psychologists have given happy people a black eye. Those in a positive mood have been found in lab studies to use stereotypes more, to be less logical, and to be more biased in their judgments. The well-known "Depressive Realism" hypothesis  suggests that depressed people are accurate, and happy people inaccurate, in their judgments.

The above conclusions seem true of simple lab tasks where there is little motivation to perform well. Happy people use quick and easy answers ("heuristics," short-cuts) they have learned in the past, especially when there are no apparent cues that more effort is needed. Such answers are often right in real life (that is why they were learned), but often provide the wrong answer in the lab studies. When happy people are given greater motivation, however, they often catch up to depressed people. In contrast to happy people, unhappy individuals seem to use effortful and vigilant processing most all of the time - examining every situation for anything that might go wrong. This vigilance pays off in tasks where motivation is low because unhappy people may tackle each task as though failure could matter.

The effortful and vigilant processing of unhappy people in the long-run has substantial costs. These individuals may spend too much time on trivial problems, and therefore not act efficiently. They may not "optimize" in their decision making because they need to spend enormous effort even on small issues. Thus, in the long-run in real life the efficient heuristics of the happy person often provide an advantage - they can act efficiently, and spend more effort only when it is truly required (on important problems, and ones where old solutions are not working). Happy people can perform well if they are cued that motivation is required and that the task might not be an easy one. Further, happy people can dual task and complete complex tasks better because they will use heuristics for parts of the task, or for one of the tasks, thus allowing more computational power for other parts of the task. Much of this description is just emerging from new research, and so it is very tentative. However, the advantage of unhappy people in decision tasks in the early work in the field seems to be now under serious challenge. In more ecological and complex settings, the person in a positive mood might perform quite well.

Q: People have been concerned about happiness since the beginning of time. Can you really add anything new here?
A: Philosophers wrote extensively about happiness, and bookstores are crammed with self-help books about it. What we are trying to add is the scientific approach. Although the philosophers and other writers, such as the Dalai Lama, undoubtedly have lots of good ideas, we are trying to test these hypotheses with rigorous empirical methods. Some of their ideas might seem plausible, but prove to be wrong. Other ideas might be right on target. But until we subject the various ideas to scientific methods, we do not know which ones are right and which are wrong.

Another aspect of our scientific approach is to remain skeptical until we have solid evidence. For this reason people often ask me questions that I simply cannot answer. You might wonder many things about happiness, about which there may currently be no firm data. As in all sciences, there are some questions we can now answer with some degree of certainty (although we never claim certainty) - and other questions for which we simply have no answers.

The scientific method has been amazingly powerful in other areas of study - in astronomy, chemistry, and medicine, for example. Our hope is that the scientific method will also be a powerful one in the understanding of SWB.

Q: Can we define and measure SWB scientifically?
A: Subjective well-being is defined as how a person evaluates his or her own life. These evaluations can be more focal (e.g., marital satisfaction, or satisfaction with one's car) or broader (e.g., life satisfaction or satisfaction with the self). In addition, these evaluations can be more cognitive - in terms of satisfaction judgments - or they can be more affective (moods and emotions, which are reactions to what is happening in one's life). Thus, there appear to be at least three major components to subjective well-being - pleasant emotions and moods, lack of negative emotions and moods, and satisfaction judgments. Other variables such as optimism and feelings of fulfillment are also a part of SWB, perhaps a 4^th component.

Global measures of SWB which simply ask people how satisfied or happy they are have been proven to have some validity. At the same time, such measures do suffer certain drawbacks and limitations. Thus, we have used a set of additional measures, in order to measure SWB with a number of assessment devices that complement one another: 1. Informant reports - what do your friends and family say about your SWB?, 2. Experience sampling - how happy are you over time when we beep you at random moments, and then aggregate those moments?, 3. Memory measures - can you quickly recall good events (and not bad events) in a timed period, and 4. Interview or qualitative measures. Although we have not used biological measures of SWB in our lab very frequently, a number are available: 1. Frontal brain asymmetry, 2. Facial electromyography, 3. Saliva cortisol levels, and 4. Eye blink startle response. There are other measures as well, for example based on performance speed, which we review in some of our measurement review chapters.

Q: Is there a "key" to SWB; a secret to happiness?
A: So many popular writers seem to search for the "key," and sometimes even offer what they think is THE key to happiness. But our research indicates that there is no single key. Some things seem to be necessary for high SWB (e.g., solid mental health, good social relationships), but they are not sufficient for happiness (some unhappy people possess these, too). So a variety of things appear to be necessary for happiness even though we have not found any characteristic that is sufficient for happiness.

