 34. Personality and Subjective Well‑Being 729
ies, participants reported much higher levels 
of life satisfaction when exposed to positive 
mood manipulations (e.g., writing about a 
positive life event, completing the survey on 
a day with pleasant weather) than when ex -
posed to negative mood manipulations. Yap 
et al. (2017) used much larger samples than 
the originals and found evidence for only 
small (at best) effects of mood manipulation 
procedures on life satisfaction judgments. 
These results are consistent with more natu -
ralistic studies showing that contextual fac -
tors such as current mood have only a very 
small influence on well-being judgments that 
theoretically should be stable (Eid & Diener, 
2004). Together, these studies suggest that 
although people may be influenced by tran -
sient and irrelevant contextual information, 
these effects are quite small.
Although the evidence reviewed above 
suggests that global self-  reports of subjective 
well-being have relatively strong psychomet -
ric properties, this does not mean that alter -
native approaches to measurement do not 
have value. One method that has received 
increasing attention over the years is to rely 
on approaches that tap more experiential  
forms of well-being. For instance, experi -
ence sampling measures (Stone, Shiffman, & 
DeVries, 1999) assess participants’ emotions 
repeatedly throughout the day, and day re -
construction methods (Kahneman, Keueger, 
Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) ask par -
ticipants to reconstruct their activities and 
feelings from a prior day. The idea is that 
when asked about very recent events, par -
ticipants will be able to accurately remember 
and report on their feelings. Although such 
measures are face valid and appear to ad -
dress limitations of global measures, much 
less research has been conducted on their 
psychometric properties. What research has 
been conducted suggests that these measures 
may not correspond as well to alternative 
measures, such as informant reports, as do 
traditional global measures (Anusic, Lucas, 
& Donnellan, 2017; Hudson, Anusic, Lucas, 
& Donnellan, 2020). Additional research is 
needed, however, that pits the two types of 
measures against one another when predict -
ing relevant criteria.
In summary, evidence to date suggests 
that self-  report measures of SWB are reli -
able and valid, sensitive to external circum -stances, and responsive to change. They cor -
relate with additional self-  report measures 
and with non-self-  report measures and crite -
ria. Finally, they prospectively predict theo -
retically relevant behaviors and outcomes, 
which indicates that they can be useful in 
both research and practice. It is true that 
there may be times when contextual factors 
influence these judgments, but we are aware 
of no research that suggests that such con -
textual effects have a large impact on the 
validity of the measures. Thus, researchers 
can be confident that SWB can be assessed 
well with standard self-  report measures. 
That being said, we also believe that the 
self- report does not provide a “gold stan -
dard”; thus, alternative techniques should 
be used when possible. Experience sampling 
techniques (Scollon, Kim-  Prieto, & Diener, 
2003) or other self-  report procedures that 
do not require memory for, and aggrega -
tion across, numerous events can help. In 
addition, non-self-  report measures, includ -
ing informant reports, psychophysiological 
measures, textual analysis, and other novel 
techniques, can provide important informa -
tion about the extent to which a person’s life 
is going well.
Evidence for  the Importance of  Personality
After decades of research on SWB, research -
ers arrived at what, to some, seemed like a 
startling conclusion: The most important 
factor in determining a person’s happiness 
appears to be the personality with which he 
or she is born. Evidence for this conclusion 
comes from at least four lines of research. 
First, studies of objective life circumstances 
(including factors such as a person’s income, 
age, education level, doctor-  rated health, 
and social relationships) appeared to show 
that associations with such factors tended to 
be quite small. Second, SWB is moderately 
(approximately 50%) heritable, which means 
that some inborn factors are at work. Third, 
SWB is stable over time, even in the face of 
changing life circumstances. And finally, 
when effect sizes are compared directly, cor -
relations with personality traits tend to be 
much larger than correlations with exter -
nal circumstances. This evidence has been 
interpreted to mean that happiness cannot 