Recent Research Trend of Subjective Well-Being Studies

Abstract

Subjective Well-Being (SWB) is the subjective and psychological view of “Quality of Life” evaluation. In this article, the author conducted an extensive review of literature related to SWB. As the result, following points were uncovered: SWB concept is composed of two components: affect, including positive and negative affect, and life satisfaction as a cognitive component. This means that, when we measure SWB on research, we must include both side of affect, positive and negative, because of their independency; SWB has strong correlation with other individual variables including demographic variables, social relations, job, health, personality, etc. Nevertheless, it is difficult to specify their causal relations; SWB study is sometimes criticized as too much theory oriented. There are two theories, Bottom-up and Top-down; Although many research literatures on SWB have published mainly in western countries since 1970, only a few literatures can be found, except gerontology, in Japan. It is suggested that more detailed theoretical and empirical studied on SWB should be done for improving our “Quality of Life”.