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Life satisfaction

Article · January 2001

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Lorie Sousa Sonja Lyubomirsky

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Life Satisfaction

Lorie Sousa and Sonja Lyubomirsky

University of California, Riverside

Reference: Sousa, L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2001). Life satisfaction. In J. Worell

(Ed.), Encylopedia of women and gender: Sex similarities and differences and
the impact of society on gender (Vol. 2, pp. 667-676). . San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.

I. Definition of Life Satisfaction

II. Distinction From Related Constructs

III. Introduction

IV. Measurement

V. How Do People Make Life Satisfaction Judgments?

VI. What Determines Life Satisfaction?: Environment vs. Personality

VII. Demographic Variables As Predictors of Life Satisfaction

VIII. Future Directions

IX. Conclusions

Affect Experiences pertaining to feelings, emotion, or mood.

Cognitive The mental process of knowing, thinking, learning, and judging.

Collectivist Cultures Members of collectivist cultures (e.g., Japan, China,

Mexico) tend to value family, belonging, and the needs of the group.

Confounding Variable A variable that is so well correlated with the variable

of interest that it is difficult to determine whether differences or changes are

due to the variable of interest or to the confound.

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Experience Sampling A method used to evaluate a participant’s experience,

mood, and/or behavior at a particular point in time. Experience sampling data

are generally collected over several days and participants are asked to record

their responses at the moment.

Individualist Cultures Members of individualist cultures (e.g., U.S., Western

Europe) tend to value individuality and independence.

Informant Data Data obtained from a significant other such as a mother,

father, spouse, or friend.

Internal Consistency Reliability of a measure determined by the

intercorrelations of the components or items of the measure.

Longitudinal Design A research design in which participants are evaluated

over a period of time.

Meta-Analysis A technique applied to summarize the literature in a particular

area and to investigate conflicting findings. This method involves gathering the

results from many studies on a specific topic to determine the average

comprehensive finding.

Objective Objective factors are those that are perceptible to the outside world

and can be evaluated by others.

Predictor A known variable that is used to predict a change in another

variable. For example, if one is interested in the extent to which exercise,

weight, and smoking are related to heart disease, then one might collect

information on the three predictor variables (i.e., exercise, weight, and

smoking), as well as on the outcome variable (i.e., disease). Such data will
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presumably tell researchers something valuable about the potential influence of

exercise, weight, and smoking on the rate of disease.

Social Desirability Bias A bias reflected in participants altering their

responses based on their need for social approval. For example, a respondent

who is concerned with social approval may inflate her response to the

interview question, "Are you a happy person," because she does not wish to

appear sad or depressed to the interviewer.

Subjective Subjective factors are those that are perceived only by the affected

individual; they are not perceptible to the senses of another person.

Subjective Well-Being An evaluation of one’s life assessed by measures of

global life satisfaction, frequency of positive affect, and frequency of negative

affect.

I. DEFINITION OF LIFE SATISFACTION

SATISFACTION is a Latin word that means to make or do enough.

Satisfaction with one’s life implies a contentment with or acceptance of one’s

life circumstances, or the fulfillment of one’s wants and needs for one’s life as a

whole. In essence, life satisfaction is a subjective assessment of the quality of

one’s life. Because it is inherently an evaluation, judgments of life satisfaction

have a large cognitive component.

II. DISTINCTION FROM RELATED CONSTRUCTS

A. Life Satisfaction vs. Subjective Well-Being

According to Ed Diener and his colleagues (1999), subjective well-being,

or happiness, has both an affective (i.e., emotional) and a cognitive (i.e.,

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judgmental) component. The affective component consists of how frequently

an individual reports experiencing positive and negative affect. Life satisfaction

is considered to be the cognitive component of this broader construct.

B. Life Satisfaction vs. Life-Domain Satisfaction

Researchers differentiate between life-domain satisfaction and life-as-a-

whole (or global) life satisfaction. Life-domain satisfaction refers to

satisfaction with specific areas of an individual’s life, such as work, marriage,

and income, whereas judgments of global life satisfaction are much more broad,

consisting of an individual’s comprehensive judgment of her life.

