April, 2008

The main aim of my research is to contribute to the scientific understand of well-being (happiness). I define happiness as a life that matches one's own preferences, values, and ideals. The ultimate goal is to develop a causal theory of happiness that can be used to predict the impact of personal and societal changes on happiness, which will allow individuals and governments to maximize well-being (Schimmack, 2006).

Well-being can be assessed in many ways, and each measure of well-being is imperfect. In my research I follow Diener's (1984) approach to assess well-being in terms of two components: an affective component (amount of pleasure versus displeasure) and a cognitive component (a judgment of one's life, e.g., "I am satisfied with my life"). These two components tend to be highly related, but not identical (Schimmack, 2008). For example, unemployment has stronger effects on cognitive well-being than on affective well-being (Schimmack, Schupp, & Wagner, in press).

One active area of research is the influence of social relationships on well-being. One important finding has been that spouses have similar levels of well-being and that their well-being changes in the same direction over time (Schimmack & Lucas, 2007, Schimmack & Lucas, 2008). That is, if husbands' well-being increases, wives well-being also increases and vice versa. This finding shows that well-being is influenced by environmental factors that change over time. One of the main goals of my current research is to uncover the nature of these environmental factors and to examine the contribution of social relationships to well-being. For this purpose, my students and I are collecting data from married couples (Pinkus, Lockwood, Schimmack, & Fournier, in press), dating couples (Petrican & Schimmack, in press), friends (Walker & Schimmack, in press), roommates, and students and their parents.

Please visit my page with preprints and reprints for additional information about my research on these and other topics.