The above findings suggest a better analogy than a key - a recipe. Most good recipes call for quite a few ingredients. Some of these ingredients are absolutely essential, and other ingredients are merely helpful. But there is no single key ingredient that by itself gives you the good food. You need to have multiple ingredients put together in the right way. This is like SWB - you need several important and necessary ingredients, but no single one of them by itself produces a happy person.

Q: Many books are written explaining how to be happy. What do you think of these?
A: I'm sure there must be a lot of good advice in many of these books. My job, however, is to examine which of these claims are valid and which are invalid. So I am more concerned with building the science, of discovering what is true and not true about happiness. Therefore, as a scientist I need to empirically study happiness, and hope that over time what I discover finds its way into the self-help books. My opinion is that the books are often right, and probably sometimes wrong, but that we need a scientific foundation for the future books that will provide help to people.

Q: Isn't SWB really genetic? That is, isn't our happiness level really just based on our genetic predisposition?
A: There are certainly genetic influences on SWB. One type of evidence for a genetic predisposition that influences both positive affect and negative affect are the twin studies. For example, in the most famous of these studies, conducted at the University of Minnesota, they found that identical twins reared apart are more similar in their happiness levels than are fraternal twins (dyzygotic twins who are only half alike on average genetically) who were reared together. The twin studies (and adoption studies as well) suggest that some portion of our happiness is likely to come from our genetics. Complementing these studies are new studies of specific gene influences. We now believe that certain genes are linked with a propensity toward depression, for instance.

Some researchers have interpreted the genetic evidence to mean that our happiness is really almost entirely controlled by our genes. We know this is not true based on several types of data. First, in the studies reported by the University of Minnesota group, there was a fair amount of variabilty in happiness over time. Although the long-term common level of happiness a person reported across Time 1 and Time 2 had a highly heritable (genetic) component, people's moods seemed to swing up and down over time in reaction to events. A second piece of evidence supporting environmental effects on SWB also comes from the Minnesota twin study. The researchers found that early family environment (twins who grew up in the same home) had an influence on levels of positive affect that the twins experienced as adults. In other words, something about the family home environment in childhood predisposed individuals to later feeling more or less positive emotions such as joy.

In our own lab, we see evidence for environmental effects on SWB in the large differences between nations in life satisfaction and other SWB variables. The poorest and richest nations, for example, differ substantially in SWB. And the former Communist nations, which have recently gone through so much turmoil, show much lower rates of SWB than nearby nations - and than was formerly reported in these Communist nations. So the larger environment seems to influence happiness, and it seems unlikely that all these national differences are due to genetic differences (see the Inglehart chapter in our cross-cultural book (Diener and Suh, 2000) for a fuller exposition of this argument.

One other piece of data against the idea that SWB is completely determined by our genetic inheritance comes from our longitudinal studies in Germany. We find that people who become unemployed are less happy-and remain so for many years. We find, similarly, that women who get married on average remain somewhat happier for years.

One last bit of evidence for environmental effects comes from data on widows. Studies show that widows remain less happy for several years after their partners dies. That is, their genetic predisposition notwithstanding, widows on average are made less happy by a tragedy that befalls them. Thus, there are lots of data indicating that happiness is not solely genetic - the environment does matter too. Genetic effects are undoubtedly very important, but cultural and situational factors can also influence SWB, sometimes strongly.

Q: Who are the happiest people?
A: A recent study by Diener and Seligman took a first look at the happiest 10 percent of college students. We used many different types of SWB measures to make sure that we were getting truly happy people. In our study the happiest people always had two things - good mental health and good social relationships. Every one of the happiest people had good social relationships in general (although not necessarily every single social relationship, of course), although some of the unhappy people also had good social relationships. For this reason, we concluded that high quality social relationships are necessary for well-being, but not sufficient for it. The happiest group also scored low on the MMPI psychopathology scales - except some scored high on the mania scale.

Q: Are some societies happier than others?
A: For many years the results of surveys have indicated that people in some societies say they are happier and more satisfied than people in other societies. For example, Diener, Diener, and Diener (1995) report a strong correlation between the wealth of nations (which goes along also with having more human rights, equality, and freedom) and the SWB reported by their citizens.

