What are the Differences between Happiness and Self-Esteem

Beyond self-report in the study of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being: Correlations with acquaintance reports, clinician judgments and directly observed social behavior

“…SHS has demonstrated good psychometric properties such as test-retest reliability, discriminant validity, and convergent validity (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999;Mattei & Schaefer, 2004). This scale has also been used in many prior studies of happiness (Lyubomirsky & Ross, 1999;Lyubomirsky, Tkach, & DiMatteo, 2006;Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006).…”

“…subjective well-being, positive affect, and low negative affect) and eudaimonic well-being (e.g., psychological well-being), are related to positive outcomes in work life, social relationships, health, perceptions of self and others, sociability and activity, likeability and cooperation, prosocial behavior, physical well-being and coping, and creativity and problem solving. For example, self-reported extraversion has been found to be highly correlated with positive affect (Costa & McCrae, 1980;Headey & Wearing, 1989;Lucas, Diener, Grob, Suh, & Shao, 2000), negative affect (Costa & McCrae, 1980;Headey & Wearing, 1989), Subjective Happiness (Lyubomirsky, Tkach, & DiMatteo, 2006), satisfaction with life (Diener & Seligman, 2002;Schimmack, Oishi, Furr, & Funder, 2004), and other measures of happiness (Bradburn, 1969;Brebner, Donaldson, Kirby, & Ward, 1995;Costa, McCrae, & Norris, 1981). However, most of these studies examined personality traits using a measure of the Big Five (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience) and all relied upon self-reports.…”

The relationship between happiness and health: Evidence from Italy

“…The quality of relationships with friends has been found to be strongly associated with happiness (Baldassarre et al 1984;Hussong 2000;Diener and Seligman 2002;Demir and Weitenkamp 2007;Lyubomirsky et al 2006;Demir et al 2007b;Fiorillo 2010). Drawing on a sample of 222 undergraduate students, Diener and Seligman (2002) find that the subjective rating of relationships with close friends is the best predictor of happiness.…”

Estimating the influence of life satisfaction and positive affect on later income using sibling fixed effects

“…Happiness has various correlates such as health (10), social networks (11), and self-esteem (12) that, in turn, are known to positively influence labor market outcomes and that may thus play a mediating role. More recent neuroscientific research provides clues that greater subjective well-being is associated with particular neurological variation, which, in turn, is associated with improved cognitive skills and economic outcomes.…”

“…However, unlike previous longitudinal studies of the effect of subjective well-being on later socioeconomic outcomes and life events (17)(18)(19)(20)(21), the richness of the dataset used here allows us to incorporate a measure of self-esteem that is surveyed at the same time as positive affect and life satisfaction. Self-esteem is a psychological construct distinct from happiness (12) and is an important driver of labor market outcomes (30). As such, it is an important variable to control for in a study of the effect of happiness on later outcomes because not doing so may otherwise bias the coefficients obtained on happiness (results in Table 2 indicate that self-esteem and subjective well-being have similarly significant effects on later earnings).…”