Although imperfect, would endorphin measurements or fMRI of reward centers be an acceptable approach? Any other possibilities
I think it might be helpful to start by asking whether you're more interested in hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. Hedonic well-being refers to the basic pleasure seeking-pain avoidance sort of well-being. In contrast, eudaimonic well-being refers to a more wholistic congruence of a self in which competence, autonomy, and relatedness are satisfied. This paper gives an excellent distinction between the two: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.141
For hedonic well-being, it may be difficult to assess this sort of processing without reference to a particular stimulus. The measure that might tap a trait sort of approach motivation is the resting frontal EEG asymmetry. Greater alpha power in the right than left hemisphere implies greater activity in the left than right hemisphere, which is associated with approach processing. The reverse is more consistent with greater withdrawal processing as a whole. This measure can be also be taken as a response to various stimuli, but it's still common just to record a couple of minutes of EEG data over the F3 and F4 sites with eyes open and eyes closed to get a sense of a person's baseline asymmetry.
With respect to hedonic response to various stimuli, there are additional complications. Kent Berridge has described a tripartite model of hedonic activity comprising wanting, liking, and reward learning. Grossly, the first describes the drive that causes an organism to approach reward, the second refers to hedonic enjoyment of the stimulus itself, and the third denotes an organism's ability to learn contingencies leading to reward. Here is a summary of his work: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2756052/
Many of the "reward center" fMRI work involving dopaminergic systems is better at assessing wanting than liking. Brian Knutson's Monetary Incentive Delay task is good at this: ftp://130.113.218.160/dalywilson/Papers/futurediscounting/Knutsen.pdf Behaviorally, David Zald's group has been developing the Expenditure of Effort for Rewards Task (EEfRT) as a measure of wanting, and the initial paper describing this task is here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006598
There are a couple of psychophysiological measures that work reasonably well for assessing liking. My favorite is the postauricular reflex, a measure I've been researching over the past decade as an index of positive emotional processing; this works for both emotional pictures and sounds: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2962877/ The zygomatic EMG is also a measure of limited utility for assessing reactivity to pleasant stimuli; however, it's fairly specific to stimulus content and tends to work only for women: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10600215_Emotion_and_motivation_II_sex_differences_in_picture_processing/file/d912f50b5bcda99856.pdf
I'm not familiar with good physiological or behavioral measures of eudaimonic well-being. However, such a construct may be relatively difficult to measure in the laboratory, given that it's not necessarily something that occurs in response to specific stimuli. I hope this helps you in your work on subjective well-being and happiness!
Article Emotion and motivation II: Sex differences in picture processing
Interesting!
I think this requires a multifunctional approach, which would include the techniques you mentioned. This approach would also include ECG registers and behavioral tests, but before, we need to find the correlations between all these variables, and how these correlations define that we call well-being. In my opinion, "objective" is a very delicate word, so maybe we could try using "accuracy"
... just an opinion
Erick
I think it might be helpful to start by asking whether you're more interested in hedonic or eudaimonic well-being. Hedonic well-being refers to the basic pleasure seeking-pain avoidance sort of well-being. In contrast, eudaimonic well-being refers to a more wholistic congruence of a self in which competence, autonomy, and relatedness are satisfied. This paper gives an excellent distinction between the two: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.141
For hedonic well-being, it may be difficult to assess this sort of processing without reference to a particular stimulus. The measure that might tap a trait sort of approach motivation is the resting frontal EEG asymmetry. Greater alpha power in the right than left hemisphere implies greater activity in the left than right hemisphere, which is associated with approach processing. The reverse is more consistent with greater withdrawal processing as a whole. This measure can be also be taken as a response to various stimuli, but it's still common just to record a couple of minutes of EEG data over the F3 and F4 sites with eyes open and eyes closed to get a sense of a person's baseline asymmetry.
With respect to hedonic response to various stimuli, there are additional complications. Kent Berridge has described a tripartite model of hedonic activity comprising wanting, liking, and reward learning. Grossly, the first describes the drive that causes an organism to approach reward, the second refers to hedonic enjoyment of the stimulus itself, and the third denotes an organism's ability to learn contingencies leading to reward. Here is a summary of his work: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2756052/
Many of the "reward center" fMRI work involving dopaminergic systems is better at assessing wanting than liking. Brian Knutson's Monetary Incentive Delay task is good at this: ftp://130.113.218.160/dalywilson/Papers/futurediscounting/Knutsen.pdf Behaviorally, David Zald's group has been developing the Expenditure of Effort for Rewards Task (EEfRT) as a measure of wanting, and the initial paper describing this task is here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006598
There are a couple of psychophysiological measures that work reasonably well for assessing liking. My favorite is the postauricular reflex, a measure I've been researching over the past decade as an index of positive emotional processing; this works for both emotional pictures and sounds: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2962877/ The zygomatic EMG is also a measure of limited utility for assessing reactivity to pleasant stimuli; however, it's fairly specific to stimulus content and tends to work only for women: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/10600215_Emotion_and_motivation_II_sex_differences_in_picture_processing/file/d912f50b5bcda99856.pdf
I'm not familiar with good physiological or behavioral measures of eudaimonic well-being. However, such a construct may be relatively difficult to measure in the laboratory, given that it's not necessarily something that occurs in response to specific stimuli. I hope this helps you in your work on subjective well-being and happiness!
