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.
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