In the recent years, positive psychology has begun to explore wellbeing and happiness in the parlance of Greek philosophical terminology of hedonia and eudaimonia (Deci & Ryan, 2008). While hedonia refers to those aspects of wellbeing that arises from pleasure oriented activities, eudaimonia refers to fulfilment of our potential as human beings. Furthermore, positive psychology literature makes some distinction between psychological wellbeing, social wellbeing, and emotional wellbeing (Keyes & Lopez, 2002).
Subjective Wellbeing: Diener (1984) has been consistent in the use of the term Subjective Well-Being, to include individual happiness, presence of positive affect, and absence of negative affect. Subjective well-being is an individual experience, which excludes objective conditions like health, comfort, virtue and wealth. In some literature the terms subjective wellbeing and emotional wellbeing are used synonymously (Snyder & Lopez, 2007).
Satisfaction with Life Scale examines Subjective Wellbeing.
Psychological Wellbeing: Ryff and colleagues have been critical of identifying psychological health with subjective wellbeing (Ryff & Keyes, 1995), and have preferred to use the term ‘human flourishing’ or ‘psychological wellbeing’. In this sense, wellbeing is not synonymous with happiness, and their approach to defining wellbeing is clearly in terms of eudaimonia. Here, wellbeing is defined as “the striving for perfection that represents the realization of one’s true potential” (Ryff, 1995, p.100). Psychological wellbeing is measured in terms of six factors:
- self acceptance – positive attitude towards the self with its multiple aspects including impressions of past life;
- personal growth – feeling of continued development and being open to new experience;
- purpose in life – having goals and a sense of direction in life;
- environmental mastery – feeling competent and being able to manage one’s environment, which includes also the community of people;
- autonomy – ability for self-determination, independence and internal regulation; and finally,
- positive relations with others – having warm and satisfying relationship with others, and being capable of empathy, affection and intimacy.
Social Wellbeing: As mentioned above, there is the third type of wellbeing that challenges the individual emphasis implied in the subjective and psychological approaches to wellbeing. Scholars have evolved constructs and measures to examine, what they call, social wellbeing (Larson, 1993). Social wellbeing is considered in terms of the following five dimensions proposed by Keyes:
- social acceptance – positive attitude towards others;
- social actualization – being optimistic about the future of the society;
- social contribution – believing that individuals have something valuable to give to the society;
- social coherence – understanding the social world as intelligible, logical and predictable; and,
- social integration – feeling part of the community and experiencing a sense of belonging.
We can recognise some aspects that overlap between these three types of wellbeing. For instance, life-satisfaction in subjective wellbeing might have some correspondence to purpose in life in psychological wellbeing, and both might have some resemblance to the dimension of social contribution in social wellbeing (Snyder & Lopez, 2007, pp.71-72).
READING 1: Dodge et al 2012 Challenge in defining wellbeing
READING 2: Diener’s Subjective Wellbeing
READING 3: Ryff’s Psychological Wellbeing
READING 4: Keyes’ Social Wellbeing
VIDEO LINK: Watch Carol Ryff’s Lecture on Wellbeing
DOWNLOAD MY CLASSNOTES IN PDF:PP 4 Understanding Wellbeing