Previous research has suggested a positive effect of physical activity on life satisfaction. Little research exists that has investigated the relationship between physical fitness and life satisfaction. For this purpose, this research was done to determine the relationship between physical fitness and life satisfaction in a sample of university men and women. Participants (N = 28, M age = 22.18) completed multiple indicators of physical fitness including cardiovascular fitness, muscular fitness, body composition and flexibility, and life satisfaction (SWLS). Descriptive and one-way between-groups ANOVAs were performed to determine gender differences on measures of life satisfaction and measures of fitness. In addition, the relationship between the five health-related components of fitness and life satisfaction were investigated using Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient. Analyses indicated there were no significant correlations between any of the health-related components of fitness and scores on the SWLS. There were significant gender differences on all physical fitness measures, except partial curl-ups, but no significant gender differences on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that improved physical fitness does not have a relationship with higher life satisfaction measures. Further tests, utilizing larger sample sizes, are recommended.Keywords physical fitness, life satisfaction, gender, physical activity 2 SAGE Open between PA and life satisfaction is also unclear. For example, research suggests that, among adolescents, as participation in PA declines, life satisfaction declines as well (Kaplan, Lazarus, Cohen, & Leu, 1991), higher life satisfaction scores are reported in younger adults participating in PA (Tasiemski, Kennedy, Gardner, & Taylor, 2005), and older adults participating in the most leisure-time activities report the highest life satisfaction (Heo, Stebbins, Kim, & Lee, 2013). On the contrary, Guven, Ozcan, Tasgin, and Arslan (2013) found that while life satisfaction scores did improve as PA frequency or duration increased, there was no significant relationship between PA and life satisfaction. Similar results were found in a study by Eime, Harvey, and Payne (2014), who found that life satisfaction was not significantly related to the level of participation in PA.Much of the existing literature has investigated the relationship of PA with life satisfaction relying upon recall or estimation of time spent in activity, and self-assessment of the intensity of an activity. Limitations of self-report data include recall bias and recollection problems. For example, individuals are most accurate when recalling sedentary behavior and high-intensity activities (Sallis & Saelens, 2000). Previous literature has suggested that a more appropriate form of research would be to use information, "with biological significance for the organism, such as the gas exchange or the lactate threshold, or the power-time asymptote" (Ekkekakis & Petruzzello, 1999, p. 357). This was in reference to po...

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Widowhood researchers have been increasingly interested in the construct of resilience and identifying factors which contribute to adaptive responses to conjugal loss. Available measures of general resilience were validated on nonwidowed samples and broadly lack face validity for use with widowed people. This article reports the development and validation of a resilience scale specific to widowhood, the Widowhood Resilience Scale. Initially, qualitative responses from 744 widowed people were analyzed and cross-referenced with existing literature on resilience to develop 49 items. The 49 items were tested on a sample of 1,188 widowed people, resulting in a 6-factor, 25-item scale.

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