City Research Online

Abstract

Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is a self-reported construct of wellbeing including components like life satisfaction, and positive and negative affect. We explore the role of physical pain in the construct of SWB using data from the Global Flourishing Study (22 countries, N = 187,160) and the Gallup World Poll (163 countries, N = 2,048,494). Consistent with the existing understanding of physical pain, we document that people can experience negative affect-related pain in the absence of physical health problems, and with near perfect physical health. We also find that the current components of SWB are not perfect proxies for pain and that physical pain and other components of negative affect like stress, worry, anxiety, anger, and sadness load on the same factor in principal component factor analysis. Based on this empirical evidence, we suggest that physical pain can be included in the construct of SWB as a component of negative affect. This proposition has the potential to advance the field in the coming decades by providing a better understanding of people’s wellbeing, presenting alternative methods to measure SWB, and informing the design of wellbeing interventions.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Subjective wellbeing (SWB), Life satisfaction, Physical pain, Negative affect, Stress, Physical health
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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