III. INTRODUCTION

The success of a community or nation is frequently judged by objective

standards. Political parties often remind citizens of the prosperity of the

nation during their party’s governance as a method to encourage appreciation

and re-election. To persuade people that quality of life has improved under

their administration, they cite such factors as low unemployment rates, greater

income, lower taxes, lower crime rates, and improvements in education and

health care. The quality of life of the individual, however, cannot be quantified

in this manner. Indeed, objective measures of quality of life (i.e., income,

education) are often weakly related to people’s subjective self-reports of the

extent to which they are satisfied with their lives. For example, one might

predict that individuals who have suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury would

be significantly less satisfied with their lives than individuals who have not

suffered such an injury. However, empirical research has not supported this
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contention -- in fact, disabled individuals do not report lower levels of

satisfaction than non-disabled ones. It is clear that a one-to-one relationship

between observable life circumstances and subjective judgments of life

satisfaction does not always exist.

A great deal of psychological research has explored the sources of

people’s life satisfaction. These sources include one’s overall wealth, whether

one is single or married, male or female, or young or old. Because most

researchers investigating the predictors of life satisfaction have not specifically

focused on the experiences of women, this review of the life satisfaction

literature will describe research conducted with both sexes. Fortunately,

however, the findings of many of these studies are directly relevant to women’s

lives. Life circumstances such as bearing and raising children, marriage,

poverty, and inequality all influence the life satisfaction of women, despite the

fact that studies of these factors have not necessarily been conducted with

women participants only or been specifically analyzed for gender differences.

Thus, this review will focus on life satisfaction in general but with women’s

lives and experiences in mind.

IV. MEASUREMENT

Before delving into the literature examining the factors related to life

satisfaction, it is important to discuss how life satisfaction is measured.

Researchers’ overwhelming choice for assessing life satisfaction is through self-

report. Self-report measures require respondents to indicate the extent to

which they are satisfied with their lives by selecting a symbol (i.e., a number or
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a facial expression) on a rating scale (e.g., from 1 to 7). Because life satisfaction

is assumed to be a judgment, researchers believe that self-report is the most

direct and most accurate way to measure it.

A. Single-Item vs. Multi-Item Measures of Life Satisfaction

There are many self-report measures of life satisfaction. Some

measures consist of a single question, such as, “How satisfied with your life are

you overall?”, whereas other measures require participants to respond to

multiple items. Overall, researchers agree that multi-item scales of life

satisfaction are preferable to single-item scales. Although single-item scales

have adequate convergent validity (i.e., the scales correlate well with other

similar measures) and satisfactory reliability (i.e., the scale measures similarly

over time), only multiple-item scales allow for the assessment of internal

consistency, as well as the identification of errors associated with wording and

measurement. Additionally, Ed Diener (1984) has argued that multi-item scales

have demonstrated greater reliability and validity overall than single-item scales.

Furthermore, a meta-analysis conducted by Martin Pinquart and Silvia

Sorensen (2000) found that correlations between life satisfaction and variables

such as income, education, gender, and age are significantly reduced when

single-item, rather than multiple-item, scales are used. Researchers speculate

that single-item scales may be more susceptible to social desirability biases

than multiple-item ones because the latter request a wider range of information

with more specificity. Despite these concerns, however, single-item scales

have tended to correlate well with the multiple-item scales, so if an abridged

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version is needed, single-item scales appear to be adequate. The most widely

used and most well-validated measure of life satisfaction is a multi-item scale,

the Satisfaction With Life Scale.

B. Satisfaction With Life Scale

The 5-item Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) was designed by Ed

Diener and his colleagues (1985) to measure global life satisfaction. Because

the authors consider life satisfaction as the cognitive component of subjective

well-being, they constructed this scale without reference to affect. The

language used for the scale items is relatively broad and nonspecific, allowing

the respondents to evaluate their overall life satisfaction subjectively.

The SWLS has been administered to many different groups of

participants and has been found to have high internal consistency and reliability

across gender, ethnicity, and age. This measure also has high convergent

validity – for example, it correlates well with clinical ratings of satisfaction, a

memory measure of satisfaction, and informant reports of satisfaction, as well

as with scales assessing self-esteem. The instructions for the SWLS ask

participants to rate the following five statements on 7-point Likert-type scales

(1 = strongly disagree, 4 = neither agree nor disagree, 7 = strongly agree):

_____ In most ways my life is close to my ideal.

_____ The conditions of my life are excellent.

_____ I am satisfied with my life.

_____ So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

_____ If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

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C. Other Measures of Satisfaction

1. Hadley Cantril’s (1965) Self-Anchoring Scale

This is a single-item measure of life satisfaction, which instructs

participants to mark one rung on a ladder, with the top of the ladder labeled

“best life for you” and the bottom of the ladder labeled “worst possible life for

you,” to indicate their life satisfaction judgment.

