Subjective Well-Being in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a growing area of psychology that focuses on how people evaluate their lives. SWB is often divided into three major components: life satisfaction, the presence of frequent positive affect, and the relative absence of negative affect. The field of SWB covers the full-range of affect from depression and dissatisfaction to euphoria and high satisfaction. Lucas, Diener, and Suh found that SWB variables show discriminant validity from personality variables such as optimism and self-esteem. Work on the psychometric properties of SWB scales reveals that they have substantial validity, reliability, sensitivity to change, and factorial invariance across groups. Thus, although initial findings are promising in terms of making cross-cultural comparisons of SWB, all the issues are not yet resolved. Veenhoven found that income was much more strongly correlated with SWB in poorer than in wealthier nations.