Overcoming positivity tendencies in life satisfaction assessment

Positive subjective life satisfaction ratings (as often observed), in spite of the proven reliability and validity of the scales, must not be misinterpreted as absence of negative hedonic experience (what Cummings and Nistico, 2002, would call a positivity bias). Accordingly, Ponocny et al. (2015b) confirmed a tendency that persons rate themselves as happy and satisfied with their lives even if they report major, in part even extreme restrictions of their well-being. Seemingly, having no impairment of mood and coping with such kind of impairments is in part not covered by standard single-items about life satisfaction. In particular, when prematurely interpreting life satisfaction serl-ratings, then coping, resilience and also the commitment to certain kinds of burden (obligations) would be insufficiently mapped and lead to an underestimation of negative circumstances in a population. As a consequence, an alternative rating scheme was developed (NWB) on the basis of life narratives which addresses the mentioned issues more explicitly. However, it has not been applied to self-ratings yet. The study submitted shall close this gap and compare NWB distributions with the outcomes of standard single-item measures of life satisfaction – we expect a much more explicit description of a population’s hedonic impairments than by usual methodology. Additionally, it shall be investigated how much persons shift from hedonic benchmarks to rather eudaimonic ones in case of burden, which is important since – according to previous results – life satisfaction ratings may less describe living conditions but how people judge their life given their living conditions. The outcomes of this study shall help find better ways of describing restrictions to (subjective) well-being and avoid underreporting of what actually impairs people’s lives.