1 Income’s Association with Judgments of Life Versus Feelings

Abstract

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.

Local neighbors as positives, regional neighbors as negatives: Competing channels in the relationship between others’ income, health, and happiness

“…Using the GHWBI, Kahneman & Deaton (2010) find that annual income's positive relationship with hedonic SWB is insignificant for income greater than $75,000 but find no such satiation point in the positive relationship with BPL. Diener et al (2010) find a similar pattern using the same questions from the Gallup World Poll.…”

What are people saying when they report they are happy or life satisfied

“…They concluded that high income was related to life satisfaction but did not maintain for happiness, whereas low income was related both to low life evaluation and low emotional well-being. As suggested also by Diener, Kahneman, Tov and Arora (2010) and Oishi and Diener (2014) the different reports of life satisfaction and happiness reflect different conditions. The cognitive report of life evaluation reflects the prevalent economic conditions; whereas the affective report of happiness reflect the conditions of life, for instance the free time.…”

Religion, Time Use, and Affective Well-Being

“…However, previous studies have mostly focused on affective well-being as a stable state for a period of time or certain pathological states rather than pleasant and unpleasant experiences in everyday life (Thoits 1989). They have relied on survey measures that ask respondents to provide an overall assessment of their emotional states, which can be influenced by their general levels of happiness and personal dispositions and also prone to retrospective and aggregation bias (Kahneman and Krueger 2006;Diener et al 2010). In order to measure daily affective experiences properly, Kahneman and Krueger (2006:9) argue that one needs to avoid "effects of judgment and of memory as much as possible."…”

“…The response to each of these questions is binary. I summarize these questions into a composite variable that measures daily affective balance by subtracting the mean of the four negative affect questions from the mean of the three positive ones and then standardizing it so that the mean of the variable is zero with standard deviation of one (Diener et al 2010). …”

“…Conventional survey measures of affective well-being typically ask respondents to assess their general affective experiences, often over a relatively long period of time. As a result, these measures are confounded by respondent's overall level of evaluative well-being and also susceptible to the biases due to retrospective evaluation and aggregation (e.g., Diener et al 2010). By using the data collected with the DRM, which measures positive and negative affective experiences associated with specific activities, this study offers a cleaner test of the connection between religious participation and the affective domain of subjective well-being compared to previous studies.…”