Article Emotion and motivation II: Sex differences in picture processing
What implicit measures are you talking about? Please comment not just a list but their relation with this topic
The question that you are asking cannot be answered at this point in time other than with a 'No'. The literature quite clearly shows that the relationship between objective and subjective wellbeing is complex and non-linear. Moreover, the biological bases behind the determination of subjective wellbeing set-points are not at all yet even close to well understood. Until science demonstrates through the use of brain imaging techniques and self-report measures that a strong relationship between certain brain structures/chemicals and self-reported happiness exists, you cannot predict happiness using 'objective measures' with any remote degree of certainty.
Absolutely Larry. I agree that neuroscience is making progress, but to my understanding, still quite far off. As a subjective wellbeing researcher, I am most interested in the genetically determined, stable, long term mood state (not emotion), that is at the heart of subjective wellbeing judgement. I am not so much interested in how peoples short term emotion states fluctuate in response to ongoing transactions with their environment. But how people generally feel most of the time and under normal circumstances at the most abstract and personal level - to me this is the heart of SWB.
A subjective something is by definition something that is looked at by a subject. This means that every other point of view is not subjective, or, it is subjective for another subject.
Thus, by definition the measure of something subjective requires the subject, and if the subject is not yourself, my best (and only bet) would be to let the subject measure. This translates in an explicit self-evaluation.
Every other third-person take on a measure of something subjective should be considered a measure of something else, objective, that can be correlated with the subjective assessment.
All this considering what Adrian Tomyn was saying about scientific evidence at the moment.
Larry, I agree wholeheartedly with your response to my point. My point was to stress that:
"Every [...] third-person take on a measure of something subjective should be considered a measure of something else, objective, that can be correlated with the subjective assessment." (cit. me)
...in the same way, if I understand correctly, in which you was stating that hte point is...
"...whether or to what extent people's self-reported emotions can be predicted from brain imaging. [...] Of course, we should not confuse the issue, even if and when we can measure them technologically with high degree of accuracy, by suggesting that therefore emotions exist in the external world in an objective sense." (cit. you)
What i'm on the edge about is your statement:
"No doubt, we will be working to a large extent with qualitative terms with regards to labeling emotions and the correspondence between our images and the emotions will have various degrees of inexact correlation, but we can nevertheless say that we are, to some extent and in some way measuring the emotions." (cit. you)
I think this demands a deeper discussion. I don't think what we are measuring are emotions. What we are measuring is some object (e.g. neural activity), the fact that this objects is subjectively felt as an emotion is nowhere to be seen in the brain-imaing. Unless of course one day we will be able to make a matching 1:1 correspondence between brain activity and subjective feeling. But limiting the discussion to the actual knowledge, I felle we are more "measuring some inexact correlate of emotions" than "measuring emotions to some extent".
This, I think, has mostly to do with the nature of emotion, or better, to what emotion means in my lexicon // to what emotion are defined as. If your description of an emotion accounts for the biological facts, than you're good with saying that you are measuring emotions to some extent. My definition of emotion is "whatever is felt as emotion", and seriously I can't think of anything better. At the very least, the subjective feeling seems to me the most peculiar part of the emotion, the "sine qua non" of the emotion. Of course there are (or seem to be) biological underpinnings, but what if we have the same neural activity (e.g.) and the emotion is not felt, as in a coma status? I don't think we can define that as an emotion.
By the way, I don't think our positions are mutually exclusive, since everything depends on definition: indeed, one can describe things with one definition, than shift to the more/less general definition and describe other facets, without necessarily changing completely topic.
Jose,
If you're looking into Eudaimonic well-being you should check out Alan Waterman and Carolyn Ryff. Waterman put forth a measurement tool called the Questionnaire for Eudaimonic Well Being (QWEB) and Ryff has a psychological well-being scale as well that has gone through some processes of validation.
I've attached a couple articles that might help you.
Good luck!
Article The Questionnaire for Eudaimonic Well-Being: Psychometric pr...
Article Psychometric Properties of the 44-Item Version of Ryff's Psy...
Chapter The Complementary Roles of Eudaimonia and Hedonia and How Th...
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