W. Wilson's (1967) review of the area of subjective well-being (SWB) advanced several conclusions regarding those who report high levels of "happiness." A number of his conclusions have been overturned: youth and modest aspirations no longer are seen as prerequisites of SWB. E. Diener's (1984) review placed greater emphasis on theories that stressed psychological factors. In the current article, the authors review current evidence for Wilson's conclusions and discuss modern theories of SWB that stress dispositional influences, adaptation, goals, and coping strategies. The next steps in the evolution of the field are to comprehend the interaction of psychological factors with life circumstances in producing SWB, to understand the causal pathways leading to happiness, understand the processes underlying adaptation to events, and develop theories that explain why certain variables differentially influence the different components of SWB (life satisfaction, pleasant affect, and unpleasant affect).In 1967, Warner Wilson presented a broad review of subjective well-being (SWB) research entitled, "Correlates of Avowed Happiness." Based on the limited data available at that time, Wilson concluded that the happy person is a "young, healthy, welleducated, well-paid, extroverted, optimistic, worry-free, religious, married person with high self-esteem, job morale, modest aspirations, of either sex and of a wide range of intelligence" (p. 294). In the three decades since Wilson's review, investigations into SWB have evolved. Although researchers now know a great deal more about the correlates of SWB, they are less interested in simply describing the demographic characteristics that correlate with it. Instead, they focus their effort on understanding the processes that underlie happiness. This trend represents a greater recognition of the central role played by people's goals, coping efforts, and dispositions. In this article, we review research on several major theoretical approaches to well-being and then indicate how these theories clarify the findings on demographic correlates of SWB.Throughout the review we suggest four directions that researchers should pursue in the decades ahead. These are by no means the only questions left to answer, but we believe they are the most interesting issues left to resolve. First, the causal direction of the correlates of happiness must be examined through more sophisticated methodologies. Although the causal priority of demographic factors such as marriage and income is intuitively appealing, it is by no means certain. Second, researchers must focus greater attention on the interaction between internal factors (such as personality traits) and external circumstances. As we shall see, demographic factors have surprisingly small effects on SWB, but these effects may depend on the personalities of those individuals being studied. Thus, future research must take Person X Situation interactions into account. Third, researchers must strive to understand the processes underlying adaptation. Consid...

The convergent and discriminant validities of well-being concepts were examined using multitrait-multimethod matrix analyses (D. T. Campbell & D. W. Fiske, 1959) on 3 sets of data. In Study 1, participants completed measures of life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, self-esteem, and optimism on 2 occasions 4 weeks apart and also obtained 3 informant ratings. In Study 2, participants completed each of the 5 measures on 2 occasions 2 years apart and collected informant reports at Time 2. In Study 3, participants completed 2 different scales for each of the 5 constructs. Analyses showed that (a) life satisfaction is discriminable from positive and negative affect, (b) positive affect is discriminable from negative affect, (c) life satisfaction is discriminable from optimism and self-esteem, and (d) optimism is separable from trait measures of negative affect.

The relative importance of emotions versus normative beliefs for life satisfaction judgments was compared among individualist and collectivist nations in 2 large sets of international data (in total, 61 nations, N = 62,446). Among nations, emotions and life satisfaction correlated significantly more strongly in more individualistic nations (r = .52 in Study 1; r = .48 in Study 2). At the individual level, emotions were far superior predictors of life satisfaction to norms (social approval of life satisfaction) in individualist cultures, whereas norms and emotions were equally strong predictors of life satisfaction in collectivist cultures. The present findings have implications for future studies on cultural notions of well-being, the functional value of emotional experiences, and individual differences in life satisfaction profiles.Across the world, is the "good life" attained mostly by doing what a person would like to do or by doing what a person thinks he or she should do? More broadly, are internal processes, such as attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and the like, or external pro-

Ecologies shape cultures; cultures influence the development of personalities. There are both universal and culture-specific aspects of variation in personality. Some culture-specific aspects correspond to cultural syndromes such as complexity, tightness, individualism, and collectivism. A large body of literature suggests that the Big Five personality factors emerge in various cultures. However, caution is required in arguing for such universality, because most studies have not included emic (culture-specific) traits and have not studied samples that are extremely different in culture from Western samples.