Personality, Culture, and Subjective Well-Being: Emotional and Cognitive Evaluations of Life

Abstract

Subjective well-being (SWB), people's emotional and cognitive evaluations of their lives, includes what lay people call happiness, peace, fulfillment, and life satisfaction. Personality dispositions such as extraversion, neuroticism, and self-esteem can markedly influence levels of SWB. Although personality can explain a significant amount of the variability in SWB, life circumstances also influence long-term levels. Cultural variables explain differences in mean levels of SWB and appear to be due to objective factors such as wealth, to norms dictating appropriate feelings and how important SWB is considered to be, and to the relative approach versus avoidance tendencies of societies. Culture can also moderate which variables most influence SWB. Although it is challenging to assess SWB across societies, the measures have some degree of cross-cultural validity. Although nations can be evaluated by their levels of SWB, there are still many open questions in this area.

Psychosocial factors and health as determinants of quality of life in community-dwelling older adults

“…There is considerable evidence for an association between personality traits and QoL and subjective well-being [22][23][24]. Personality traits have relatively high stability over the lifecourse, providing a consistent and stable indication of how an individual might perceive and respond to life's challenges [5,25].…”

“…Personality traits have relatively high stability over the lifecourse, providing a consistent and stable indication of how an individual might perceive and respond to life's challenges [5,25]. Some studies have found that self-reported quality of life is associated with aspects of personality such as self-efficacy, optimism, goal adjustment and harm avoidance [5,20,24,26]. Many personality theorists argue for the presence of five superordinate factors which are viewed as being fundamental to the description of personality differences: Extraversion, Neuroticism/Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience (also called Intellect/Imagination).…”

Ageing in rural areas of East and West Germany: increasing similarities and remaining differences

“…Barresi et al 1983Barresi et al -1984Lamb 1996;Veenhoven 1996;Ferna´ndez-Ballesteros et al 2001;Diener et al 2003;Oswald et al 2003). This was also the case for the German rural elders.…”

“…In our prediction model, we included socio-demographic, health-related, social, environmental, mobility and leisure-related predictor variables from those described above which had proven to contribute substantially to older people's well-being in past studies (e.g. Barresi et al 1983Barresi et al -1984Baldassare et al 1984;Golant 1986Golant , 2004Farquhar 1995;Lamb 1996;Veenhoven 1996;Wenger 1997;Smith et al 1999;Cvitkovich and Wister 2001;Ferna´ndez-Ballesteros et al 2001;Evans et al 2002;Diener et al 2003;Oswald et al 2003) as well as in our previous research (e.g. Mollenkopf et al 2002Mollenkopf et al , 2004.…”

“…Considering that objective characteristics have often been shown to exert a modest impact on well-being (e.g. Veenhoven 1996; Diener et al 2003;Krause 2004), objective conditions will be related to subjective evaluations of neighbourhood, services, and the possibilities to be mobile and pursue leisure activities.…”