Is the good life the easy life?

ABSTRACT. Three studies examined folk concepts of the good life. Participants rated the desirability and moral goodness of a life as a function of the happiness, meaning, and effort experienced. Happiness and meaning were solid predictors of the good life, replicating King and Napa (1998). Study 1 (N = 381) included wealth as an additional factor. Results showed little desire for exorbitant (over moderate) wealth, but also a desire to avoid poverty. When effort was operationalized as number of hours worked, respondents desired the easy life, particularly at moderate levels of income. When effort was operationalized as effortful engagement (Study 2), 186 undergraduates and 178 community adults rated the hardworking life as morally superior to the easy life. Community adults preferred meaningful lives of ease, while college students preferred meaningful lives that involved effort. Study 3 (N = 359) found the meaningful, effortful life was rated as most morally good, and the happy effortful life was rated as most desirable, happy, and meaningful. The role of hard work in naïve notions of The Good Life is discussed. A number of potential components of the good life require effort – namely, economic success (Weber, 1930/1976), a sense of purpos

Mobile Sensing at the Service of Mental Well-being: a Large-scale Longitudinal Study

Measuring mental well-being with mobile sensing has been an increasingly active research topic. Pervasiveness of smartphones combined with the convenience of mobile app distribution platforms (e.g., Google Play) provide a tremendous opportunity to reach out to millions of users. However, the studies at the confluence of mental health and mobile sensing have been longitudinally limited, controlled, or confined to a small number of participants. In this paper we report on what we believe is the largest longitudinal in-the-wild study of mood through smartphones. We describe an Android app to collect participants’ self-reported moods and system triggered experience sampling data while passively measuring their physical activity, sociability, and mobility via their device’s sensors. We report the results of a large-scale analysis of the data collected for about three years from $\sim$ 18; 000 users. The paper makes three primary contributions. First, we show how we used physical and software sensors in smartphones to automatically and accurately identify routines. Then, we demonstrate the strong correlation between these routines and users’ personality, well-being perception, and other psychological variables. Finally, we explore predictability of users’ mood using their passive sensing data. Our findings show that, especially for weekends, mobile sensing can be used to predict users’ mood with an accuracy of about 70%. These results have the potential to impact the design of future mobile apps for mood/behavior tracking and interventions.This work was supported by the EPSRC through Grants UBHAVE (EP/I032673/1) and GALE (EP/K019392)

Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being

According to the hedonic treadmill model, good and bad events temporarily affect happiness, but people quickly adapt back to hedonic neutrality. The theory, which has gained widespread acceptance in recent years, implies that individual and societal efforts to increase happiness are doomed to failure. The recent empirical work outlined here indicates that 5 important revisions to the treadmill model are needed. First, individuals ’ set points are not hedonically neutral. Second, people have different set points, which are partly dependent on their temperaments. Third, a single person may have multiple happiness set points: Different components of well-being such as pleasant emotions, unpleasant emotions, and life satisfaction can move in different directions. Fourth, and perhaps most important, well-being set points can change under some conditions. Finally, individuals differ in their adaptation to events, with some individuals changing their set point and others not changing in reaction to some external event. These revisions offer hope for psychologists and policymakers who aim to decrease human misery and increase happiness

Positivity and the Construction of Life Satisfaction Judgments: Global Happiness is not the Sum of its Parts

life statisfaction, positivity, happiness, subjective well-being, culture, positive affect, norms.,

Time for break: Understanding information workers' sedentary behavior through a break prompting system

© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. Extended periods of uninterrupted sedentary behavior are detrimental to long-term health. While prolonged sitting is prevalent among information workers, it is difficult for them to break prolonged sedentary behavior due to the nature of their work. This work aims to understand information workers' intentions & practices around standing or moving breaks. We developed Time for Break, a break prompting system that enables people to set their desired work duration and prompts them to stand up or move. We conducted an exploratory field study (N = 25) with Time for Break to collect participants' work & break intentions and behaviors for three weeks, followed by semistructured interviews. We examined rich contexts affecting participants' receptiveness to standing or moving breaks, and identified how their habit strength and self-regulation are related to their break-taking intentions & practices. We discuss design implications for interventions to break up periods of prolonged sedentary behavior in workplaces

Does the burden of the experience sampling method undermine data quality in state based body image research?

Despite growing popularity of experience sampling methodology (ESM) for evaluations of state-based components of body image, there have been concerns that the frequent repeated measurement might encourage problematic responding resulting in low data quantity and/or quality. Using a sample of 105 women (mean age = 24.84), this study used multilevel modelling to investigate whether (a) there were changes in compliance or response variability across a 7-day period, and (b) whether such changes are explained by participant characteristics. Present findings suggest that demands of ESM protocol undermine quantity more so than quality of obtained data. Decline in procedural compliance across the testing period correlated with BMI and body shame, whereas reduced variability in state-based assessments did not adversely impact the strength of association between state body satisfaction ratings and other variables in the dataset. The authors make several recommendations for ensuring the quality of ESM-based data in future studies