In well-being research the term happiness is often used as synonymous with life satisfaction. However, little is known about lay people's understanding of happiness. Building on the available ...literature, this study explored lay definitions of happiness across nations and cultural dimensions, analyzing their components and relationship with participants' demographic features. Participants were 2799 adults (age range = 30-60, 50% women) living in urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, and United States. They completed the Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation (EHHI), reporting, among other information, their own definition of happiness. Answers comprised definitions referring to a broad range of life domains, covering both the contextual-social sphere and the psychological sphere. Across countries and with little variation by age and gender, inner harmony predominated among psychological definitions, and family and social relationships among contextual definitions. Whereas relationships are widely acknowledged as basic happiness components, inner harmony is substantially neglected. Nevertheless, its cross-national primacy, together with relations, is consistent with the view of an ontological interconnectedness characterizing living systems, shared by several conceptual frameworks across disciplines and cultures. At the methodological level, these findings suggest the potential of a bottom-up, mixed method approach to contextualize psychological dimensions within culture and lay understanding.
A vast amount of literature has highlighted that restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as lockdowns and the resulting interruption of face-to-face academic activities, strongly ...disrupted students' daily routine and undermined their well-being. Through a mixed method approach, this study was aimed at investigating the association between students' experience of the health emergency and their resilience levels during the first pandemic outbreak. Between April and May 2020, 421 Italian university students attending Health Sciences, Humanities, and Political Sciences courses completed the Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA), provided narratives about the emergency by answering an open-ended question, and filled out a demographic questionnaire. Results showed that narratives about community/society issues were by far the most recurrent ones across disciplinary areas, while a significantly higher percentage of students from Humanities focused on study/university. Health Sciences students were more likely to provide narratives concerning social commitment, and they reported significantly higher resilience levels than Humanities students. A higher percentage of students with moderate resilience focused their narratives on the study/university domain, compared to students with high resilience. Findings suggest the importance of supporting students' resilience to counterbalance their academic concerns in both times of crisis and ordinary times.
The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) is widely used to assess global satisfaction with life. Although the scale’s psychometric properties were extensively investigated through different methods, ...Rasch analysis can provide further insight into the scale’s targeting and sensitivity across the different levels of the underlying construct. It also allows researchers to evaluate how well a scale fits the assumptions of unidimensionality and local independence of the items, how the response categories are used, and whether differential item functioning occurs in different demographic groups. In this study, Rasch analysis was used to examine the psychometric properties of the SWLS among participants from South Africa (
n
= 676) and Italy (
n =
516). Findings showed that the scale was insensitive at high levels of life satisfaction. Since the majority of the participants reported high scores, these results suggest that the SWLS may not be sensitive to detect change in the general population. Although support was provided to the scale’s unidimensional factor structure, a distinction emerged between items referring to satisfaction with present and past life. No group difference in item functioning was detected for country, gender, age group, or education level. However, findings suggest that using fewer response categories with less nuanced lower level descriptors could be more appropriate, especially for the South African sample. Overall, results highlight the need for further research on the SWLS, especially concerning insensitivity at the upper range.
This study investigated learning activities and associated quality of experience of students with different levels of perceived academic self-efficacy. Two groups were formed out of 130 Italian ...adolescents (age 15-19), one with high and one with low academic self-efficacy beliefs (31 and 32 participants, respectively). Students provided valuation of academic pursuits and aspirations, and were monitored for one week with experience sampling method (ESM). Attention was paid to the association of learning activities with optimal experience, characterized by high perceived environmental challenges matched by high personal skills, involvement, concentration and intrinsic reward. High self-efficacy students reported higher academic aspirations and pursuits than low self-efficacy students. They also spent more time in homework, and primarily associated learning activities with optimal experience. Results have educational implications in fostering motivation and enjoyment in learning. They also provide empirical support for the combination of self-efficacy beliefs and quality of experience in motivational research.
•This study jointly investigated caregivers’ burden and psychosocial resources.•Higher risk of burnout was associated with a higher subjective/total burden ratio.•High satisfaction and to a lesser ...extent resilience predicted lower burden levels.•Depression related emotions did not predict subjective and objective burden.•Burden and well-being indicators are independent measures of caregiver functioning.
