Research pick: Can you get no satisfaction? - "Life-satisfaction is more a matter of feeling well than having what you want. Tests of Veenhoven’s theory"

A paper from The Netherlands found, through tests of Veenhoven’s theory, that life- satisfaction is more about feeling well than having what you want. The researches assessed individual’s satisfaction with their lives, as a whole, using two information sources: How well we feel most of the time and to what extent life has brought us what we want from it. The paper focuses on how much an individual likes their own lives.

It highlights the debate surrounding the nature of happiness and weightings of affective experience (need-theory) and the success of meeting wants (comparison theory). Overall, the research fits the theory that life satisfaction draws first on affective experience, that individuals will draw on the experiences they have rather than how well they meet their wants in life.

Kainulainen, S., Saari, J. and Veenhoven, R. (2018) ‘Life-satisfaction is more a matter of feeling well than having what you want. Tests of Veenhoven’s theory’, Int. J. Happiness and Development, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp.209–235.