2. Frank Andrews and Stephen Withey’s (1976) Delighted-Terrible Scale

This single-item scale requires participants to indicate their level of life

satisfaction by selecting one of seven faces ranging from a happy face (smiling,

delighted) to a sad face (frowning, terrible) in response to the question, “How

do you feel about your life as a whole?”

D. Potential Problems with Life Satisfaction Measurement

Several concerns have been raised regarding the validity of life

satisfaction measures. Critics have questioned whether people 1) are aware of

their levels of satisfaction, 2) inflate their responses to appear more satisfied

than they actually are, 3) confuse their own perceptions with how others

perceive them, and 4) interpret the questions differently depending on their

gender or their culture. Fortunately, each of these concerns appears to be

unfounded. First, participants rarely fail to respond to satisfaction questions

and they tend to answer such questions quickly, indicating that the extent to

which they are satisfied with life is something they are well aware of and think

about often. Second, as most life satisfaction assessments are conducted

anonymously, there is little reason to believe that social desirability effects are
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greatly inflating people’s responses. Third, it is unlikely that respondents may

confuse their own perceptions with that of others because then one would

expect more affluent or better educated individuals to report much higher rates

of satisfaction than others of less means or education. This has not generally

been found. And, finally, because the SWLS is written in very general terms –

a procedure that allows each individual to define life satisfaction for themselves

– this widely-used life satisfaction scale appears to be gender and culture

neutral (see also Section VII.A.). For example, in a recent study, Kari Tucker

and colleagues found that the SWLS measures life satisfaction similarly for

females and males in two different cultures.

V. HOW DO PEOPLE MAKE LIFE SATISFACTION JUDGMENTS?

We know that most people are fully capable of rating the level of their

own life satisfaction. However, the question still remains, how exactly do

people make such judgments? The conceptualizations of life satisfaction

proposed by theorists in this area offer several clues. For example, Angus

Campbell and his colleagues (1976) conceptualized life satisfaction as the

difference between what one wants and what one has -- essentially, a

comparison between reality and the ideal. Thus, a woman’s judgment of her

life satisfaction involves drawing on her personal standards and expectations

for herself and assessing the extent to which her life measures up.

Alex Michalos’s Multiple-Discrepancy-Theory (1986) also specifies

how a woman might arrive at her personal level of satisfaction. According to

this theory, satisfaction is determined by one’s perceptions of “how things

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are” vs. “how they should be.” Comparisons between how things are and what

one wants, what one had, what one expected, what others have, and what one

feels one deserves combine to determine life satisfaction. Small discrepancies

among these areas result in greater life satisfaction. Large discrepancies among

these areas result in greater life dissatisfaction. Michalos’s theory was

supported using a sample of nearly 700 undergraduate participants, fifty-four

percent of whom were women. Both women and men in his sample appeared

to derive global satisfaction in comparable ways.

Joseph Sirgy’s theory (1998) similarly mentions several comparisons

that women may consider before arriving at a judgment of their life satisfaction.

He suggests that expectations of what one is capable of accomplishing, one’s

past circumstances, one’s ideals, what one feels one deserves, what one

minimally requires to be content, and what one ultimately believes will occur

are comparisons that help determine overall life satisfaction.

Other researchers have investigated whether people determine their

personal estimates of their life satisfaction through a “top-down” or a “bottom-

up” approach. If a woman were to use a top-down procedure, she might reflect

on the value of her life as a whole, probe her sense or intuition for how happy

and satisfied she is overall, and, therefore, conclude that she must have a good

(or not-so-good) life. Alternatively, if she were to use a bottom-up approach,

she might think about the various domains of her life (e.g., marriage, children,

work, friendships, income) and arrive at her life satisfaction judgment based

upon the average satisfaction she obtains from each of these domains. In other
 11

words, does a woman have a good life because she is satisfied or is she satisfied

because she has a good life? Preliminary research suggests that the answer is

both, but additional work is needed to address this question further.

