Concurrent Assessments of Individuals’ Affect and Contentment and the Correlation of these Estimates to Overall Happiness at Specific Moments

A rich variety of concepts are used in the field of happiness research. Happiness often overlaps with concepts such as subjective well-being (SWB) and life satisfaction. These concepts are measured by countless different metrics. Comparing the results of studies is complicated by differences in both conceptual and empirical measurement. According to many theories and studies, the most important factors in the estimation of life satisfaction are affect and contentment. However, the relationship of these components to happiness or life satisfaction is not clear. This article evaluates the relationships of these components with life satisfaction. The data have been collected over the last ten years from Finland in different ways and in different populations. There are seven datasets (N = 20,855). Based on the results, affect systematically explains more about the variance of life satisfaction than contentment, but the difference between these correlations is small.