An examination of patience and well-being

Patience is the propensity to wait calmly in the face of frustration or adversity. The new 3-Factor Patience Scale (Study 1) measures three types of patience (interpersonal, life hardship, and daily hassles patience), which differentially relate to well-being and personality. In Study 2, goal pursuit and achievement mediated the relation between patience and well-being. Participants rated 10 personal goals on 15 dimensions of goal pursuit (e.g. patience enacted, difficulty, achievement satisfaction, effort). Patience facilitated goal pursuit and satisfaction especially in the face of obstacles. In Study 3, participants took part in a training program designed to increase trait patience. The program led to increased patience, decreased depression, and increased positive affect relative to a control condition, suggesting that patience may be modifiable.     

What’s in a face? Perhaps some elements of both eudaimonic and hedonic well-being

The idea that eudaimonic well-being (EWB) should be distinguished from the more widespread notion of hedonic well-being (HWB), has stirred up disagreement among happiness researchers. Siding with EWB researchers, this study provides theoretical and empirical arguments supporting the distinctiveness and usefulness of a EWB dimension. A path model with data from Norwegian university students (N?=?184) showed that, when requested to draw both a happy face and a sad face, indicators of HWB were associated with a preference for working with the happy rather than the sad face. Indicators of EWB were uncorrelated with this hedonic bias. Eudaimonic feeling states were associated with the level of creativity involved in the drawings, while hedonic feelings were not. Finally, participants who draw bigger faces also felt more pleasure during the act of drawing. Eudaimonic feelings were unrelated to the size of the drawing.     

Having the will and finding the way: A review and meta-analysis of hope at work

Critics of the field of positive organizational psychology have expressed reservations with validity and utility of positive constructs, such as hope. The purpose of this article is to systematically review the existing research on hope at work and to determine the ‘true’ relationship between hope and work outcomes by meta-analyzing 133 effect sizes across 45 primary studies based on 11,139 employees. As predicted, we found that the overall corrected mean effect sizes between hope and work performance and employee well-being were positive and statistically significant. Gender and study location were significant moderators of these relationships, with women and US-based studies having stronger hope to work outcomes effects. Taken together, results demonstrate that positive psychology constructs, such as hope, play an important role in understanding and predicting employee behavior.     

A psycho-social system approach to well-being: Empirically deriving the Five Domains of Positive Functioning

A new psycho-social system approach to well-being is presented, in which psychological and social functioning is understood through an empirically derived framework of five domains. A quantitative co-term analysis was performed on 3466 terms within 18,401 PsycINFO^® journal documents on topics related to positive psychology (PP) across disciplines such as psychology, education, management, business and psychiatry. The analysis revealed that research on PP topics can be classified into five broad domains: attention and awareness, comprehension and coping, emotions, goals and habits, and virtues and relationships. These domains provide a new systematic framework, the Five Domains of Positive Functioning, for understanding positive psycho-social functioning and exploring the underlying ways in which people function to achieve well-being outcomes. When used within the psycho-social system approach, the framework can be used in future research to clarify mechanisms of change, facilitate comparisons between different PP interventions and suggest ways to improve intervention effectiveness.     

Revisiting desirable response bias in well-being reports

Growing popular interest in positive psychology may have important implications for the measurement of well-being. Five studies tested the prediction that well-being ratings are influenced by desirability bias. In Study 1, participants (N?=?176) instructed to fake good endorsed higher well-being; those instructed to fake bad endorsed lower well-being, compared to controls. In Studies 2 and 3 (N’s?=?111, 121), control participants endorsed higher levels of well-being compared to those attached to a bogus pipeline. These differences were mediated by desirability bias. In Study 4 (N?=?417), instruction manipulations did not affect well-being levels, but presenting a desirability measure prior to well-being measures attenuated the correlations between them. In Study 5 (N?=?391), however, this order effect did not replicate. We discuss the importance of continued vigilance for desirability bias in well-being research as a ready solution to this clear problem remains elusive.     

