Optimism, Self-Esteem and Subjective Well-Being among Trainees under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan

Subjective well-being is an emerging field of research with important and broader implications for interventions. SWB is a broad category ofphenomenon that includes people's emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgments of life satisfaction. SWB, a psychological term has been used for happiness and is preferred due to the many connotations of the latter term. Within the literature, the terms are used interchangeably.The subjective well-being is the subjective judgment of how much people are happy with their own lives (Diener, Scollon, & Lucas, 2003). The SWB has an emotional (positive and negative affect), and a cognitive component (life satisfaction). The emotional component reflects the intensity and frequency with which people experience emotions. That is, individuals with high scores for positive affect live intense and frequent episodes of pleasure while subjects with high scores on negative affect have the same experience with episodes of displeasure (Watson, 2005). Levels of affection are stable over time (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005) and there is evidence that positive and negative affects are independent factors (Diener & Emmons, 1985). The cognitive component of SWB, life satisfaction, is the perception that the subjects have about satisfaction with their own lives (Diener, Lucas, & Oishi, 2005).Contentment has traditionally been conceptualized as an aspect of the broader constructs of subjective well-being and happiness. Within this conceptualization, contentment is viewed as the positive affective basis, along with joy, for more global well-being; one's experience ofpositive emotions (including contentment) contributes to one's subjective appraisal of happiness. Until recently, little research focused on the experience of positive emotions, like contentment, primarily due to the fact that relative to negative emotions, positive emotions are less discrete, fewer in number, and less obvious in terms of their adaptive functions. Happiness can be measured by contentment and contentment functions as an antidote to feeling, need, jealousy and miserliness. A content person will appreciate and be able to rejoice in other person's wealth or good fortune knowing that wealth is the fruit of previous goodkarma.There are number of correlates of subjective well-being i.e. personality, religiosity, social support, financial support, physical activity, health, age, education, intelligence (Abdel-Khalek & Singh, 2014; Singh & Singh, 2013; Singh & Singh, 2008; Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999; Diner & Suh, 1997; Schmutte & Ryff, 1997; Suh,Diener, F Wilson, 1967).Personality correlates of subjective well-beingSeveral theories propose that personality is closely related to SWB. Personality theorists using either the trait perspective or the psycho-biological perspective have also suggested that personality is critical to SWB. Early SWB researchers focused on identifying the external conditions that lead to satisfying lives. For example, in his influential article entitled Correlates of Avowed Happiness, Wilson (1967) catalogued the various demographic factors that were related to SWB measures. Yet after decades of research, psychologists came to realize that external factors often have only a modest impact on wellbeing reports (Diener et al., 1999). Demographic factors such as health, income, educational background, and marital status account for only a small amount of the variance in well-being measures. Research instead shows that SWB is fairly stable over time, that it rebounds after major life events, and that it is often strongly correlated with stable personality' traits. Thus, many researchers have turned their attention towards understanding the relations between personality and SWB.Optimism and subjective well- beingPsychological well-being is a multidimensional construct indicated by low levels of depression and negative affect and high levels of positive affect (Diener et al. …