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One area of positive psychology analyzes subjective well-being (SWB), people’s cognitive and affective evaluations of their lives. Progress has been made in understanding the components of SWB, the importance of adaptation and goals to feelings of well-being, the temperament underpinnings of SWB, and the cultural influences on well-being. Representative selection of respondents, naturalistic experience sampling measures, and other methodological refinements are now used to study SWB and could be used to produce national indicators of happiness.

For millennia thinkers have pondered the question, what is the good life? They have focused on criteria such as loving others, pleasure, or self-insight as the defining characteristics of quality of life. Another idea of what constitutes a good life, however, is that it is desirable for people themselves to think that they are living good lives. This subjective definition of quality of life is democratic in that it grants to each individual the right to decide whether his or her life is worthwhile. It is this approach to defining the good life that has come to be called “subjective well-being” (SWB) and in colloquial terms is sometimes labeled “happiness.” SWB refers to people’s evaluations of their lives—evaluations that are both affective and cognitive. People experience abundant SWB when they feel many pleasant and few unpleasant emotions, when they are engaged in interesting activities, when they experience many pleasures and few pains, and when they are satisfied with their lives. There are additional features of a valuable life and of mental health, but the field of SWB focuses on people’s own evaluations of their lives.

Throughout the world, people are granting increasing importance to SWB. Inglehart (1990) proposed that as basic material needs are met, individuals move to a postmaterialistic phase in which they are concerned with self-fulfillment. Table 1 presents means from an international college sample of 7,204 respondents in 42 countries, signifying how students in diverse countries view happiness (see Suh, Diener, Oishi, & Triandis, 1998, for more information about this sample). Mean values are presented for how...