Experienced Well-Being
When I became interested in the study of well-being about fifteen years ago, I quickly found out that almost everything that was known about the subject drew on the answers of millions of people to minor variations of a survey question, which was generally accepted as a measure of happiness. The question is clearly addressed to your remembering self, which is invited to think about your life:
All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?
Having come to the topic of well-being from the study of the mistaken memories of colonoscopies and painfully cold hands, I was naturally suspicious of global satisfaction with life as a valid measure of well-being. As the remembering self had not proved to be a good witness in my experiments, I focused on the well-being of the experiencing self. I proposed that it made sense to say that “Helen was happy in the month of March” if
she spent most of her time engaged in activities that she would rather continue than stop, little time in situations she wished to escape, and—very important because life is short—not too much time in a neutral state in which she would not care either way.
There are many different experiences we would rather continue than stop, including both mental and physical pleasures. One of the examples I had in mind for a situation that Helen would wish to continue is total absorption in a task, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow—a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle: interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations. I also had memories of a happy early childhood in which I always cried when my mother came to tear me away from my toys to take me to the park, and cried again when she took me away from the swings and the slide. The resistance to interruption was a sign I had been having a good time, both with my toys and with the swings.
I proposed to measure Helen’s objective happiness precisely as we assessed the experience of the two colonoscopy patients, by evaluating a profile of the well-being she experienced over successive moments of her life. In this I was following Edgeworth’s hedonimeter method of a century earlier. In my initial enthusiasm for this approach, I was inclined to dismiss Helen’s remembering self as an error-prone witness to the actual well-being of her experiencing self. I suspected this position was too extreme, which it turned out to be, but it was a good start.
Experienced Well-Being
I assembled “a dream team” that included three other psychologists of different specialties and one economist, and we set out together to develop a measure of the well-being of the experiencing self. A continuous record of experience was unfortunately impossible—a person cannot live normally while constantly reporting her experiences. The closest alternative was experience sampling, a method that Csikszentmihalyi had invented. Technology has advanced since its first uses. Experience sampling is now implemented by programming an individual’s cell phone to beep or vibrate at random intervals during the day. The phone then presents a brief menu of questions about what the respondent was doing and who was with her when she was interrupted. The participant is also shown rating scales to report the intensity of various feelings: happiness, tension, anger, worry, engagement, physical pain, and others.
Experience sampling is expensive and burdensome (although less disturbing than most people initially expect; answering the questions takes very little time). A more practical alternative was needed, so we developed a method that we called the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM). We hoped it would approximate the results of experience sampling and provide additional information about the way people spend their time. Participants (all women, in the early studies) were invited to a two-hour session. We first asked them to relive the previous day in detail, breaking it up into episodes like scenes in a film. Later, they answered menus of questions about each episode, based on the experience-sampling method. They selected activities in which they were engaged from a list and indicated the one to which they paid most attention. They also listed the individuals they had been with, and rated the intensity of several feelings on separate 0–6 scales (0 = the absence of the feeling; 6 = most intense feeling). Our method drew on evidence that people who are able to retrieve a past situation in detail are also able to relive the feelings that accompanied it, even experiencing their earlier physiological indications of emotion.
We assumed that our participants would fairly accurately recover the feeling of a prototypical moment of the episode. Several comparisons with experience sampling confirmed the validity of the DRM. Because the participants also reported the times at which episodes began and ended, we were able to compute a duration-weighted measure of their feeling during the entire waking day. Longer episodes counted more than short episodes in our summary measure of daily affect. Our questionnaire also included measures of life satisfaction, which we interpreted as the satisfaction of the remembering self. We used the DRM to study the determinants of both emotional well-being and life satisfaction in several thousand women in the United States, France, and Denmark.