Experienced Well-Being

EXPERIENCED WELL-BEING

This account draws on Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The first-person research narrative is his, and the findings and references to contemporary surveys reflect the book’s context.

Experienced well-being refers to the quality of an individual's moment-by-moment emotional and affective experience—how people feel from moment to moment (e.g., joy, stress, sadness)—as opposed to their overall cognitive evaluation of life satisfaction. When I became interested in the study of well-being, I quickly found that almost everything known about the subject drew on global survey questions clearly addressed to the remembering self: "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?" Having come to well-being research from studying the mistaken memories of colonoscopies and painfully cold hands, I was naturally suspicious of global life satisfaction as a valid measure of well-being. I focused instead on the well-being of the experiencing self.

I proposed that it made sense to say "Helen was happy in the month of March" if she spent most of her time engaged in activities she would rather continue than stop, little time in situations she wished to escape, and not too much time in a neutral state. There are many such experiences, including physical pleasures and the total absorption in a task that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow—a state some artists experience in creative moments and many others achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle. I had childhood memories of crying when taken from my toys, then crying again when taken from the swings—resistance to interruption being a sign of having a good time. I proposed measuring objective happiness precisely as we assessed colonoscopy patients' experiences: by evaluating a profile of well-being over successive moments of life, following Edgeworth's hedonimeter method of a century earlier.

Measuring Moment-to-Moment Experience

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 Csikszentmihalyi invented. Technology has advanced: this method (also known as Ecological Momentary Assessment) now programs an individual's cell phone to beep at random intervals, presenting brief questions about what the respondent was doing, who she was with, and rating scales for intensity of feelings such as happiness, tension, anger, worry, engagement, and physical pain. It can also be supplemented with physiological data like heart rate and blood pressure.

Experience sampling is expensive and burdensome, though less disturbing than most people expect. A more practical alternative was needed, so we developed the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM). We hoped it would approximate experience sampling results while providing additional information about how people spend their time. Participants (all women in early studies) were invited to a two-hour session. We first asked them to relive the previous day in detail, breaking it into episodes like scenes in a film. Then they answered menus of questions about each episode based on the experience-sampling method: selecting activities from a list, indicating which commanded most attention, listing individuals they were with, and rating the intensity of several feelings on separate 0–6 scales.

Our method drew on evidence that people who can retrieve a past situation in detail are also able to relive the feelings that accompanied it, even experiencing earlier physiological indications of emotion. We assumed participants would fairly accurately recover the feeling of a prototypical moment of each episode. Several comparisons with experience sampling confirmed the DRM's validity. Because participants also reported episode start and end times, we could compute a duration-weighted measure of feeling during the entire waking day, with longer episodes counting more than short ones. Our questionnaire also included measures of life satisfaction, which we interpreted as the satisfaction of the remembering self. We used the DRM to study determinants of both emotional well-being and life satisfaction in several thousand women in the United States, France, and Denmark.

The U-Index

The experience of a moment or episode is not easily represented by a single happiness value. Many positive feelings exist—love, joy, engagement, hope, amusement—and negative emotions come in many varieties, including anger, shame, depression, and loneliness. Although positive and negative emotions can coexist, it is possible to classify most moments as ultimately positive or negative. We called an episode unpleasant if a negative feeling was assigned a higher rating than all the positive feelings. We found that American women spent about 19% of the time in an unpleasant state, somewhat higher than French women (16%) or Danish women (14%).

We called the percentage of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state the U-index (Unpleasant-index). For example, someone who spent 4 hours of a 16-hour waking day in an unpleasant state would have a U-index of 25%. It summarizes how long unpleasant states last, rather than comparing the absolute intensity of different people’s feelings. Classifying those states still depends on self-reported ratings. If the U-index for a population drops from 20% to 18%, you can infer that total time spent in emotional discomfort or pain has diminished by a tenth. The U-index is more sensitive to situational factors (such as commuting or interacting with a boss) than life satisfaction measures, which are often influenced by memory and overall narratives.

A striking observation was the extent of inequality in the distribution of emotional pain. About half our participants reported going through an entire day without experiencing an unpleasant episode. On the other hand, a significant minority experienced considerable emotional distress for much of the day. It appears that a small fraction of the population does most of the suffering—whether because of physical or mental illness, an unhappy temperament, or misfortunes and personal tragedies.

A U-index can also be computed for activities. For 1,000 American women in a Midwestern city, the U-index was 29% for the morning commute, 27% for work, 24% for child care, 18% for housework, 12% for socializing, 12% for TV watching, and 5% for sex. The U-index was higher by about 6% on weekdays, mostly because on weekends people spend less time in activities they dislike and do not suffer work-related tension and stress. The biggest surprise was that time spent with children was slightly less enjoyable than housework for American women. Here we found one of the few contrasts between French and American women: Frenchwomen spend less time with their children but enjoy it more, perhaps because they have more access to child care and spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities.

