Human Growth and Development / Unit 14 HGD 1989 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Subjective Well-Being
The idea
Subjective well-being has two sides. Happiness is the affective side, how good one feels, and can be measured by a single question; finances, social support and extraversion predict it. Life satisfaction is a global, multidimensional appraisal of one's life, measured by instruments such as the Satisfaction With Life Scale, validated across cultures.
In practice
A fifty-year-old who feels stressed most days yet, asked about her life as a whole, rates it highly: low daily happiness, high life satisfaction.
Where people slip
The two can diverge, which is why researchers measure both separately. Correlates shift with age: fluid intelligence predicts life satisfaction for young and middle-aged adults, while perceived health matters more in older adulthood. Younger adults overestimate their future happiness; older adults tend to underestimate it.
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