VI. WHAT DETERMINES LIFE SATISFACTION?:

ENVIRONMENT VS. PERSONALITY

One of the principal questions that researchers are tackling is, what

causes life satisfaction? That is, why are some women more satisfied than

others? Most of the research in this area can be subsumed under two categories

-- namely, evidence implicating personality (i.e., genetics, inborn traits) and

evidence implicating environment (i.e., life circumstances and life events). A

great deal of work has investigated whether life satisfaction is a stable, enduring

trait or whether it is a variable that is highly influenced by external events and

life circumstances. For example, will the experience of discrimination or

harassment, the birth of a child, a divorce, purchasing a house, obtaining an

advanced degree, or the day-to-day hassles of balancing work and home life

greatly influence a woman’s satisfaction with her life? Alternatively, will a

woman’s stable characteristic patterns of responding to events determine her

life satisfaction, such that she remains satisfied (or dissatisfied) despite changes

in income, social relationships, employment, or other significant life events. In

support of the latter view, research has shown that individuals tend to show

similar levels of satisfaction across time and across many life domains. For

example, women who are content with their marriages are also likely to be

content with their work, their children, their financial situation, and even the
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daily weather. However, this finding should not be overstated, as it is certainly

possible to be dissatisfied with one’s partner but satisfied with one’s job. In

support of the alternative perspective, another study found that the proportion

of positive to negative life events experienced during the previous year

predicted an individual’s life satisfaction during the following year. This

finding suggests that life events, such as a new marriage or a new job, may

indeed significantly boost or deflate one’s overall life satisfaction.

Eunkook Suh and his colleagues (1996) conducted a longitudinal study

that may help explain such conflicting findings. They asked recent female and

male college graduates to report their significant life events and their subjective

well-being, including their life satisfaction, approximately every 6 months over

a 2-year period. The results showed that the occurrence of particular life

events in these students’ lives was related to changes in their well-being -- but

these effects did not endure. That is, recent life events in both men and women

predicted changes in well-being while distal events did not, possibly because

people adapt to significant life changes over long periods of time. The results

of this study suggest that “personality” or “environmental” explanations in

isolation may not be sufficient to explain the source of people’s life satisfaction

judgments. That is, life satisfaction may have both stable, trait-like

components (reflecting the effect of a personality predisposition), as well as

variable, state-like components (reflecting environmental influences). However,

it may be impossible to entirely discriminate between these two sets of

components because one’s personality may influence one’s life events. For
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example, an extraverted woman may place herself in social situations, giving

herself the opportunity to have more encounters and a greater wealth of life

experiences. Indeed, Robert Plomin and his colleagues (1990) provide evidence

that genes do have a small influence on the actual types of life events people

experience.

Supporting the argument that personality plays a role in determining

life satisfaction, personality variables such as psychological resilience,

assertiveness, empathy, internal locus of control, extraversion, and openness to

experience have been found to be related to life satisfaction. Furthermore,

Keith Magnus and his colleagues (1993) found in a longitudinal study that

personality predicted life satisfaction 4 years subsequent to the study. This

pattern of results suggests that life satisfaction may have a dispositional

component or at least interacts with the environment to influence life

satisfaction. Finally, as previously mentioned, satisfied individuals tend to be

satisfied across several life domains. Combined, these findings suggest that life

satisfaction is stable over time and consistent across situations.

Further supporting the view that life satisfaction has trait-like

characteristics, several studies have also found that subjective well-being, which

encompasses life satisfaction, has a substantial genetic component. For

example, Auke Tellegen and his colleagues showed that identical twins (who

share 100% of their genes) reared in separate environments are more alike in

their levels of well-being than fraternal twins (who share 50% or their genes)

reared in either separate or similar environments. Future research would benefit

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from studies that measure life satisfaction specifically to reach stronger

conclusions about the links between personality and life satisfaction.

Currently, the literature suggests that personality plays a significant role in

whether a women will judge her life to be satisfying. However, proximal

environmental factors (e.g., recent life events) can influence life satisfaction

judgments in the short term. In conclusion, as with many variables in the field

of psychology, both nature and nurture (i.e., personality and environment)

appear to be influential in determining life satisfaction, and to discount one

explanation in favor of the other would not be empirically or theoretically

productive.

VII. DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES AS PREDICTORS OF LIFE

SATISFACTION

The vast majority of research on life satisfaction investigates the extent

to which various demographic variables predict life satisfaction. However,

because researchers are not able to perform true experiments by randomly

assigning participants to demographic groups (e.g., gender, income, age), all of

this research has necessarily been correlational. Much of the work has focused

on the “objective” determinants of life satisfaction -- that is, the extent to

which satisfaction is related to the environment, both imposed (e.g., culture)

and relatively controllable (e.g., income, occupation, education, marriage), as

well as to specific aspects of persons (e.g., gender, age).