Is the grass always greener on the other side? Social comparisons of subjective well-being

This study investigates subjective well-being (SWB) among residents of Munich (n?=?380) and Venice (n?=?545) with respect to their individual SWB and their judgments of SWB for residents of their own city and those living in the other city. Our results indicate that egocentrism rather than striving for self-enhancement guided people's judgments of SWB. For people with low individual SWB, a below-average effect was found, whereas for people with high individual SWB, a better-than-average effect emerged. Also in line with the egocentrism approach, judgments of individual SWB were positively related to the judgments of SWB for residents of their own city, but unrelated to SWB of those living in the other city. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Turning to art as a positive way of living with cancer: A qualitative study of personal motives and contextual influences

Why do some women turn to creative art-making after a diagnosis of cancer? Eleven women provided qualitative accounts that were analysed following guidelines for interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Some described taking up artistic leisure activities initially in order to manage emotional distress. Others emphasized their need for positive well-being, taking up art to experience achievement and satisfaction, to regain a positive identity, and to normalize family dynamics in the context of living with cancer. Participants’ turn to art-making was facilitated by biographical and contextual factors, including pre-existing craft skills, long-standing personal values and coping philosophies, family role models for managing adversity, and the supportive encouragement of family and friends. Other research has acknowledged that positive lifestyle change and posttraumatic growth can occur after a cancer diagnosis, and this study reveals a multi-faceted process. The findings suggest a need for further research into the experiences that facilitate positive lifestyle change and subjective well-being among people who are living with cancer.     

Life satisfaction across adulthood: different determinants at different ages?

It is likely that with aging and changing life circumstances, individuals’ values shift in systematic ways, and that these shifts may be accompanied by shifts in the determinants of their subjective judgments of well being. To examine this possibility, the relations among the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) and a number of personality, affect, demographic, and cognitive variables were examined in a sample of 818 participants between the ages of 18 and 94. The results indicated that although many variables had significant zero-order correlations with the SWLS, only a few variables had unique utility in predicting life satisfaction. Invariance analyses indicated that while the qualitative nature of life satisfaction remains constant across adult age, the influence of fluid intelligence on judgments of life satisfaction declines with age. In contrast, negative affect is negatively associated with life satisfaction consistently across the adult age span.     

Curiosity and well-being

Recent conceptualizations of curiosity have identified two underlying factors that together represent trait curiosity: exploration (the disposition to seek out novel/challenging situations) and absorption (the disposition to become fully engaged in these interesting situations) (Kashdan, Rose, & Fincham, 2004). These factors have been proposed to broaden the thought–action repertoire by promoting interest in novel/challenging situations and to incrementally build knowledge and well-being in a manner consistent with the Broaden-and-Build Theory (Fredrickson, B. L., 1998). This article reports findings from a study which examined associations between the exploration and absorption components of curiosity and continuous and categorical indices of well-being. Replicating and extending previous findings, the exploration (more so than absorption) component of curiosity exhibited moderate positive associations with measures of well-being. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

A controlled trial of mindfulness training in schools: The importance of practice for an impact on well-being

We report the results of a short programme of mindfulness training administered to adolescent boys in a classroom setting. Intervention and control groups (N = 155) were compared on measures of mindfulness, resilience and psychological well-being. Although the overall differences between the two groups failed to reach significance, we found that within the mindfulness group, there was a significant positive association between the amount of individual practice outside the classroom and improvement in psychological well-being and mindfulness. We also found that the improvement in well-being was related to personality variables (agreeableness and emotional stability). Most students reported enjoying and benefiting from the mindfulness training, and 74% said they would like to continue with it in the future. The results of this preliminary study are encouraging. Further work is needed to refine the training programme and undertake a definitive randomised controlled trial, using both subjective and objective outcome measures, with long-term follow-up.