Thus, conclusions about the happiness of societies, based on broad survey measures, suggests that countries do differ substantially in SWB. Another reason that nations seem to differ in SWB is because of the norms (beliefs about what is right) they have for feeling emotions. We find that in Latin nations (South America, Spain, etc.), there is a belief that positive emotions are mostly all good and negative emotions are mostly all bad. In the Confucian nations of the Pacific Rim (e.g., Korea, China, and Japan), there is a belief that negative emotions are as good as positive ones. Thus, there is not a high value placed on SWB and being happy. We find that these nations differ in SWB, especially when income is controlled. The Latin nations are much happier than we would expect based on their income, and the Pacific Rim countries are less happy. Thus, we see two primary forces determining how happy on average people in a nation are: the wealth (and concomitant human rights, equality, and freedom) of nations, and the norms governing the desirability of positive emotions.

However, we might question the validity of the broad survey measures, and only recently have we begun to take a deeper look across nations, using a multimethod measurement approach. In this approach, we employ, in addition to the global survey measures of SWB, experience sampling (the Palmtop method of obtaining moods at random moments over time), informant reports (friends and family tell us how happy the target respondent is), and memory measures (can the individual quickly remember more good things than bad things from his or her life). We also use broad and narrow measures, in order to pick up response tendencies. At the gross level, we find that the survey measures perform OK - we can distinguish the happiest from unhappiest nations. But the additional measures also show that one can get different results with the different measures when one takes a more fine-grained analysis. And also, positive affect measures can produce different results from negative affect measures - that is, how much joy a people in a country feel on average is not the opposite of how much sadness people feel there. There are nations where lots of both positive and negative are felt, and there are nations where not much emotion of either type is experienced.

Q: What is adaptation or habituation?
A: Campbell and Brickman hypothesized that we live on a "hedonic treadmill" - that we react strongly to good events, but then come back to neutral. They called this a treadmill because one can never stay happy for long; one works for good things, but adapts to them once they are attained. In a sense, they contended that life is like an addiction -- that one gets pleasure from things at first, but after addiction one must obtain the thing just to avoid pain. Solomon's opponent process theory and Heady and Wearings' dynamic equilibrium model are based on similar assumptions.

In a classic set of studies, Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman found that lottery winners were only a tiny bit happier than nonwinners, and that people with spinal cord injuries were not as unhappy as one might expect. These early studies suffered from a number of weaknesses, but later research has generally supported the idea of adaptation. For example, Roxanne Silver found that people in a hospital because of a new spinal cord injury had moods that showed adaptation over the first two months after their injury. During this time their fear and sadness declined and their happiness increased. In other words, over time they experienced greater happiness and less of the negative emotions than they did one week after their injury. Similarly, in our laboratory Mark Suh found that most events (e.g., getting a raise at work) don't have much influence on people's SWB after two months.

One problem with the adaptation literature is that few studies have actually followed people over time. In a recent study with Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis, we examined adaptation over a period of many years. We find that people do adapt (react strongly at first and then return toward their baseline moods) to many conditions, but they do not adapt completely to all conditions, at least not within four years. Here are some examples: We find that men adapt to marriage - they are very happy at first, but then return to their premarriage baseline after a few years. However, women show only partial adaptation. They react strongly in the positive direction to marriage, and then return toward their baseline - but on average never return quite to their previous baseline. Similarly, unemployed men show only partial adaptation - they react strongly in the negative direction to loss of their job, they then return toward their baseline, but they never quite return to the level of SWB of when they were working.

So adaptation is a very important process. But some conditions do matter even in the long-run. People may partially adapt to them, but for some conditions people may never adapt completely.

Q: Are rich people happier?
A: When wealth is measured within countries, wealthier people seem to be slightly happier on average. But the effects of money on happiness in general are not large. Dire poverty is more likely to make a person unhappy than wealth is to make a person happy, although even for poverty the effects are not overwhelming. The effects of living in a wealthy nation are stronger - people in wealthy nations show higher levels of SWB, and this is true for all levels of wealth within nations. One thing that appears clearly to be bad - wanting money too much. Those who highly value materialism have been found in a number of studies to have lower SWB.

It is easy to forget that poor people can have many strengths in their lives. For example, in Robert Biswas-Diener's study in the slums of Calcutta, even the homeless (who are extraordinarily poor by western standards) have friends, often have a family back in the countryside, gain positive feelings from their religion, have decent self-esteem, and so forth.