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A. Culture

Before describing research on cultural influences, we must revisit the

question of whether life satisfaction can be measured similarly across cultures.

Fortunately, satisfaction appears to be a universal term, and cross-cultural

researchers have not had any difficulty translating measures of life satisfaction

into many different languages. People from different cultures are able to

distinguish between such terms as “happiness,” “satisfaction with life,” “best

possible life,” and “worst possible life,” and there does not appear to be a

linguistic bias. Thus, research suggests that life satisfaction is not a uniquely

Western concept. For example, non-response and “don’t know” answers to

questions about life satisfaction are no more frequent in non-Western cultures

than in Western ones. In sum, such evidence for the cultural universality of the

construct of life satisfaction has allowed researchers to compare life satisfaction

across cultures.

Current research shows that members of individualist cultures (e.g.,

U.S., England, Australia) report greater satisfaction relative to members of

collectivist cultures (e.g., China, Japan, India). Life satisfaction also appears to

vary with other cultural dimensions. For example, citizens of wealthy,

industrialized nations have very high levels of satisfaction overall, and citizens

of poor, third-world nations have low levels of satisfaction overall. Research

suggests that once a community of people reach a decent standard of living,

however, differences in life satisfaction are less likely to be related to

differences in wealth.
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Once subsistence levels have been reached, recent research suggests that

members of different cultures reach life satisfaction judgments in distinct ways.

Eunkook Suh and colleagues (1998) conducted a large international study of 61

nations, with close to 62,500 participants. Their findings suggested that

members of collectivist and individualist cultures chronically rely on different

types of information when assessing their life satisfaction. That is, members of

collectivist cultures appear to rely on cultural norms (i.e., Am I expected to be

satisfied?) to determine their life satisfaction judgments, whereas members of

individualist cultures appear to rely on emotional experiences (i.e., Do I

frequently feel happy and content?) as their guide to life satisfaction

judgments. Interestingly, participants from Hong Kong, a collectivist city,

appear to rely on emotion to determine their life satisfaction judgments. The

rapid Westernization and modernization of this continually changing culture

may account for this surprising finding. Moreover, it serves as an example of

our earlier point that personality and environment are both important

determinants of life satisfaction -- that is, that life satisfaction judgments can be

fluid and subject to the changing social environment.

Reinforcing the importance of the social climate in people’s life

satisfaction, researchers have also found that life satisfaction is greatest among

prosperous nations characterized by gender-equality, care for human rights,

political freedom, and access to knowledge. Cultures that are more accepting of

differences (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, religion) and those

that demand equal treatment of and equal opportunity for their citizens, appear
 17

to foster greater overall satisfaction. It is not surprising that women living in

patriarchal cultures in which equal opportunities are unavailable and equal value

is not afforded would experience greater dissatisfaction with their lives than

women living in egalitarian cultures.

B. Gender

An apparently paradoxical finding in the literature is that women show

higher rates of depression than men, but also report higher levels of well-being.

At the same time, the majority of studies find no gender differences in life

satisfaction. These conflicting findings can be resolved by considering the range

of affect that men and women typically experience. Women report

experiencing affect -- both positive and negative -- with greater intensity and

frequency than do men. That is, women tend to experience greater joy and

deeper sadness -- and experience these emotions more often -- than do men.

Hence, measures of depression and subjective well-being, which include

affective components, appear to capture the extreme lows that leave women

vulnerable to depression, as well as the extreme highs that allow for greater

well-being. By contrast, men and women report similar rates of global life

satisfaction, which is primarily a cognitive assessment.

Despite similar levels of life satisfaction across gender, women and men

appear to derive life satisfaction from different sources. For example, Ed

Diener and Frank Fujita (1995) found that social resources (i.e., family, friends,

access to social services) are predictive of life satisfaction for both men and

women, but they are more predictive of life satisfaction for women. Perhaps
 18

women’s roles as the conservators of contact with friends and family -- both a

blessing and a burden -- lead to their relatively greater reliance on social

support. By contrast, factors that may be more relevant to men’s personal

goals, such as athleticism, influential connections, and authority, were found to

be related to life satisfaction for men, but not for women.

A meta-analysis of the predictors of life satisfaction in the elderly

conducted by Martin Pinquart and Silvia Sorensen (2000) found additional

support for the assertion that men and women derive satisfaction from

different sources. In their study, life satisfaction was more highly related to

income for men than for women. The authors hypothesized that because men

are more socialized to draw their sense of identity from work and income, they

tend to look to income as a barometer of their success and satisfaction with

their life. In addition, more women live in poverty than do men, so it may be

easier for men to obtain satisfaction from their financial situation than it is for

women.

