The structure of psychological well-being

Preface Sir Isaiah Berlin has observed that there are deep differences in the ways in which people approach life, and that it may be useful to think of these ways as falling into two large groups-the way of the hedgehog and the way of the fox. Hedgehogs approach problems in an integrative manner, trying to bring everything into a single, universal, organizing principle that gives unity to the manifest diversities of life. Foxes, on the other hand, approach problems in a differentiating manner and pursue many disparate problems with little concern for haw they fit together or might fit into a larger integrated whole. Hedgehogs look for the unity in diversity; foxes look for the diversity that underlies the unity. In the field of mental health, the split between hedgehogs and foxes roughly parallels that between theorists and empiricists. The grand theorists such as Freud and Jung were militant hedgehogs. However, a review of the empirical literature in mental health, such as that by Jahoda (1958), shows the field to be dominated by foxes. This unfortunate split between hedgehog-theorists and fox-empiricists has resulted in unifying theories that dangerously approach explaining everything, and thus explaining nothing, or in disparate empirical findings that do not add up to anything. Too often theories are divorced from data, and data are collected with little regard for their theoretical import. This book is a hedgehog's attempt to bridge that gap and pursue systematic data collection within the framework of a single unifying concept. This concept-psychological well-being, or happiness has been of great concern to men since recorded history began and has been the object of vast amounts of thought and research for centuries. It is a logical concept to employ in the study of phenomena related to current concerns with mental health and mental illness, and one that is very congenial to the hedgehog mind. The particular conception of psychological well-being that is elaborated in this monograph emerges from a pilot study conducted by NORC (Bradburn and Caplovitz. 1965), which vi Preface attempted to develop instruments for measuring mental health in the population. Analysis of the data from that study led to a conceptualization of psychological well-being as a resultant of two almost completely unrelated dimensions of affect, which we called positive and negative feelings. The results of that study were sufficiently encouraging to suggest that further research along these lines would be productive. At …