Q: What is your advice to those who want to be happy?
A: As I have said repeatedly, I have no simple, easy answer that will make everyone happy. Some people with serious problems need to see a therapist and get professional help. And many of us have such deep-grained habits that it won't be easy to change overnight. Plus, we all have our temperaments that will put some limits on how easy it for us to be happy. So there is no magic elixir. Having said this, I think there are some steps people can take to insure that they are as happy as they can be (although nothing will make us happy every moment, fortunately). First, we need good friends and family, and we may need to sacrifice to some extent to insure that we have intimate, loving relationships - people who care about us, and about whom we care deeply. Second, we need to involve ourselves in activities - work, for example - that we enjoy and value. We are likely to be best at things we value and think are interesting. Finally, we need to control how we look at the world. We need to train ourselves not to make a big deal of trivial little hassles, to learn to focus on the process of working toward our goals (not waiting to be happy until we achieve them), and to think about our blessings (making a habit of noticing the good things in our lives).

Q: Can we make ourselves happier?
A: This is a 64,000 dollar question, about which we have surprisingly little direct evidence. We know that cognitive style correlates with SWB. We also have some studies where cognitive style is altered, and people become happier (or less depressed). So it seems as though people can change their level of SWB with persistent work, but we need much more data. Michael Fordyce has conducted a few controlled studies to try to raise people's happiness, and finds that a multimodal intervention (get more friends, think positively, don't worry so much, etc.) can increase people's reports of SWB, but these studies too are in their infancy.

Q: Is it possible to be too happy?
A: In large surveys very few people say that they are extraordinarily happy - that they are mostly elated and exuberant. For instance, only a few percent of people in most surveys respond they are a 10 on a 1 to 10 happiness scale, and perhaps only 5 to 10 percent say they are a 10 on life satisfaction. We find that those few individuals who say they are extraordinarily happy are likely in a few years to be back down to a lower level. So we might not be "built" to remain at the elated level, because this might be dysfunctional. There is not evidence yet on whether people who are a 10, or stay at a 10 (very rare) would fare well or poorly in our society.

Some people are manic - they have lots of energy, and often have high moods. These people sometimes are very productive, if they can harness their energy.

Q: Do different things make different people happy?
A: There is clear evidence that different things make different people happy. For example, the correlates of happiness vary somewhat for young versus old people. We find that there are different correlates of happiness in different cultures. Of course at some basic level, there are probably universals - for example, having close social relationships - but there are also specific things that make some people satisfied but do not seem to have much effect on others.

Q: Are there scientific theories of SWB?
A: There are lots of theories, but no powerful theory has emerged that can explain most of the data. There are theories about social comparison, about adaptation, and many other aspects of SWB, but each one of them seems to predict only some of the differences in happiness, and each of the theories thus far has been incompatible with at least some of the data. So the field is still in a theory-building stage. Beware of researchers who think that they have a broad theory that can explain everything about SWB. Many theories (e.g., the idea that people are less happy if they are around others who have more than they do) have proven oversimplified, or correct only in limited circumstances.

Q: What types of personality predispositions are important?
A: Few would be surprised to learn that neurotic people are less happy. After all, neuroticism is the propensity to experience negative emotions. Our data repeatedly also show that extraverts are happier. But they are happier in a certain way - they experience on average more positive emotions. Extraverts do not necessarily experience less negative emotions; it is just that they experience pleasant affect more.

Q: What about dampening one's emotions, being nonattached, as a method of being happier?
A: People who use nonattachment ("it's not that important") might suffer less, at least consciously, from negative events. However, several studies also show that this strategy may result in being less positive when good things happen. Similarly, studies have shown that when people think a goal is very important, they are likely to be happier when they reach it, but they also are likely to suffer more anxiety beforehand if attaining the goal is uncertain. Thus, nonattachment appears to be a two-edged sword, as is investing increased importance in goals.

One can also dampen one's emotions by ignoring them, not labeling them, and so forth. Men traditionally were believed to do this more than women, especially for emotions such as fear and sadness. However, individuals who dampen their emotions seem likely to also experience less intense positive emotions. Women on average, for example, are often socialized to be more open to affective experience - and therefore might on average get depressed more when bad things happen, but also may experience more intense positive emotions when good things happen.

Q: Is it good to be emotionally intense?
A: Randy Larsen and I have studied people varying in emotional intensity, and this individual difference seems to have little relation to SWB. Some intense people are high in SWB, and some nonintense people are high in SWB.

There appear to be costs and benefits to emotional intensity. If an individual thinks that things are all very important and reacts intensely to good events, it is more likely that she or he will also react strongly when things go wrong. Thus, the intense person may be happier when things are going well, but unhappier when things are going badly. Overall, the intense and nonintense persons might on average be equally happy, but the intense person will experience stronger ups and downs. Thus, these two types of individuals experience their happiness in qualitatively different ways.

