Subjective well-being (SWB) is a self-reported measure of well-being, typically obtained by questionnaire.
Ed Diener developed a tripartite model of SWB in 1984, which describes how people experience the quality of their lives and includes both emotional reactions and cognitive judgments. It posits "three distinct but often related components of wellbeing: frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and cognitive evaluations such as life satisfaction." SWB is an overarching ideology that encompasses such things as "high levels of pleasant emotions and moods, low levels of negative emotions and moods, and high life-satisfaction."
SWB therefore encompasses moods and emotions as well as evaluations of one's satisfaction with general and specific areas of one's life. SWB is one definition of happiness.
Although SWB tends to be stable over the time and is strongly related to personality traits, 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%. There is evidence that health and SWB may mutually influence each other, as good health tends to be associated with greater happiness, and a number of studies have found that positive emotions and optimism can have a beneficial influence on health.
Construction of SWB
Diener argued that the various components of SWB represent distinct constructs that need to be understood separately, even though they are closely related. Hence, SWB may be considered "a general area of scientific interest rather than a single specific construct". Due to the specific focus on the subjective aspects of well-being, definitions of SWB typically exclude objective conditions such as material conditions or health, although these can influence ratings of SWB. Definitions of SWB therefore focus on how a person evaluates his/her own life, including emotional experiences of pleasure versus pain in response to specific events and cognitive evaluations of what a person considers a good life. Components of SWB relating to affect include positive affect (experiencing pleasant emotions and moods) and low negative affect (experiencing unpleasant, distressing emotions and moods), as well as "overall affect" or "hedonic balance", defined as the overall equilibrium between positive and negative affect, and usually measured as the difference between the two. High positive affect and low negative affect are often highly correlated, but not always.
Components of SWB
There are three components of SWB: affect (hedonic measures), life satisfaction (cognitive measures), and eudaimonia (a sense of meaning and purpose). Current research recognizes the importance of accurately assessing SWB within a society by focusing on how each component of SWB impacts the individual.
Affect
Affect refers to the emotions, moods, and feelings a person has. These can be all positive, all negative, or a combination of both positive and negative. Some research shows also that feelings of reward are separate from positive and negative affect. Research also recognizes that when evaluating subjective well-being, approaches to affect can be interchangeable between children and adults.
Life satisfaction
Life satisfaction (global judgments of one's life) and satisfaction with specific life domains (e.g. work satisfaction) are considered cognitive components of SWB. The term "happiness" is sometimes used in regards to SWB and has been defined variously as "satisfaction of desires and goals" (therefore related to life satisfaction), as a "preponderance of positive over negative affect" (therefore related to emotional components of SWB), as "contentment", and as a "consistent, optimistic mood state" and may imply an affective evaluation of one's life as a whole. Life satisfaction can also be known as the "stable" component in one's life. Affective concepts of SWB can be considered in terms of momentary emotional states as well as in terms of longer-term moods and tendencies (i.e. how much positive and/or negative affect a person generally experiences over any given period of time). Life satisfaction and in some research happiness are typically considered over long durations, up to one's lifetime. "Quality of life" has also been studied as a conceptualization of SWB. Although its exact definition varies, it is usually measured as an aggregation of well-being across several life domains and may include both subjective and objective components.