Article summary of Well-being concepts and components by Tov. - Chapter

What is this article about?

Well-being is a broad, complex, multifaceted construct. This article is a review of different ways of defining and measuring well-being and the implications that this has for understanding the correlates and causes of well-being. Different conceptions of well-being and specific components of them will be discussed.

What different conceptions of well-being are there?

There are different ideas on what it means to be well. There are two major approaches to conceptualizing well-being:

• Hedonic well-being (HWB) refers to the approach that emphasizes a person's own emotional and cognitive evaluations of their own life. HWB consists of frequent pleasant feelings, infrequent unpleasant feelings, and an overall judgment that life is satisfying. This is also referred to as subjective well-being. 
• Eudaimonic well-being refers to the approach that takes as its starting point that there are certain needs or qualities that are essential for one's psychological growth and development. Fulfillment of these needs enables a person to reach their full potential. This is also referred to as psychological well-being. Different eudaimonic approaches focus on different needs and/or qualities of life. 

Measures of HWB and EWB are highly correlated. This suggests that positive feelings and positive functioning tend to go hand in hand. This is why there are also approaches that try to measure both the HWB and the EWB.

What is the difference between affective and cognitive well-being?

Affective well-being (AWB) refers to the experience of pleasant and unpleasant feelings. Cognitive well-being (CWB) refers to an evaluation of how well one's life is going relative to an ideal state of affairs. CWB tends to be based on information that is more stable. The only thing that would suggest otherwise, is that personality traits such as extraversion and neuroticism correlate more strongly with AWB.

Aspects of AWB that one would need to know to assess AWB are valence, frequency, and intensity. Valence is a quality that distinguishes between pleasant or positive affect and unpleasant or negative affect. Frequency refers to how often specific affect occurs and intensity to how intens it is when it occurs. Someone might feel happy overall because of one big enlighting life-changing thing that happened, or because a lot of small positive things that happened throughout their life. In addition to valence, frequency, and intensity, emotions may also be characterized by their level of arousal, the cultural calue or the degree to which they are interpersonally engaging.

Aspects of CWB that one would need to know to assess CWB are firstly that there are global measures to assess one's life as a whole, and domain specific measures to assess specific aspects of one's life. Secondly, there are top-down models and bottom-up models. A top-down models suggests that people who are happy, feel more satisfaction in different domains of their life. A bottom-up model suggests the opposite; that people who are satisfied with important domains of their life, feel more happiness.

What is the difference between a state conception of well-being and a trait conception of well-being?

Measures of well-being can be placed on a continuum ranging from state-like to trait-like. Trait levels of well-being reger to how a person feels or how satisfied they are in general or on average across time and situations. State levels of well-being refer to feelings and satisfaction at a particular moment in time or within a restricted period of time. 

Trait measures of well-being are mostly influenced by personality traits, cultural values, memory biases, and general beliefs about one's self. State measures mostly reflect unstable factors such as the day of the week, the temperature, or the nuances of a recent event or activity. Thus, state and trait measures of well-being involve different processes, are influenced by different factors, and are associated with distinct outcomes.