In studies on caregiving, high levels of perceived burden are commonly considered as synonymous with poor well-being. This study aimed at better disentangling the relationship between burden and well-being dimensions through their joint investigation. To this purpose, perceived well-being and social resources were evaluated among caregivers reporting different levels of burden. Participants were 91 caregivers (mean age=50.4; SD=9.6), parents of people diagnosed with severe neuromotor and cognitive disorders. Participants completed a semi-structured interview and a set of scaled questionnaires: Caregiver Burden Inventory (CBI), Satisfaction with Life Scale, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, Depression Anxiety Stress Scale, Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation, Resilience Scale for Adults, and Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support. Participants were divided into two groups according to their perceived burden level, assessed through CBI. In both groups, the subjective components of burden accounted for the major fraction of the total burden level. Participants perceiving high burden reported higher levels of depression related emotions, lower life satisfaction and lower resilience than participants perceiving low burden. No group difference emerged in perceived meaningfulness and social support. A regression analysis showed that the best predictor of perceived burden was life satisfaction, followed to a lesser extent by resilience, while depression related emotions did not provide significant contribution. Findings suggest that the joint assessment of burden and well-being dimensions, that are co-existing in caregivers’ experience, allow for the identification of personal and relational resources that can be usefully included in interventions addressed to caregivers.
The experience of persons with multiple sclerosis (MS) and their caregivers is usually investigated in terms of emotional distress and health-related quality of life, while well-being indicators ...remain largely underexplored. In addition, findings are often interpreted from the clinical perspective, neglecting socio-cultural aspects that may crucially contribute to individuals' functioning. At the methodological level, most studies rely on scaled instruments, not allowing participants to freely express their needs and resources. Based on the bio-psycho-social perspective endorsed by the International Classification of Functioning, well-being indicators were investigated among 62 persons with MS (PwMS), their 62 caregivers and two control groups, matched by age and gender. Participants completed the Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), and the Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation instrument (EHHI). EHHI provides information on participants' happiness, goals and meanings through scaled and open-ended questions, contextualized within major life domains. No relevant differences emerged among PwMS and caregivers, compared with the respective control groups, as concerns life domains associated with happiness, goals and meaning. Participants across groups prominently mentioned family, highlighting its intrinsic value and its relevance as a sharing context; health did not represent a major theme for PwMS; community, society and religion/spirituality issues were substantially neglected by all participants. PwMS and caregivers reported lower levels of positive affect than their control groups, while no substantial differences emerged for negative affect, happiness and meaningfulness levels in life and across most domains. Results suggest that the experience of MS is associated with well-being in relevant life domains, such as family and close relationships. Although PwMS and caregivers identified a lower number of goals and meaning-related opportunities compared to control groups, they showed a positive adjustment to disease through the development of personal and family resources. These assets are often undervalued by health professionals and social institutions, while they could be fruitfully exploited through the active involvement of PwMS and their families as expert and exemplary informants in initiatives aimed at promoting the well-being of individuals and communities.
Worldviews are culturally derived assumptions that influence individual and collective behaviors, values, and representations of reality. The study of mental functions is not exempt from this ...influence, as reflected in scientific theories, methodological approaches, and empirical studies. Despite acknowledging the interplay of mental processes with developmental, environmental, and cultural dimensions, psychological research is still primarily based on quantitative methods, and on the conceptualization of mental phenomena as unfolding along polarized continua. A lively epistemological debate surrounds this approach, especially underscoring the risk of blurring the distinction between constructs derived from statistical models and real-life processes and experiences. Based on this debate and on recent empirical evidence derived from the positive psychology literature, this paper is aimed at proposing an integrated view of mental health, as a holistically patterned, contextually imbedded, and dynamic phenomenon changing over time and across life events, with harmony, harmonization and dynamic balance as core qualities. The heuristic potential of investigating the qualitative configuration patterns of mental health dimensions across individuals and groups, beyond their position along a quantitative continuum, is outlined. The development of more integrated approaches and methodologies to investigate mental health as a harmonization process, taking into account personal, contextual and developmental features, would be aligned with evidence derived from the integration of traditional nomothetic and ideographic approaches, and other life sciences. However, the development of a transdisciplinary line of research requires further inputs from different epistemological views, as well as higher attention to the potential contribution of different philosophical traditions.
Research highlighted the negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents' emotional well-being worldwide. In the attempt to identify resources which could facilitate adolescents' ...adjustment, this study examined the occurrence of flow experience and related activities, and the association between flow and emotional well-being among Italian teenagers. In Spring 2021, 150 students (40.7% girls) aged 15-19 completed instruments assessing flow and related activities before and during the pandemic, and current positive and negative affect. Findings revealed that only 24.7% of the participants currently reported flow; over half of those reporting flow before the pandemic did not experience it subsequently, and only 6.5% of those not reporting flow before the pandemic currently experienced it. Participants with flow both before and during the pandemic reported higher positive affect than teens who never experienced flow (p = .011), or lost it (p = .006). No group differences were detected for negative affect. Learning, structured leisure, and interpersonal relations were the domains most frequently associated with flow before and during the pandemic, but after the pandemic onset a reduction in the variety of flow activities and limited identification of new flow domains were observed. The association of flow with higher emotional well-being even in pandemic times suggests the potential usefulness of interventions promoting flow retrieval under adverse circumstances.
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