Subjective well-being

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Subjective well-being (SWB) is a concept of well-being (happiness) that focus on evaluations from the perspective of the people who's lives are being evaluated rather than from some objective viewpoint. SWB measures often rely on self-reports, but that does not make them SWB measures. Objective measures of wellbeing are also sometimes measured with self-reports and SWB can also be measured with informant ratings.^[1]

Ed Diener defined SWB in terms of three indicators of subjective well-being: frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and cognitive evaluations such as life satisfaction."^[2][3][4]

SWB includes two different subjective measures of well-being that are based on different definitions of happiness. Experiences of positive affect (mood, emotions), and experiences of negative affect (mood, emotions) can be used to create a measure of the amount of positive and negative affect in people's lives. These hedonic balance scores measure subjective wellbeing from a hedonistic perspective that define happiness as high PA and low NA. Life-satisfaction is based on a subjective view of happiness. Accordingly, there is no objective way to define happiness and people have to define it for themselves. They then use their own definition of happiness to evaluate their actual. ^[5] Therefore SWB is not a definition of happiness. Rather it is a label for two definitions of happiness, a hedonistic one and a subjective one. Both are based on subjective experiences, but the subjective experiences are different. Hedonism relies on aggregation of momentary affective experiences. Life-satisfaction relies on the recall and evaluation of past experiences.

Although SWB tends to be stable over the time^[5] and is strongly related to personality traits,^[6] the emotional component of SWB can be impacted by situations; for example, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, lowered emotional well-being by 74%.^[7] There is evidence that health and SWB may mutually influence each other, as good health tends to be associated with greater happiness,^[8] and a number of studies have found that positive emotions and optimism can have a beneficial influence on health.^[9]