Abstract
Happiness, or subjective well-being, was measured on a birth-record-based sample of several thousand middle-aged twins using the Well-Being (WB) scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire Neither socioeconomic status, educational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance in WB From 44% to 52% of the variance in WB, however, is associated with genetic variation Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins after intervals of 4 5 and 10 years, we estimate that the heriability of the stable component of subjective well-being approaches 80%
Keywords
HappinessPsychologySocioeconomic statusVariance (accounting)PersonalityDevelopmental psychologyScale (ratio)Sample (material)Educational attainmentSocial psychologyMarital statusExplained variationWell-beingDemographyStatistics
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Publication Info
- Year
- 1996
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 186-189
- Citations
- 1674
- Access
- Closed
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Cite This
David T. Lykken,
Auke Tellegen
(1996).
Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon.
Psychological Science
, 7
(3)
, 186-189.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb00355.x