The Central Role of Attention

An individual's mood at any moment depends on her temperament and overall happiness, but emotional well-being also fluctuates considerably over the day and week. The mood of the moment depends primarily on the current situation. Mood at work, for example, is largely unaffected by factors that influence general job satisfaction, including benefits and status. More important are situational factors: opportunity to socialize with coworkers, exposure to loud noise, time pressure (a significant source of negative affect), and the immediate presence of a boss (in our first study, the only thing worse than being alone). Attention is key. Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, and we are normally focused on our current activity and immediate environment. There are exceptions—when happily in love we may feel joy even in traffic, and if grieving we may remain depressed watching a funny movie—but in normal circumstances, we draw pleasure and pain from what is happening at the moment, if we attend to it. To get pleasure from eating, you must notice that you are doing it. French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted.

These observations have implications for both individuals and society. Few individuals can will themselves to have a sunnier disposition, but some may be able to arrange their lives to spend less time commuting and more time doing things they enjoy with people they like. The feelings associated with different activities suggest that another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms including socializing and exercise. From a social perspective, improved transportation, availability of child care for working women, and improved socializing opportunities for the elderly may be relatively efficient ways to reduce the U-index of society—even a 1% reduction would be a significant achievement, amounting to millions of hours of avoided suffering. Combined national surveys of time use and of experienced well-being can inform social policy in multiple ways. The economist on our team, Alan Krueger, took the lead in introducing elements of this method into national statistics.

Two Aspects of Well-Being: Experience vs. Life Evaluation

Measures of experienced well-being are now routinely used in large-scale national surveys in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and the Gallup World Poll has extended these measurements to millions of respondents in more than 150 countries. The polls elicit reports of emotions experienced during the previous day, though in less detail than the DRM. The large samples allowed detailed comparisons of experienced well-being with circumstances, physical health, and social contact. Not surprisingly, a headache will make a person miserable, and the second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

The Gallup data permit a comparison of two distinct aspects of well-being:

• Experienced well-being: the well-being that people experience as they live their lives
• Life evaluation: the judgment they make when they evaluate their life

Gallup's life evaluation is measured by the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale: "Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?"

Some aspects of life have more effect on the evaluation of one's life than on the experience of living. Educational attainment is an example: more education is associated with higher life evaluation but not with greater experienced well-being. Indeed, at least in the United States, the more educated tend to report higher stress. On the other hand, ill health has a much stronger adverse effect on experienced well-being than on life evaluation. Living with children also imposes a significant cost in the currency of daily feelings—reports of stress and anger are common among parents—but the adverse effects on life evaluation are smaller. Religious participation has relatively greater favorable impact on both positive affect and stress reduction than on life evaluation. Surprisingly, however, religion provides no reduction of feelings of depression or worry.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

The analysis discussed here used more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Kahneman and Deaton reported different relationships between income and the two measures: lower income was associated with more emotional distress, while higher income continued to be associated with a better evaluation of life even where the emotional measures leveled off.

Severe poverty amplifies the experienced effects of other misfortunes. Illness is much worse for the very poor than for those who are more comfortable. A headache increases the proportion reporting sadness and worry from 19% to 38% for individuals in the top two-thirds of the income distribution. The corresponding numbers for the poorest tenth are 38% and 70%—a higher baseline and a much larger increase. Significant differences between the very poor and others are also found for the effects of divorce and loneliness. Furthermore, the beneficial effects of the weekend on experienced well-being are significantly smaller for the very poor.

The analysis identified a plateau in experienced well-being at a household income of about $75,000, with the relevant level potentially differing by local cost of living. It found no further average improvement beyond that level under the measures used. This was a finding about those data, not a fixed ceiling for everyone’s happiness. Kahneman also discusses the possibility that wealth could reduce enjoyment of small pleasures, citing a study in which a wealth-related prime reduced expressed pleasure while eating chocolate. That experiment does not by itself establish a causal effect of higher income.

There is a clear contrast between the effects of income on experienced well-being and on life satisfaction. Higher income brings with it higher satisfaction, well beyond the point at which it ceases to have any positive effect on experience. Ed Diener's research found that most people are happy most of the time, and life evaluation rises steadily with income—a correlation of r = .84 between GDP and ladder scores across countries. But the general conclusion is as clear for well-being as it was for colonoscopies: people's evaluations of their lives and their actual experience may be related, but they are also different. Life satisfaction is not a flawed measure of experienced well-being, as I thought some years ago. It is something else entirely.

The distinction matters when judging the quality of a life. An experience can be pleasant while it lasts without becoming a memorable story, and a satisfying life story can include painful days. Someone with Alzheimer’s may no longer sustain a narrative of her life but can still respond to beauty and gentleness. Both the experience of living and the evaluation of a life deserve attention.