Two Concepts or Two Approaches? A Bifactor Analysis of Psychological and Subjective Well-Being

Researchers often debate about whether there is a meaningful differentiation between psychological well-being and subjective well-being. One view argues that psychological and subjective well-being are distinct dimensions, whereas another view proposes that they are different perspectives on the same general construct and thus are more similar than different. The purpose of this investigation was to examine these two competing views by using a statistical approach, the bifactor model, that allows for an examination of the common variance shared by the two types of well-being and the unique variance specific to each. In one college sample and one nationally representative sample, the bifactor model revealed a strong general factor, which captures the common ground shared by the measures of psychological well-being and subjective well-being. The bifactor model also revealed four specific factors of psychological well-being and three specific factors of subjective well-being, after partialling out the general well-being factor. We further examined the relations of the specific factors of psychological and subjective well-being to external measures. The specific factors demonstrated incremental predictive power, independent of the general well-being factor. These results suggest that psychological well-being and subjective well-being are strongly related at the general construct level, but their individual components are distinct once their overlap with the general construct of well-being is partialled out. The findings thus indicate that both perspectives have merit, depending on the level of analysis.     

Constructions as categories of language

What causes children to categorize distinct utterances they hear into a constructional generalization? That is, what makes subjects create a constructional category instead of treating each utterance as a distinct unrelated idiom? One simple factor that encourages the learning of abstract categories is shared concrete similarity. When instances share concrete attributes, learners are more likely to categorize them together, and moreover are more likely to attend to their abstract commonalities [Gentner, D., & Medina, J. (1998). Similarity and the development rules. Cognition, 66, 236-297; Markman, A.B., & Gentner D. (1993). Splitting the difference: A structural alignment view of similarity. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 517-535]. This paper reports results that confirm the prediction that presentation of items with concrete shared similarity early in training enhances language learning in adults.