Life satisfaction goes with pleasure and personal growth goes with interest: Further arguments for separating hedonic and eudaimonic well-being

Abstract

Some theories suggest that pleasure and interest are separable emotions, with distinct functions and phenomenology. This study proposes a functional model of well-being that draws on these insights. It argues that both pleasure and satisfaction are elements of hedonic well-being and that their main function is to reward goal achievement and to mentally signalize that the body is in homeostatic stability. In contrast, the main function of interest is to promote mental and physical growth, and to suppress hedonic tendencies of premature returns to a homeostatic balance during difficult strivings. The feeling of interest facilitates personal growth, and is thus an indicator of eudaimonic well-being. A follow-up study (N = 145 Norwegian students) gave empirical support to these assumptions. Life satisfaction predicted feelings of pleasantness while personal growth predicted feelings of interest. With a projective technique, it was further demonstrated that satisfaction produces pleasant stories, but not interesting stories.

Keywords:

• hedonic well-being
• eudaimonia
• life satisfaction
• personal growth
• pleasure, interest

Notes

1. Happiness is typically considered to be a less scientific term than well-being. But in this article we have found it convenient to use the two concepts interchangeably.

2. In more recent writings, Kahneman seems to have turned away from the strict objective happiness hypothesis (e.g., Kahneman, Schkade, Fischler, Krueger, & Krilla, 2010), but he still steers clear of a taxonomic distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic feeling states.

3. More recently, such measures are sometimes referred to as implicit techniques (Baumann & Scheffer, in press).