in Psychological Science

Happiness, or subjective well-being, was measured on a birth-record-based sample of several thousand middleaged tvuns using the Well-Being (WB) stale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire Neither soctoeconomic status, edu( ational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance m WB From 44% to 52% of the xariance in WB, however, is associated with genetic variation Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins after intervals of 4 5 and 10 years, we estimate that the heritability of the stable component of subjective nell-bemg approaches 80% Happiness depends as Nat suppose e shows less on extei Are those people who go to work in suits happier and more fulfilled than those who go in overalls'* Do people higher on the socioeconomic ladder enjoy life more than those lower down** Can money buy happiness'' As a consequence of racism and live poverty, are black Amencans less contented on average than white Amencans'' Because men still hold the reins of power, are men happier than women'' The survey in this journal by Myers and Diener (1995) mdicated that the answer to these questions, surpnsmgly. is "no " These authors pointed out that people have a remarkable ability to adapt, both to bad fortune and to good, so that one's life circumstances, unless they are y bad indeed, do not seem to have lasting effects on one s mood Yet some people do seem to be happier on average than other people are Although people adapt surpnsmgly quickly to both good news and bad. the set point around which happiness 'anes from time to time apparently differs from one person to mother Myers and Diener considered personal relationships, religious faith, and the "flow" of working toward achievable goals as possible determiners of individual differences in the happiness set point We had already collected demographic and questionnaire data on a large sample of adults, and it seemed appropnate to try to replicate and perhaps extend some of Myers and Diener's findings The Minnesota Twin Registry (Lykken. Bouchard. McGue. & Tellegen. 1990) is a birth-record-based registry of middle-aged twins bom in Minnesota lTom 1936 to 1955 We know how far these twins went in school, their approximate family income, their mantal status, and their socioeconomic status (SES). based on their occupations These twins provide an unusually representative sample of the white population (dunng the 20 birth years searched, fewer than 2% of Minnesota births were to Afncan or Native Amencans) Some of the twins Address correspondence to David Lykken. Department of Psychology. University of Minnesota. Minneapolis MN 5S4SS-0344 did not reach the eighth grade, whereas others have doctorates, they hve on farms, in small towns, in big cities, and m foreign lands, their socioeconomic levels are representative of Minne sota-bom adults A self-rating questionnaire was administered to 2.310 men rs of this twin registry One of the questionnaire items read a Contentment Taking the good with the bad, how happy and contented are you on the average now compared with other people'' The twins were asked to make their ratings on a 5-point scale 1 = the lowest 5% of the population 2 = the lower 30%, 3 the middle 30%, 4 = the upper 30%, and 5 = the highest 5% Figure 1 shows that these seem to be contented people by and large and that the women are at least as happy as the men More than 86% of these twins rated themselves as among the upper 35% in overall contentment Most people (at least people born in Minnesota) believe that they are above average on most positive traits, but this pleasant illusion is strongest for the trait of contentment Only 42% of the twins in this sample rated themselves in the upper 35% on intelligence, for example We interpret these ratings to mean that most people are in fact reasonably happy most of the time One is tempted to speculate that natural selection tended to favor happy people because they were more likely to mate and raise children and thus to become our ancestors Figure 2 displays the mean contentment ratings for the twins in each of the seven categones of the Hollingshead and Redlich system for classifying socioeconomic status There is remarkably little reduction in self-rated contentment as one moves 1 the highest, or professional, category (SES = 1) down even to unskilled labor (SES = 6) and unemployed (SES = 7) Both of these findings corroborate Myers and Diener These results led us to examine a measure of happiness having better psychometnc properties than this single rating item The Well-Bemg (WB) scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ. Tellegen. 1982. Tellegen & WaUer. 1994) appears to be a reliable and valid measure of the condition that Its name denotes, the disposition to feel good about oneself and one's own comer of the world The 30-day retest reliability of the WB scale is 90. and its alpha reliability is 92 We have MPQ scores, corrected for age and sex and expressed in r-score units {M = 50. SD = 10). on 5.945 twins in the Minnesota Twin Registry Figure 3 shows the distnbution of MPQ-WB scores for the 2.486 twins from whom we also had contentment ratings For purposes of comparabihty with the ratings distnbution. Tscores for the WB distnbution were divided into five intervals <33. 186 Copyright © 19% Amencan Psychological Society VOL 7. NO 3. MAY 1996 PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE David Lykken and Auke Tellegen Fig 1 Contentment ratings by gender for 2,310 Minnesotabom twins Ratings are on a self-report scale from I {the lowest 5% of the population) to 5 (the highest 5%) 33^5, 46-54, 55-67, and >67, if the WB distnbution were normal, these categones would have frequencies of 5%, 30%, 30%, 30%, and 5%, respectively, the same percentages that were specified for ratings on the contentment scale As can be seen m the figure, the WB distribution is reasonably symmetrical, unlike the contentment self-ratings, presumably because the sum of the responses to the WB items measures variations in happiness around a mean value that represents a generally positive (rather than a negative or neutral) state of mmd Myers and Diener (1995) suggested that their definition of subjective well-being (SWB) includes both the "presence of positive affect" and the "absence of negative affect' (p II) There is indeed substantial evidence that positive and negative emotions do not behave as merely the opposite poles of the same continuum Positive and negative affect (PA and NA) emerge reliably as two largely independent superordinate state