Happiness, Economics and Public Policy: A Critique

If politicians and their advisers want to promote the well-being or happiness of citizens they have three ways to find out what they should do. (1) They can analyse the behaviour and the decisions of citizens to find out what they want, in other words: they can try to identify their “revealed preferences”. This is common practice in economics. (2) They can analyse the “stated preferences” of people as they express them explicitly in inquiries, referenda, polls and elections. (3) They can analyse the conditions that make people happy by comparing the conditions of people at different levels of happiness. Economists, like Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod, have an outspoken preference for the first option and they are sceptical about the third. Their argument is unbalanced because they are too critical about the authenticity and complexity of self-reported happiness and not critical enough about the authenticity and complexity of revealed preferences. Economists should appreciate the comparative advantages and additional value of each option and try to find optimal combinations with synergistic effects. Economists should appreciate happiness research as an option to assess the nature and magnitude of “externalities” within their own discipline.     

Conscious and Preconscious Uses of Memory in Patients with Depressive and Somatoform Disorders

This study investigated whether conscious and preconscious memory features contribute to discrimination between depressive and somatoform disorders. Thirty-one participants fulfilling the diagnostic criteria for a somatoform disorder and 28 participants fulfilling the criteria for depression were examined within the framework of the process–dissociation paradigm using neutral, health-threatening, and general threatening words in a lexical decision task. Parameters of conscious memory, preconscious memory, and chance were used to compare memory features of both the groups. There was an inverse relationship between conscious and preconscious memory effects for health-threatening stimuli in the group of patients with somatoform disorders but not in the group of depressive patients. Patients with somatoform disorders showed a significantly lower level of conscious memory for health-threatening stimuli than depressive participants. Compared to depressive patients, a more dynamic relationship between decreased conscious and increased preconscious memory for health-related stimuli seems to be characteristic for patients with somatoform disorders.     

Factor structure of patient and caregiver ratings on the dementia quality of life instrument

Preliminary evidence suggests that quality of life reports from patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) are as reliable and valid as data provided by caregivers. To date, no studies compared the factor structure of data provided by caregivers and patients. Factor analyses are important to conduct because they are an indicator of validity. This study compared the factor structure of patient and caregiver reports on the Dementia Quality of Life scale (DQoL). Participants (N=67) were patients diagnosed with amnestic MCI or mild AD and their caregivers. Principal axis factor analyses were run separately on patient and caregiver report data. The three-factor solutions for patient and caregiver data were nearly identical. Three factors corresponding to positive affect, negative affect, and aesthetics emerged reliably from analyses. Thus, data from patients demonstrated a factor structure that was highly consistent with caregiver report data and conformed to meaningful psychological constructs.     

Did the Market Depress Happiness in the US?

Robert Lane is a seasoned critic of American consumer society. His latest book summarizes many of the arguments brought up earlier and contributes new data about developments in income, companionship and happiness in the USA between 1972 and 1994. Lane notes a considerable rise in incomes over these years and claims that companionship and happiness have declined. He attributes this decline to market forces that emphasize money at the expense of intimate bonds, resulting in a weakened capacity to deal with stress.This review challenges two of the book's hypotheses. First, it shows that happiness did not decline in the USA in these years, but was actually quite stable. Second, it mitigates the assertion that companionship has dwindled and notes that money making and companionship are not necessarily antithetical.Still, Lane could be right. Possibly market forces did depress happiness and possibly that loss was offset by improvements in other fields, like increased freedom or better health care, such as better treatment for mental problems. If so, Lane's message is that Americans could have been happier than they ultimately were.     

Limited Experienced Happiness or Unlimited Expected Utility,What About the Differences?

Happiness and utility are two types of subjective well-being, but measured in different ways. Happiness is measured by asking people questions about their subjective appreciation of their life as a whole. Utility is measured by an assessment of their subjective priorities, as revealed in their actual behaviour. Both methods have specific pros and cons and additional value. These methodological issues are important in an epistemological way: how to obtain knowledge about subjective well-being. There are, however, also three important ontological differences between happiness and utility in the actual nature of these phenomena in reality. (1) Happiness depends on available market and non-market commodities and living-conditions; utility depends only on available market-commodities. (2) Happiness is about experienced well-being, utility is about expected well-being. (3) Happiness is limited because it is related to the fulfilment of a limited number of needs, utility is unlimited because behaviour always reveals preferences in terms of expected well-being. Economists and happiness-researchers tend to neglect the last two differences. Their analysis, the analysis of Carol Graham included, could gain strength if more attention would be paid to these last two differences.     

Implicit memory for auditorily presented threatening stimuli: a process-dissociation approach

The investigation of unconscious cognition involves especially problems with the methodology of measuring implicit and explicit proportions of different task performances. In this study the process dissociation procedure of Jacoby and its modification within the multinomial modelling framework for an indirect word-nonword-discrimination task is applied to a sample of 45 healthy students. The paradigm includes acoustically presented stimuli. During a learning phase, subjects listened to a series of neutral and threatening words. Performance was tested by letting subjects decide whether a presented stimulus (masked with white noise at signal-noise ratio of -17 dB or unmasked) had been a word or a nonword. Within this paradigm, implicit cognition occurs when (a) a word is more probably correctly recognized as "word" after presentation during the learning phase (typical priming effect) or when (b) a nonword derived from a word is more probably falsely recognized as "word" after its corresponding word had been presented during the learning phase (effect of implicit cognition given perceptual fluency). Frequencies for hits and false alarms were analyzed within the multinomial model which allows estimating parameters for the correct discrimination of words (c), the response bias (b), the classical priming effect (u1), and the parameter for the priming effect of "old" nonwords (u2). Under masked stimuli the multinomial model showed implicit cognition, an effect not equally found for neutral and threatening words. Threatening words exhibited a significantly higher portion of implicit cognition than neutral ones. Given the statistical complexity of multinomial models, the application of this method was explained in detail.