Measures of well-being were created to assess psychological flourishing and feelings-positive feelings, negative feelings, and the difference between the two. The scales were evaluated in a sample of 689 college students from six locations. The Flourishing Scale is a brief 8-item summary measure of the respondent's self-perceived success in important areas such as relationships, self-esteem, purpose, and optimism. The scale provides a single psychological well-being score. The measure has good psychometric properties, and is strongly associated with other psychological well-being scales. The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience produces a score for positive feelings (6 items), a score for negative feelings (6 items), and the two can be combined to create a balance score. This 12-item brief scale has a number of desirable features compared to earlier measures of positive and negative emotions. In particular, the scale assesses with a few 123Soc Indic Res (2010) 97:143-156 DOI 10.1007 items a broad range of negative and positive experiences and feelings, not just those of a certain type, and is based on the amount of time the feelings were experienced during the past 4 weeks. The scale converges well with measures of emotions and affective well-being.

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Although mate preference research has firmly established that men value physical attractiveness more than women do and women value social status more than men do, recent speed-dating studies have indicated mixed evidence (at best) for whether people's sex-differentiated mate preferences predict actual mate choices. According to an evolutionary, mate preference priority model (Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002; Li & Kenrick, 2006; Li, Valentine, & Patel, 2011), the sexes are largely similar in what they ideally like, but for long-term mates, they should differ on what they most want to avoid in early selection contexts. Following this model, we conducted experiments using online messaging and modified speed-dating platforms. Results indicate that when a mating pool includes people at the low end of social status and physical attractiveness, mate choice criteria are sex-differentiated: Men, more than women, chose mates based on physical attractiveness, whereas women, more than men, chose mates based on social status. In addition, individuals who more greatly valued social status or physical attractiveness on paper valued these traits more in their actual choices. In particular, mate choices were sex-differentiated when considering long-term relationships but not short-term ones, where both sexes shunned partners with low physical attractiveness. The findings validate a large body of mate preferences research and an evolutionary perspective on mating, and they have implications for research using speed-dating and other interactive contexts.

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Evidence is presented that measures of subjective well-being vary along a dimension anchored at the two ends by evaluative judgments of life and experienced affect. A debate in recent decades has been focused on whether rising income increases the experience of well-being. We found that Judgment is more strongly associated with income, and with long-term changes of national income. Measures of feelings showed lower correlations with income in cross-sectional analyses, and lower associations with long-term rising income. Furthermore, income showed very similar regression lines with the judgment of life at the two times of the surveys, suggesting that a common standard was used. Measures of concepts such as "Happiness" and "Life Satisfaction" appear to be saturated with varying mixtures of judgment and affect, and this is reflected in the degree to which they correlate with income. Our findings are relevant to Easterlin's hypotheses about income and well-being. Income and income change were associated with judgments of life and national increases in them, whereas the associations of income and feelings were less robust.