In this article, we develop a measure of complete well-being. The framework is derived from the theoretical model of human flourishing understood as a state in which all aspects of a human life are favorable. The approach extends beyond psychological well-being and reflects the World Health Organization definition of health that not only considers the health of body and mind but also embraces the wholeness of the person. The Well-Being Assessment is a comprehensive instrument designed to assess holistic well-being in (...) six domains: emotional health, physical health, meaning and purpose, character strengths, social connectedness, and financial security. Although each of these domains is distinct, all of them are nearly universally desired, and all but financial security constitute ends in themselves. Data were collected from a representative sample of working adults. A sample of 276 employees participated in the pilot, 2,370 participated in the first wave and 1,209 in the second wave of the survey. The WBA showed a good fitting, satisfactory reliability, test–retest correlation, and convergent/discriminant validity in relation to stability over time and relevant health measures, as well as a good fit to the data that were invariant over time, gender, age, education, and marital status. The instrument can be of use for scientists, practitioners, clinicians, public health officials, and patients. Adoption of more holistic measures of well-being that go beyond psychological well-being may help to shift the focus from health deficiencies to health and well-being promotion. (shrink)

Depression and the subjective experience of suffering are distinct forms of distress, but they are sometimes commingled with one another. Using a cross-sectional sample of flight attendants, we tested for further empirical evidence distinguishing depression and suffering. Correlations with 15 indices covering several dimensions of well-being indicated that associations with worse well-being were mostly stronger for depression than suffering. There was a large positive correlation between depression and suffering, but we also found evidence of notable non-concurrent depression and suffering in (...) the sample. After dividing participants into four groups that varied based on severity of depression and suffering, regression analyses showed higher levels of well-being among those with both none-mild depression and none-mild suffering compared to those with moderate-severe depression, moderate-severe suffering, or both. All indices of well-being were lowest among the group of participants with moderate-severe depression and moderate-severe suffering. In addition to providing further evidence supporting a distinction between depression and suffering, our findings suggest that concurrent depression and suffering may be more disruptive to well-being than when either is present alone. (shrink)

Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across academia. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how it is created, especially not in a multidimensional sense. By ‘created’ we do not mean its influencing factors, for which there is extensive research, but how it actually forms in the person. The work that has been done in this arena tends to focus on physiological dynamics, which are certainly part of the puzzle. But they are not the whole picture, with (...) psychological, phenomenological, and socio cultural processes also playing their part. As a result, this paper offers a multidimensional overview of scholarship on the ‘architecture’ of happiness, providing a stimulus for further work into this important topic. (shrink)

Direct effects in mediation analysis quantify the effect of an exposure on an outcome not mediated by a certain intermediate. When estimating direct effects through measured data, misclassification may occur in the outcomes, exposures, and mediators. In mediation analysis, any such misclassification may lead to biased estimates in the direct effects. Basing on the conditional dependence between the mismeasured variable and other variables given the true variable, misclassification mechanisms can be divided into non-differential misclassification and differential misclassification. In this article, (...) several scenarios of differential misclassification will be discussed and sensitivity analysis results on direct effects will be derived for those eligible scenarios. According to our findings, the estimated direct effects are not necessarily biased in intuitively predictable directions when the misclassification is differential. The bounds of the true effects are functions of measured effects and sensitivity parameters. An example from the 2018 NCHS data will illustrate how to conduct sensitivity analyses with our results on misclassified outcomes, gestational hypertension and eclampsia, when the exposure is Hispanic women versus non-Hispanic White women and the mediator is weights gain during pregnancy. (shrink)

The paper puts forward an analytic definition of “love” that is intended to characterize the use of the word in expressions of the form “He/she loves...” It is proposed that when “love” is used in such contexts, it denotes “a disposition towards either (i) desiring a perceived good or desiring union with it, either as an end itself or with it being a source of delight in itself or (ii) desiring good for a particular object for its own sake.” The (...) first of these might be referred to as unitive love and the second as contributory love. A defense of the definition is offered by considering its application to a number of seemingly problematic cases. Many of the puzzling features of “love” arise from the disjunctive nature of its use – that we use “love” when either unitive or contributory love is present. Confusions arise when we take what can be said about unitive love, and apply this to contributory love, or vice versa, or when we assume all uses of “love” entail both unitive and contributory aspects. Consideration is given to the implications of the proposed definition and distinctions for cultivating love within society, marriages, political life, and media. (shrink)