Meditation as an adjunct to a happiness enhancement program

Personal adjustment to aging as measured by scales from the Chicago Attitude Inventory (CAI) was examined longitudinally in a community-dwelling sample of 557 men aged 17 to 97. Concurrent and predictive relations between this age-appropriate measure of well-being and personality were examined by correlating the CAI variables with three factors from the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey identified as Neuroticism, Extraversion, and "Thinking Introversion." As hypothesized, Neuroticism was related negatively and Extraversion was related positively to most concurrent measures of well-being in both younger and older subsamples. "Thinking Introversion" was related only to positive attitudes toward religion. Predictive correlations between personality and subjective well-being over two-to-ten (M = 5.3) and ten-to-seventeen (M = 12.6) year intervals confirmed earlier research, and showed that enduring personality disposition antedate and predict measures of personal adjustment to aging.

This research concerns the relation of subjective control and happiness within normal daily experience. Respondents from several nonclinical samples rated their feelings of control at randomly-selected moments during a week in their lives, following the procedures of the Experience Sampling Method. Analyses consider the relation of these ratings to similar ratings of affective states, first, within persons and, second, between persons. The within-person analyses show relatively little moment-to-moment correlation of subjective control and affective states. For many persons there is no correlation at all and on the average people report feeling only slightly more happy at times when feeling in control. The between-persons analyses yield findings that are more in line with explanations of subject control, showing that individuals reporting higher average daily control also experience greater average happiness. The results confirm that a generalized sense of control is important to well being in daily life, but for nondisturbed individuals short-term experiences of discontrol are not accompanied by substantial distress.