Satisfaction Paradox
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Satisfaction Paradox
The satisfaction paradox is an empirical phenomenon in quality-of-life research, describing how objectively negative life circumstances have relatively little impact on an individual's subjective well-being. This counterintuitive effect challenges the assumption that adverse conditions directly correlate with lower life satisfaction. Examples Financial satisfaction Older adults often report higher financial satisfaction than younger adults despite having lower incomes. While this has traditionally been attributed to psychological adaptation, research using data from the Norwegian NorLAG study suggests a material explanation: older adults generally possess more assets and have less debt, which enhances their financial well-being. However, this wealth advantage does not explain the paradox among low-income elderly individuals, as they have little accumulated wealth. Since older individuals with limited income and wealth still report higher financial satisfaction than younger co ...
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Quality-of-life Research
''Quality of Life Research'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research into quality of life from a medical and public health perspective. It was established in 1992 and is published ten times per year by Springer Science+Business Media. It is the official journal of the International Society of Quality of Life Research. The editors-in-chief are Jan Böhnke (University of Dundee) and Claudia Rutherford (University of Sydney). According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2017 impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a type of journal ranking. Journals with higher impact factor values are considered more prestigious or important within their field. The Impact Factor of a journa ... of 2.392. References External links *{{Official website, https://www.springer.com/journal/11136 General medical journals Public health journals Springer Science+Business Media academic journals Academic journal ...
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Cognitive Bias
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm (philosophy), norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the Objectivity (philosophy), objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality. While cognitive biases may initially appear to be negative, some are adaptive. They may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in Heuristic (psychology), heuristics. Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations, resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), the impact of an individual's constitution and bi ...
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Hedonic Treadmill
The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness (or sadness) despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness. Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell coined the term in their essay "Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society" (1971). The hedonic treadmill viewpoint suggests that wealth does not increase the level of happiness. Overview Hedonic adaptation is an event or mechanism that reduces the affective impact of substantial emotional events. Generally, hedonic adaptation involves a happiness "set point", whereby humans generally maintain a constant level of happiness throughout their lives, despite events that occur in their environment. The process of hedonic adaptation is often conceptualized as a treadmill, sinc ...
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Diminishing Returns
In economics, diminishing returns means the decrease in marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, holding all other factors of production equal ('' ceteris paribus''). The law of diminishing returns (also known as the law of diminishing marginal productivity) states that in a productive process, if a factor of production continues to increase, while holding all other production factors constant, at some point a further incremental unit of input will return a lower amount of output. The law of diminishing returns does not imply a decrease in overall production capabilities; rather, it defines a point on a production curve at which producing an additional unit of output will result in a lower profit. Under diminishing returns, output remains positive, but productivity and efficiency decrease. The modern understanding of the law adds the dimension of holding other outputs equal, since a giv ...
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Easterlin Paradox
The Easterlin paradox is a finding in happiness economics formulated in 1974 by Richard Easterlin, then professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and the first economist to study happiness data. The paradox states that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow: while people on higher incomes are typically happier than their lower-income counterparts at a given point in time, higher incomes don't produce greater happiness over time. One explanation is that one's happiness depends on a comparison between their income and their perceptions of the average standard of living. If everyone's income increases, one's increased income gives a short boost to their happiness, since they do not realize that the average standard of living has gone up. Some time later, they realize that the average standard of living has also gone up, so the happiness boost produc ...
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Subjective Well-being
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. 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." 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 ...
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Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a conceptualisation of the needs (or goals) that motivate human behaviour, which was proposed by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow's original formulation, there are five sets of basic needs that are related to each other in a hierarchy of prepotency (or strength). Typically, the hierarchy is depicted in the form of a pyramid although Maslow himself was not responsible for the iconic diagram. The pyramid begins at the bottom with physiological needs (the most prepotent of all) and culminates at the top with self-actualization needs. In his later writings, Maslow added a sixth level of 'meta-needs' and metamotivation. The hierarchy of needs developed by Maslow is one of his most enduring contributions to psychology. The hierarchy of needs remains a popular framework and tool in higher education, business and management training, sociology research, Health care, healthcare, Counseling psychology, counselling and social work ...
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Psychological Adaptation
A psychological adaptation is a functional, cognitive or behavioral trait that benefits an organism in its environment. Psychological adaptations fall under the scope of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs), however, EPMs refer to a less restricted set. Psychological adaptations include only the functional traits that increase the fitness of an organism, while EPMs refer to any psychological mechanism that developed through the processes of evolution. These additional EPMs are the by-product traits of a species’ evolutionary development (see Spandrel (biology), spandrels), as well as the Vestigiality, vestigial traits that no longer benefit the species’ fitness. It can be difficult to tell whether a trait is vestigial or not, so some literature is more lenient and refers to vestigial traits as adaptations, even though they may no longer have adaptive functionality. For example, xenophobic attitudes and behaviors, some have claimed, appear to have certain EPM influences relatin ...
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Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is the scientific study of conditions and processes that contribute to positive psychological states (e.g., contentment, joy), well-being, Positive psychology of relationships, positive relationships, and positive institutions. Positive psychology began as a new domain of psychology in 1998 when Martin Seligman chose it as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association. It is a reaction against past practices that tended to focus on mental illness and emphasized maladaptive behavior and negative thinking. It builds on the Humanistic psychology, humanistic movement of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, which encourages an emphasis on happiness, well-being, and Meaningful life, purpose. Positive psychology largely relies on concepts from the Western philosophy, Western philosophical tradition, such as the Aristotle, Aristotelian concept of , which is typically rendered in English with the terms "flourishing", "the good life," or "h ...
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Life Satisfaction
Life satisfaction is an evaluation of a person's quality of life. It is assessed in terms of mood, relationship satisfaction, achieved goals, self-concepts, and the self-perceived ability to cope with life. Life satisfaction involves a favorable attitude towards life—rather than an assessment of current feelings. Life satisfaction has been measured in relation to economic standing, degree of education, experiences, residence, and other factors. Life satisfaction is a key part of subjective well-being. Many factors influence subjective well-being and life satisfaction. Socio-demographic factors include gender, age, marital status, income, and education. Psychosocial factors include health, illness, functional ability, activity level, and social relationships. People tend to gain life satisfaction as they get older. Factors affecting life satisfaction Personality Meta-analyses using the Five Factor Model of Personality found that, among its "Big Five" personality traits, ...
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Paradoxes
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true or apparently true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites". In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself and showed that attempts to found set theory on ...
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