Although most research on life satisfaction has not been directly

focused on the experiences of women, a few studies have investigated the

unique predictors of life satisfaction for women. For example, as stated

previously, several studies have demonstrated that the greater the gender

equality within a culture (i.e., freedom to make reproductive choices, equal pay,

equal value under the law, equal opportunity to education and achievement),

the greater reported life satisfaction. This finding spans both equality in the

broader cultural sense and equality within a marriage. For example, Gloria
 19

Cowan and her colleagues (1998) found that women who report greater

equality in their marriages tend to report greater life satisfaction than women

whose marriages are relatively more traditional. That is, women seem to

achieve greater satisfaction with their lives overall when they are in marriages in

which their roles are not traditionally proscribed. Marital equality may

manifest itself in the sharing of household chores and responsibility for

childcare, as well as equal say in family decision-making. However, this ideal is

not often achieved. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and her colleagues (1999) found

that women carry the overwhelming burden in regard to household and parental

responsibility, and report feeling relatively less appreciated by their spouse.

Regardless of the type of marriage, however, married women report greater life

satisfaction than single, widowed, or divorced women.

In further research, Arlene Metha and her colleagues (1989) conducted a

survey investigating the major regrets and priorities of women. Overall, the

least satisfied women surveyed reported that their greatest regret was having

failed to take risks. Possibly because of women’s childcare burdens, many

cultures discourage women from risk-taking. However, despite their many

dangers, taking risks also provides access to greater opportunities. That is,

without the ability to take risks, a woman would not be able to start her own

business, move to a new city, pursue a graduate education, or ask for a

promotion. Thus, it would not be difficult to imagine that failing to take risks

might translate into missed opportunities and greater dissatisfaction.

 20

John Haworth and his colleagues (1997) found that, among their sample

of American working women, those who had an internal locus of control (i.e.,

who believed that control of events comes from within themselves rather than

outside of themselves) were relatively more satisfied with their lives. For

example, a woman who perceives her success to be due to her hard work and

determination would report greater satisfaction than a woman who perceives

her success to be due to luck or chance. This is not surprising, as a belief in

one’s own ability to effect changes and choose the course of one’s life is

undoubtedly more satisfying than believing that one has no control over life’s

outcomes.

An additional study found that women’s hostility toward other women

was inversely associated with life satisfaction. That is, women who harbored

hostile feelings toward other women were less likely to be satisfied with their

own lives. This finding appears to correspond well with the comparison

theories discussed earlier. Researchers have suggested that people’s

perceptions of their life satisfaction are in part due to comparisons that they

make between what they have, what they want, what they used to have, and

what others have. Thus, hostility toward other women may be a consequence

of unfavorable social comparisons. That is, the recognition that another woman

is clearly better off may be related to dissatisfaction with one’s own life.

C. Age

Numerous studies have provided evidence that, contrary to common

expectations, life satisfaction does not decline with age. For example, in a
 21

cross-cultural study conducted in 40 different nations and with nearly 6,000

participants, Ed Diener and Eunkook Suh (1998) found that reported life

satisfaction generally remained stable throughout the life span, showing just a

slight increasing trend between the ages of 20 and 80 years.

The predominant explanation for this surprising lack of difference in life

satisfaction levels across the life span is that people have an extraordinary

capacity to adapt to significant life changes. In a study by Carol Ryff (1991),

older participants reported smaller discrepancies between their realistic and

their ideal selves than did younger participants. Perhaps, as women age, they

revise their ideals to accommodate their current circumstances (i.e., engage in

“accommodative coping”). For example, a woman who had intended to have

three children may have only been able to bear two. With time, she might

decide that having three is impractical financially and that having two is

actually preferable. This conclusion would serve to decrease the discrepancy

between her ideal and the reality of her life. Indeed, according to Jochen

Brandtstaedter and Gerolf Renner (1990), accommodative coping does tend to

increase with age. Alternatively, as women age, they may achieve their goals

with greater frequency (i.e., a family, career success, and financial comfort),

moving closer to their ideal self.

