The concept of happiness: a multidimensional scaling investigation

This study investigated the concept of happiness using multidimensional scaling analyses. Two samples were studied. The first contained 100 adult males and females, aged nineteen to ninety (M = 39.5). The second contained 126 female adults, aged twenty-six to eighty-nine (M = 61.3), all Catholic nuns. Respondents provided word associates to the words happiness and unhappiness during separate one-minute intervals. Subsequently, the twelve most frequent associates and the word happiness were used in a written paired comparison task of dissimilarities between all possible pairs. In both samples, a two-dimensional space was judged to optimally fit the data. The first dimension was interpreted as a bipolar affective dimension. The second dimension was one-fifth and one-third as salient as the first dimension in the respective samples, and was interpreted as representing personal independence. Two-dimensional spaces of young, middle-aged, and old subsamples of sample one were, in large part, similar to the total space. Three age trends were noted.