title: The concept of happiness: a multidimensional scaling investigation.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Arizona State University.
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Thomas
authors.forename: W A
authors.initials: WA
authors.lastname: Stock
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D008149:Love; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011594:Psychometrics; D012934:Social Isolation; D014936:Word Association Tests; D014937:Work