Implicit Subject Well-being Research

As its name implies, subjective well-being (SWB) consists of people's own evaluations of their lives. These evaluations can be either cognitive (e.g., life satisfaction or satisfaction with one's job) or affective (the presence of joy). The positive affect involves pleasant experiences such as affiliation, optimism, self-esteem, and happiness, whereas the negative affect involves unpleasant affective experiences such as sadness, anxiety, and wrath. As to cognitive evaluation, it is usually referred to as life satisfaction, which is defined as the global judgments of one's life. Although these components are separable, they often interrelate, suggesting the existence of a higher order construct of subjective well-being.In the research on SWB, researchers studying the facets of happiness usually relied on only a single self-report item to measure each construct. Despite the encouraging findings, SWB measures can be contaminated by biases. First, an insurmountable limitation might be the participants' ability or willingness to introspect or report private concerns. Another potential problem is that people may respond to SWB scales in socially desirable ways.Accordingly, the current work tries to explore people's implicit subjective well-being with an implicit association test (IAT). The implicit subjective well-being refers to people's unconscious or automatic evaluation, which reflects the positive and negative experiences that can't be identified precisely by people's introspection. After reviewing the literature of SWB, the present work tries to explore the SWB systemically and holistically with the incorporation of the new direction of implicit SWB, and with the new methods in research of implicit social cognition.Five studies are employed to explore implicit SWB:The first study aimed to examine the relationship of implicit SWB and explicit SWB. To explore implicit SWB, the study designed some IAT tasks. The basic presumption is that when people are quicker to associate "my life" with "positive words" compared to "negative words," this is interpreted as evidence of a generally-held bias in favor of positive SWB, and vice versa. It indeed revealed that people are quicker to associate "my life" with "positive words" compared to "negative words". It also showed that the implicit SWB IAT had substantial internal consistency. In addition, structural equation modeling revealed that implicit SWB and explicit SWB are distinct constructs.The second study was aimed to provide evidences of stability of implicit SWB. It examined the influence of different types of feedback (of success or failure) on explicit SWB, implicit SWB and anxiety. Results showed that feedback had effects on people's explicit SWB and anxiety. Specifically, success feedback decreased the level...