D. Social Relationships

Francis Bacon (1625) said that human relationships double our joys and

halve our sorrows. Many studies have supported this contention. High levels

of social support have been shown to be strongly associated with high levels of
 22

life satisfaction. For example, one study found that participants who could list

five or more friends were happier than participants who could not list many

friends. In addition to the number of social contacts, it appears that gender is a

factor in the quality of intimate relationships as well. Women tend to provide

greater and more meaningful support than men. That is, both women and men

report that their friendships with women are more intimate, nurturing, and

supportive than their friendships with men. Perhaps this is due to the finding

that conversations with women involve greater self-disclosure and empathy.

In Western nations, marriage appears to be even more predictive of life

satisfaction than relationships with friends and family. Ed Diener and his

colleagues (2000) found that married women do not differ in their levels of life

satisfaction from married men. However, married men reported greater positive

affect than did married women, as well as did single people of both genders.

Thus, men appear to benefit more from marriage than do women -- possibly

because husbands become dependent on their wives’ emotional support and

household care. This study also found that cohabitating unmarried

participants, especially those from collectivist cultures, reported less life

satisfaction than did married participants.

Interestingly, having children does not appear to increase people’s life

satisfaction, although this finding is difficult to interpret given that childless

individuals are different from parents in numerous ways. However, for those

who have children, the quality of their relationships with their children is

highly related to their level of satisfaction with their life overall. Also, several
 23

studies have suggested that parents’ life satisfaction tends to correlate

negatively with the number of children that they have -- that is, life satisfaction

decreases as the number of children increases.

E. Income

The relationship between income and life satisfaction is a complicated

one. It seems that within nations, wealthier individuals are more satisfied than

poorer individuals. Across nations, wealthier nations also show greater levels

of life satisfaction than poorer nations; however, across-nation differences are

smaller than within-nation differences. Furthermore, a robust finding in this

literature concerns the distribution of wealth within a nation – that is, the

greater the economic disparities among income levels and classes in a nation, the

greater the dissatisfaction expressed overall and the greater the disparity

between satisfaction levels of the wealthy and the poor. Thus, women who

live in poorer, less egalitarian nations tend to be less satisfied with their lives

overall than women who live in wealthier nations.

Despite significant correlations between life satisfaction and wealth,

longitudinal research has shown that rises in people’s incomes do not

necessarily coincide with related increases in life satisfaction. For example,

Americans’ levels of life satisfaction before and after World War II did not

increase despite significant growth in income during this time period. Several

explanations have been offered to account for these results. Perhaps once a

certain level of wealth is obtained, life satisfaction is no longer anchored to

increases in wealth and in material goods. In addition, social comparison may

 24

account for this effect – that is, comparing oneself with others as income and

wealth increase may produce corresponding increases in expectations such that

levels of satisfaction remain stable.

F. Employment

An individual’s employment status, regardless of income, appears to

predict life satisfaction, such that the unemployed report significantly

diminished satisfaction compared with the employed. When gender is taken

into account, it appears that employment (or lack thereof) is more strongly

associated with life satisfaction for men than for women. This finding is not

surprising, given that there is less cultural pressure on women to work outside

the home. However, this pattern may change as existing gender roles broaden.

At present, men’s sense of self and identity is more strongly tied to their

employment status than it is for women.

G. Education

Overall, researchers have found a small correlation between education

and life satisfaction. However, the correlation appears to disappear when

income and occupation are statistically controlled. That is, the relationship

between education and life satisfaction is probably due to the fact that higher

levels of education are associated with higher incomes.

Education also appears to be more highly related to life satisfaction for

individuals with lower incomes and in poor nations. Perhaps poorer persons

obtain greater satisfaction from education because the achievement surpasses

their expectations of what is attainable. For example, poor women in some

 25

cultures have little access to education, so when they do gain access, they may

value and appreciate the experience more than those who perceive access to

education as universal and easily available. Education may also provide access

to greater occupational and income opportunities, which may additionally

influence life satisfaction.

Despite the overall trend suggesting that education is more strongly

related to life satisfaction for the poor, recent studies have found that, in

wealthy nations, the most highly educated individuals seem to be slightly

dissatisfied with their lives. It is possible that the educational elite have higher

expectations or greater cynicism about their lives. Indeed, income appears to

be a better predictor of life satisfaction than level of education.

H. General Comments

While this review of the predictors of life satisfaction provides valuable

information and raises some intriguing questions, we must be cautious in

interpreting these findings because the possibility of selection effects may

artificially bolster some of the results. For example, the observation that

married individuals are more satisfied with their lives than unmarried ones may

be confounded by the fact that more mentally healthy, extraverted, and stable

individuals are able to find and sustain quality relationships with a spouse, and

those factors are also correlated with life satisfaction. Similar selection effects

may account for some of the findings regarding gender, income, employment,

education, and age.

