Lay Conceptions of Happiness: Associations With Reported Well-Being, Personality Traits, and Materialism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lay conceptions of happiness are beliefs about the nature, value, antecedents, and outcomes of happiness. Happiness research has largely focused on the levels, predictors, and outcomes of happiness, whereas conceptions of happiness have received less attention. This study sought to expand our understanding of these conceptions by examining a relatively large number of them (i.e., eudaimonism, inclusive happiness, externality of happiness, fear of happiness, transformative suffering, fragility of happiness, valuing happiness, and inflexibility of happiness), in samples from Korea and Canada. Five components of well-being (i.e., social well-being, psychological well-being, life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect), the Big Five personality traits, materialism, and demographic variables were measured in addition to conceptions of happiness. The results showed that conceptions of happiness predicted various components of well-being over and above personality traits and demographic variables. These conceptions contributed additional variance to the prediction of materialism. The conceptions were largely independent of personality traits, and there were gender and age differences in the conceptions of happiness. The results also suggest that two dimensions of "effortful virtuosity vs. doubtful pursuit" and "malleability vs. stability" are the underlying dimensions along which the conceptions of happiness vary. There were similarities and differences in the results for Korea and Canada. In sum, this study provides a relatively comprehensive and systematic exploration of the conceptions of happiness, their structure, nomological network, and their relevance to well-being research. It is hoped that these results will stimulate more research on lay conceptions of happiness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".