Q: Isn't health a key to happiness?
A: If people are satisfied with their health, it predicts their life satisfaction moderately well. However, objective measures of health (e.g., a physician's objective rating, not the person's own satisfaction), are correlated only at very low levels with SWB. This makes sense if one thinks about it. There are plenty of healthy people around who take their health for granted, but for a variety of reasons are unhappy. And there are many individuals with bad health who are able to cope and adapt to their condition, and to be reasonably satisfied and happy. Thus, health may be an important component of quality of life, in and of itself, but it is only modestly related to SWB. There is some evidence, however, that multiple and severe health problems that interfere with daily functioning can lower one's SWB.

Q: What about physical beauty?
A: Our research on physical attractiveness shows that it has a small, but positive, influence on SWB. Like income and health, the effect is not large. But there is a small effect such that pretty and handsome people on average are slightly happier than the unattractive. Of course there are lots of individual exceptions in both directions - attractive people who are unhappy and unattractive people who are quite happy. The data suggest that there is a slight advantage for attractive people in terms of SWB, just as there is a modest advantage for wealthier people in terms of SWB.

Q: Are life satisfaction and happiness the same thing?
A: Many researchers in the area of subjective well-being avoid the term "happiness" because it has several different meanings. For example, it can mean a joyful state, it can mean long-term positive feelings, or it can mean life satisfaction. Happiness sometimes is even used to refer to the things that cause one to feel good, as in "Happiness is a good family."

Life satisfaction refers to a cognitive evaluation or judgment of one's life. Is my life overall going well? Has the entirety of my life been close to my ideal? If I could live my life over, would I choose essentially the same life or would I change much of it? People use information to make conscious judgments when they report "satisfaction," whereas moods and emotions occur as ongoing reactions to current events.

Occasionally we use the term happy or happiness to refer to the affective components of SWB - a presence of positive affect and an absence of negative affect. A happy person then would be one who has a positive "affect balance" (much more positive affect than negative affect).

Q: Are most people unhappy?
A: Our work from around the world suggests that most people are happy, not unhappy. A minority of respondents are basically unhappy, and a smaller percentage are actually depressed. The average person is slightly to moderately happy - it is also rare for people to remain elated or extremely happy for long. We hypothesize that humans might be predisposed to mild happiness. The idea that modern society is a sink of unhappiness seems wrong, and we have shown this with a variety of different types of measures of SWB. However, it is true that individuals in very chaotic conditions (e.g., after a revolution) might experience less happiness.

Q: Is happiness real, or is it just in people's imaginations? Is it an epiphenomenon, just a touchy-feely idea that some people worry about?
A: We are finding that happiness is not something shallow, or just a gimmick or imaginary thing. We can measure people's SWB, not just through what they say, but also biologically and through what others can see. In addition, high SWB seems to have certain consequences that are measurable - for example, in health, in work performance, and even in the likelihood of committing suicide. Thus, "happiness" can be measured, and has observable and measurable outcomes.

Q. Is religion counterproductive to high SWB?
A. Many studies, including those based on broad, international samples, show that people who claim to be religious also report higher SWB. This effect is not always strong. For example, in a random-digit dialing study we did with the Gallup Organization, we found a small but statistically significant correlation between religious belief (belief in God and a soul) and reported life satisfaction. A number of factors are probably responsible for the relation between religiosity and SWB - the social support that religion provides and the comforting belief system, for example. It could also be that the people who are disbelievers, in a society where religiosity and belief are the norms, on average tend to be unusual people with some characteristics that can lead to unhappiness. Or it could be that being in tune with a society's general belief system (e.g., in democracy, in religion, in socialism) is much easier than being a skeptic and critic. Much more research needs to be conducted on when and why religious people are happier.

Q: What is the most interesting group you have studied?
A: My son, Robert Biswas-Diener, is collecting data among the Amish, and they are very different from most western respondents. We have collected data among prostitues and the homeless in the slums of Calcutta, as well as among the homeless in California. We have some data from the Masai in Africa, and are planning a larger project among the Masai. We are planning to collect data from the Greenlanders, the indigenous people from Northern Greenland, in 2002. We also have data on less "exotic" samples from a larger number of nations.

We have learned many interesting things from the "small cultures." For instance, the Masai (in contrast to Americans) are extremely satisfied with their physical appearance. The thing that the California homeless miss most is not physical things such as good housing, but close and trusting friendships. Even though the Calcutta homeless are worse off physically than the California homeless (e.g., have less food), they are not as dissatisfied with life because they are more likely to have a strong social network. The Amish appear to be busy people who are rarely bored. For the Amish, satisfaction is in part a statement about their relationship to God. And so forth; from each of these groups we have learned important new things.

