PERSONALITY & WELL-BEING RESEARCH
Investigating the habits, behaviors, and decisions which can increase well-being
TWO AREAS OF FOCUS
HAPPINESS
AND
WELL-BEING
FINANCIAL CHOICES,
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR,
AND EMPLOYEE BEHAVIOR
This area of research has focused on exploring the important predictors of subjective well-being, such as personality.
Our research also explores Positive Activity Interventions with the aim of understanding how to prolong hedonic adaptation and create lasting happiness. Hedonic adaptation can be understood as the tendency of us mere humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major recent positive or negative events or life changes.
We are also beginning to explore and expand the measurement of happiness through the use of peer-reports, implicit associations, sentiment analysis (including on Facebook and Twitter), and facial coding.
This area of research has focused on determining the relations among wealth, experiential consumption, and subjective well-being.
Concerning consumption, we have found that people derive more happiness from experiential purchases as compared to material purchases of equal value. Much of this reality has been found to be linked to the fact that experiences foster people's feelings of relatedness (among many other mediators).
Concerning consumers, experientialists report increased well-being as well as greater psychological need satisfaction compared to materialists. In regards to employee research, we are quite focused on utilizing organizational commitment research as lens to view, understand, and impact attrition rates.