Abstract
Happiness or subjective well-being is often measured by assessing individuals’ judgments of life satisfaction and experience of positive and negative affect (Diener, Psychological Bulletin, 95, 542–575, 1984). In addition, recent research suggests that individuals’ sense of harmony in life is also an important component of subjective well-being (Kjell et al., Social Indicators Research, 126, 893–919, 2016; Nima et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 3016, 2020a; Nima et al., Validation of a general subjective well-being factor using classic test theory, 2020b). Happiness, is largely explained by temperament traits such as emotional stability and extraversion, but also by specific life circumstances such as being married, having a reasonable income, having a job, and having meaningful social connections, and last but not the least by individuals’ values and goals or what they make of themselves intentionally, that is, character traits such as self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence (Myers and Diener, Psychological Science, 6, 10–18, 1995; Diener et al., Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13, 176–184, 2018; Cloninger, Feeling good: The science of well-being, Oxford University Press, 2004; Garcia and Archer, The Journal of Happiness and Well-Being, 4, 212–225, 2016; Garcia et al., PsyCh Journal, 7, 103–104, 2018a; PsyCh Journal, 7, 53–54, 2018b; Lester et al., Annals of General Psychiatry, 15, 10, 2016). In this context, subjective well-being reflects an overall evaluation of the quality of a person’s life from her own perspective. In other words, happiness, operationalized as subjective well-being, is cognitive in nature because it consists of people’s own judgments of their life as a whole (Garcia et al., A biopsychosocial model of subjective well-being (under editorial evaluation), n.d., under editorial evaluation). As such, it is influenced by what is salient in people’ minds at the moment of the assessment. Indeed, global judgments of happiness are based on previous experiences that have caused evaluative reactions and emotional reactions. These reactions are then, depending on different factors, more or less accessible when a person is asked to judge and rate her global levels of happiness (Kim-Prieto et al., Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 261–300, 2005). This framework is indeed not static, the recollection of an event might elicit different emotions and judgments of happiness depending on, for example, the person’s situation, temperament, character, and identity (cf. Chap. 8 in this volume). That is to say, a wide range of information is used when individuals are asked to assess their subjective well-being (for a review see Schwartz and Strack, Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology, Russell Sage Found, 1999).
Here, we applied quantitative semantics to investigate differences and similarities between the content of people’s (N = 1000) responses to words that individuals associate to happiness (cf. semantic memory) and their own brief descriptions of what makes them happy (cf. episodic memory). We also investigated how the content in these responses relates to participants’ scores in the three components of subjective well-being: life satisfaction, affect, and harmony in life. As in past studies, the content of people’s semantic and episodic memories of happiness had a clear communal theme (i.e., goals and values based on other relationships) expressed in words such as family, kids, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, daughter, friendship, relationships, hel**, and etcetera; and also an agentic theme (i.e., goals and values based on the self as an agent) expressed in words such as healthy, eating, reading, and exercising. Moreover, we also discerned a transcendental or spiritual theme (i.e., goals and values that transcend the self and that are existential in nature) expressed in words such as meaning, alive, memories, creative, and creating. Self-rated happiness correlated twice as much to what people associate to happiness compared to narratives of what makes people happy. At the same time, for both questions, the same concepts were mirrored as predominant in positive (e.g., family) and negative (e.g., money) scores in all subjective well-being measures. Thus, suggesting a common association of both semantic and episodic memories to a general happiness factor connecting the cognitive, affective and social components of subjective well-being. In sum, we argue that our results may indicate a mismeasurement of happiness, if semantic memory and/or temperament is more active than episodic memory and/or character when people are asked to rate their happiness on a scale. Happiness is indeed more than the accumulation of emotional reactions and the life we lived, it is also how we remember when we tell our story.
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Notes
- 1.
Researchers conducting experiments aiming to activate different memory systems use questions that are similarly designed as the ones we used in the present study. For semantic memory, for example, participants are asked to think of two related words (cf. to the question “Which words do you associate to happiness?” where the participant is asked to find words she associates to a specific cue word, namely, happiness). This is a condition that serves as a baseline to control for brain activity related to semantic processing that has been widely used in numerous previous studies as a comparison relative to episodic retrieval (e.g., Beaty et al. 2015; Beaty and Schacter 2018; Fink et al. 2009; Kleibeuker et al. 2013; Benoit and Schacter 2015; Addis et al. 2009). Episodic retrieval, which activates the episodic brain network, is achieved by simply asking participants to recall a past experience related to a cue word (cf. to the question “What makes you happy?” in which the cue word is still happiness, but where the verb makes and the pronoun you is aimed to activate a life narrative in relation to the concept of happiness, rather than associations to happiness; after all this brain network is distinctive in this specific way) (see also Beaty et al. 2018).
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This work was supported by grants from the Swedish Research Council (Dnr. 2015-01229), Vinnova (Dnr. 2018-02007), and Kamprad Foundation (Dnr. 20180281).
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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Garcia, D., Al Nima, A., Kjell, O.N.E., Granjard, A., Sikström, S. (2020). The (Mis)measurement of Happiness: Words We Associate to Happiness (Semantic Memory) and Narratives of What Makes Us Happy (Episodic Memory). In: Sikström, S., Garcia, D. (eds) Statistical Semantics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37250-7_10
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