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VIII. FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The vast majority of studies investigating life satisfaction have been survey-

based. Although current self-report measures of life satisfaction have good

reliability and validity, the field would benefit greatly from the use of alternative

methodologies. For example, expanding the measurement of life satisfaction with

physiological data (e.g., skin conductance, heart rate, blood pressure,

neuropsychological measures), informant data, daily experience sampling, facial

expressions, and cognitive procedures (e.g. reaction times) would greatly bolster

the validity of self-reports and ensure that future measures of life satisfaction are

completely gender-neutral.

Studies of life satisfaction would also benefit from greater complexity of

research design. Longitudinal studies and studies using causal modeling

statistical techniques would bolster researchers’ conclusions by moving beyond

correlational methods that make it difficult to disentangle causal relationships

among variables. For example, the finding that income seems to be more

strongly related to life satisfaction for men than for women is difficult to

interpret without greater statistical and methodological precision.

More sophisticated methodologies could also shed light on how

interactions between women’s personalities and their environment (i.e., nature

and nurture) may influence their life satisfaction. Sonja Lyubomirsky (2000)

argues that three types of personality-environment interactions may be

operating in this area. One type of interaction is referred to as “reactive” – that

is, satisfied women may perceive and respond to the same circumstances
 27

differently from unsatisfied ones (e.g., cope better with poverty or adversity).

Another type of interaction is called “evocative” -- that is, satisfied women

may evoke different kinds of reactions in others (e.g., may be better liked and

more successful at obtaining jobs or marriage partners). The final type of

interaction is called “proactive” -- that is, satisfied women may find and

construct different social worlds and environments (e.g., choose to leave an

unfulfilling job or to move abroad). Empirical investigations of these

personality-environment interactions may help shed light on some of the

conflicting findings regarding the predictors of life satisfaction. For example,

studies of this kind may help reconcile the findings that life satisfaction has

been found to be both stable over time as well as influenced by recent life

events.

IX. CONCLUSIONS

Although much of the research described in this article has not

specifically addressed the experiences of women, it nevertheless provides a

great deal of information about life satisfaction in women. For example, women

who live in egalitarian nations characterized by greater gender equality are

relatively more satisfied with their lives than women who live in regions in

which more traditional gender roles are observed. In addition, women who

show an internal locus of control and less hostility toward other women, who

have less traditional marriages and relatively more friends, and who have

relatively higher incomes and greater levels of education tend to be more

satisfied with their lives. Because measures of life satisfaction have been
 28

shown to be gender neutral, researchers can maintain a reasonable degree of

confidence in these findings. Interestingly, women and men appear to differ

with respect to the sources from which they derive their life satisfaction. For

example, women tend to draw on social resources (i.e., friends, family,

community) to assess their satisfaction with their lives, whereas men are

inclined to draw on financial and occupational status. Further research,

however, is needed to specify more precisely the differences in the factors

related to life satisfaction judgments for men versus women. Additionally,

questions such as, “Is the life satisfaction of women from diverse backgrounds

(i.e., different races, cultures, ages, classes, and sexual orientations) related to a

unique set of variables?” remain to be explored. Future studies focusing on the

lives and experiences of women are needed to further develop and explore such

questions.

Further Reading

Argyle, M. (1999). Causes and correlates of happiness. In D.

Kahneman & E. Diener (Eds.), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic

Psychology (pp. 353-373). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective

well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 276-302.

Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S., (1985). The

satisfaction with life scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49, 71-157.

 29

Emmons, R. A., & Diener, E. (1985). Factors predicting satisfaction

judgments: A comparative examination. Social Indicators Research, 16, 157-

167.

Fujita, F., Diener, E., & Sandvik, E. (1991). Gender differences in

negative affect and well-being: The case for emotional intensity. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 427-434.

Headey, B., & Wearing, A. (1989). Personality, life events, and

subjective well-being: Toward a dynamic equilibrium model. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 731-739.

Pinquart, M., & Sorensen, S., (2000). Influences of socioeconomic

status, social network, and competence on subjective well-being in later life: A

meta-analysis. Psychology and Aging, 15, 187-224.

Veenhoven, R. (1996). Developments in satisfaction research. Social

Indicators Research, 37, 1-46.

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