Q: What role do values play in SWB?
A: People's values influence the goals that they set for themselves. For example, people who place a high value on the environment might set a goal of recycling and composting. People who set goals for themselves that are consistent with their values will experience fewer internal conflicts.

As people work for their goals, and achieve them, they experience subjective well-being. Thus, SWB can be achieved by seeking those things that one values. Values (including helping others, hard work, contributing to society) are thus not inconsistent with SWB. Instead, people's SWB can be enhanced to the degree that they work for goals that are consistent with their values, and are able to make progress toward those goals. Being happy is not just a hedonistic enterprise of "eat, drink, and be merry" - for most people, obtaining high SWB means working for important values.

People might not enjoy specific activities that are necessary to achieving their goals. However, these activities in the long-run can lead to satisfaction. Thus, some activities might not produce pleasure or even positive affect at the moment, but might lead to longer-term life satisfaction. There is evidence, however, that people on average do tend to enjoy activities more if they are consistent with their values.

It is important to understand that there is not a choice between other important values and SWB. If a person is socialized to desire values and goals that are positive, the person will achieve SWB by moving toward those values. Thus, achieving SWB is not a sort of search for hedonistic pleasures, but instead can be best achieved by working for the things that a person values. Being happy does not stand in contrast to basic values - the choice need not be between one or the other. Instead, SWB can derive from working for one's values.

Q. What are the most important things scientists have learned about SWB?
A. We have learned some important things about SWB, but there is much that is still uncertain. Oftentimes people will ask us questions for which we simply have no good answer. But here are a few of the important things we have learned. Below I list my favorites:

1.  We seem to be able to measure the components of SWB with some level of validity.
2.  Temperament is an important predictor of a person's SWB, but conditions can matter too. Some conditions have long-lasting effects on SWB (e.g., unemployment, living in a very poor nation), and many situations can dramatically influence SWB in the short run.
3.  Culture makes a difference to SWB; some cultures have higher levels of SWB than others. One reason for this seems to be that in some cultures happiness is valued more than in other cultures.
4.  People in unstable and very poor societies avow lower levels of SWB.
5.  The happiest people all seem to have good friends.
6.  On average most people are at least slightly happy. But everyone has up and down moods - nobody is happy every moment. Even the happiest people sometimes get unhappy.
7.  Negative and positive emotions are to some extent independent. Thus, one can have a lot of positive affect, but this does not tell us with certainty whether one is low on negative affect. Similarly, a person high in negative affect might also be high in positive affect. Thus, "happiness" cannot be simply understood as a single dimension, but is multidimensional.
8.  There seems to be no single key to happiness- no one thing that guarantees high SWB once you possess it. Instead, there are many necessary conditions that together seem to contribute to high SWB.
9.  High average positive affect is not a bad thing; instead, it seems to have desirable consequences (as outlined earlier). Furthermore, high SWB can follow from the values that people cherish, and is not simple hedonism.
10. Emotional intensity seems relatively independent of average happiness. Instead, happiness is based more squarely on the frequency of positive moods and emotions - on being in a good mood (even though not intense) most of the time.

Q. What error do reporters often make in inquiring about SWB?
A. Reporters sometimes think that the particular questions on their mind, rather than the ones scientists are studying or those that scientists know about, are the important ones. Thus, reporters sometimes ask research psychologists questions about SWB that are either uninteresting from a scientific point of view, or about which the scientist knows little.

Let me offer an analogy from chemistry. Imagine that you phone an expert chemist, who has just won the Nobel prize, and ask her if she could turn water into wine, or turn lead into gold. She would hang up on you. She has made an important discovery, and that is what she knows about and wants to discuss. If you phone an astronomer and ask about life on other planets, he or she can make some educated guesses, but ultimately does not have a strong answer to your question. However, the astronomer knows a great deal about many extraterrestrial things, if you are interested in those particular things and ask about them.

So a psychologist-researcher, for example one who is an expert on SWB, knows certain things, and knows a few things pretty well. And those are the things not only that he or she is competent to discuss, but are also the things about which s/he likes to talk. When the reporter brings up a bunch of questions that have just popped into their heads, the interview may seem naive or irrelevant to the researcher. The challenge for reporters is to draw out what is known scientifically, not to try to answer some questions about which science knows little.