Book reviews 585

The book makes very interesting reading and provides a good starting point for everyone inter-ested in a multidisciplinary approach to happiness studies. The various elements of the happinessjigsaw are identified and analyzed without excess technicalities (but it provides all the referencesfor more in depth studies). Layard’s recommendations to policy makers are challenging and willcertainly generate considerable debate in the economists’ community and hopefully beyond it.

Gianni De Robertis ∗KStudio Associato,1

via E. Petrolini no. 2, 00197Roma, Italy

∗ Tel.: +39 0680963563.E-mail address: G.De-Robertis@iname.com

1 The views expressed in this review are those of the author anddo not necessarily reflect those of KStudio Associato.

doi: 10.1016/j.socec.2005.06.004

D. Kahneman, E. Deiner, N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-being: The Foundations of HedonicPsychology, New York Russell Sage Foundation, New York (594 pp., Price?, ISBN 087154423-7 (paper) 4–5 (cloth)).

This is an excellent book. Kahneman, Deiner and Schwartz are eminent academics in this areaand their book offers a fine summation of the state of the art, drawing together work from social,cognitive, economic, personality and neurological perspectives into a weighty 28 chapters. Thetext is aimed at the serious academic, and yet the subject matter is of such interest and the stylelargely accessible enough to appeal to the practitioner, policy maker and interested lay reader. Ityou want a solid grasp of Hedonics this is the book to get.

Hedonic psychology refers to the science of what makes life pleasant and unpleasant, satisfyingand unsatisfying, from the biological, through the psychological to the societal. It represents partof a movement within psychology and the applied social sciences more broadly to shift attentionfrom fixing what’s wrong to studying what works and makes people feel good. In economicsthere is a related shift from a focus on hard measures to increasing concern with developing softermeasures including the quality of life.

The chapters here are authored primarily by US and European psychologists. The book isdivided into five sections on I—conceptual and methodological issues, II—mood and emotion,III—personality and individual differences, IV—the social context and V—biological perspec-tives.

The first section charts some of the difficulties of measuring subjective well-being, and itsdifferences from objective well-being. It includes chapters by Kahneman on objective happiness,Stone et al. on momentary assessment, Fredrikson on emotional measurement and Schwartz andStrack on mood and judgement and subjective well-being, and Lowenstein on future predictions.Many estimates of subjective well-being and life satisfaction have been gleaned from global reportsof life-satisfaction with life. Global measures do not necessarily show much correspondence withdomain specific measures. A common psychologically accepted measure of subjective well-beingis global life satisfaction and level of positive affect minus level of negative affect. Psychologists

586 Book reviews

also question how reliable people’s estimates are of their past or future satisfaction. The answerseems to be not very, and indeed people’s future predictions lack the accuracy that economicmodels tend to assume. Interest is increasing in successive momentary measures of well-being,obtained for example from experience sampling, where people are buzzed at random intervalsand asked to record what they are doing and how they are feeling.

The second section describes emotions and begins to chart the biology of mood systems. Itincludes contributions from Rozin on pleasure, Kubovy on the role of the mind, Eich et al. onpain, Morrison the mood system and Frijda on hedonic experience.

The third section discusses various psychological factors notably personality. A large amountof the variance in levels of subjective well-being can be attributed to personality differencesthat persist over the life course. This leads to the suggestion that individuals have a set-pointfor happiness which varies considerably, with some individuals experiencing considerably morehappiness than others. Deiner and Lucas discuss the impact of personality on subjective well-being,Cantor and Sanderson the importance of involvement in life-tasks, Higgins et al. self-regulation,Berenbaum et al. emotional disturbance, Peterson personal control, Frederick and Lowensteinadaption, and Nolen-Hoeksema and Rustig gender differences.

The fourth section on the social context presents chapters by Argyle on the correlates ofhappiness, Myers on the importance of close relationships, Warr on well-being at work, Praagand Fritjers on the Leyden approach to measuring welfare and well-being, and Deiner and Suhon national differences in well-being. This section highlights the critical importance of socialembeddness to well-being. One consistent finding is that the correlation between global estimatesof quality of life and objective wellbeing are fairly low. Another interesting finding is that ratingsof time spent with friends tends to be higher than time with close family.

The fifth section begins to describe a biology of hedonics, discussing relevant hormonaland neurobiological pathways pertinent to motivational systems. This includes unhappiness(Sapolsky), appraisal (Ito and Cacioppo), the neurobiology of feelings (LeDoux and Armony),implications of brain stimulation reward (Shizgal), pleasure, pain, desire and dread (Berridge)and reinforcement, addiction and depression (Hoebel et al.). Pleasure and pain appear to be twoseparate systems, affected by different neurotransmitters. Self-reports of positive and negativeaffect also appear to be independent, showing relatively little co-variation.

Most chapters offer an excellent review of their area. Taken together we see a move from aninterest in simple measures of life satisfaction to more sophisticated multi-faceted measures andincreasing interest in measures of experience. The psychology of emotion has been elaboratedconsiderably in the last ten years. Work on personality has reinforced the view that the capacity forhappiness is normally partially determined by temperament. Social factors such as relationshipsconsistently show a positive relationship with well-being and we are just beginning to decipher thebiological pathways through which positive and negative experiences are mediated. This book hasmore psychology than economics but given the advances in the field, anyone with an interest in thisarea would do well to take account of the psychological, social and neurological developments.

In considering the relationship between objective and subjective reports of well-being onestriking finding is that though GDP has increased several times over since the middle of the lastcentury, measures of life satisfaction have remained more or less flat. We may strive for extramoney, but it does not seem to improve our sense of well-being very much. The policy implicationsof this work are considerable. In England the New Economics Foundation is one think tank thathas taken the well-being data on board in its policy initiatives. It is to be hoped that over thecoming decades economists will develop new measures of well-being that move beyond purelyobjective measurement of quality of life like GDP to take greater account of the other things that

Book reviews 587

appear to have considerable impact on people’s sense of well-being, like their close relationships,sense of purpose and belonging. Rapid progress is being made in the psychology and biology ofhedonics. Can economics follow suit?

Jane HenrySchool of Management, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

E-mail address: j.a.henry@open.ac.uk

doi: 10.1016/j.socec.2005.06.003