What does it take to be truly satisfied with life? A recent study from the University of Toronto Mississauga suggests that simply feeling good isn't sufficient - people also need to feel free.
"We found that autonomy, the sense that you're self-directed, predicted life satisfaction above and beyond what emotions explained," says study co-author Jason Payne.
"This research shows that people are not merely hedonists. They care a lot about whether they're free in a way that pleasant emotions don't replace, when they think about life satisfaction."
Payne completed the study, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology , as part of his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Ulrich Schimmack, a professor in U of T Mississauga's department of psychological and brain sciences.
Life satisfaction is a central component of what scientists call "subjective well-being" and most people call happiness. It's how individuals evaluate their own lives based on whatever factors they think are important.
There are two main views on how people derive life satisfaction. The first perspective says that life satisfaction is all about having more pleasant feelings and fewer unpleasant feelings. The other perspective says that pleasure isn't enough and people need to meet certain psychological needs to be happy.
In their study, Payne and Schimmack put the two perspectives to the test by exploring three psychological needs that other researchers have put forward as crucial to well-being: relatedness, or feeling close to others; competence, or feeling effective and capable; and autonomy.
"In a lot of happiness or well-being studies, researchers ask questions that are aligned with one or the other theory," says Payne, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at B.C.'s Simon Fraser University.
"There was a gap where no one was looking at the impacts of both feeling good and meeting psychological needs on life satisfaction judgments."
The researchers surveyed more than 1,200 adults from Canada and the United Kingdom about their overall life satisfaction. They then measured respondents' positive and negative emotions and sense of relatedness, competence and autonomy. In all cases, respondents considered their past four weeks when selecting their answers.
Finally, the researchers used advanced statistical modelling to disentangle each of these influences and see how much each of them affected life satisfaction.
"As expected, people who felt good more often and bad less often tended to rate their lives more highly," says Payne. "The surprising finding was that autonomy contributed something to life satisfaction that feelings alone could not explain."
Relatedness and competence, on the other hand, didn't predict life satisfaction on their own. "They only seemed to matter for life satisfaction because they made people feel good, suggesting that those factors are interchangeable with other pleasant experiences."
As for the practical value of this new knowledge, the researchers say there are lessons at both the individual and societal level.
"There is not one happiness," says Schimmack. "Everybody has to define for themselves what their personal conception of happiness is."
While the findings confirm that feelings are an important guide to know whether our lives are good, they show that feelings shouldn't be followed blindly.
"This is where autonomy comes in," says Schimmack. "Freedom adds to happiness over pleasure and displeasure. Making a choice to suffer can add to happiness if it's freely chosen."
He says going to the gym is an example.
When it comes to developing public policy, Schimmack says the research supports the creation of liberal societies where everybody is free to pursue their own version of happiness.
Similarly, Payne says programs designed to improve well-being shouldn't involve any form of coercion.
"Policymakers need to be mindful not only of potential outcomes, but of whether people feel they're free to choose the path to those outcomes," he says.
Ultimately, Payne says the study highlights that no one theory on satisfaction entirely fits everyone.
"It speaks to the complexity of human well-being," he says. "And it's important to have some humility about that."
