How do I know how I am doing? Use of different types of comparison in judgment of well-being in patients seeking psychological treatment and healthy controls.

Abstract

Judgment of well-being is formed on the spot, and we know little about its foundations. We aimed at examining the role of comparison standards in informing evaluations of well-being in a clinical and a nonclinical sample. In a semi-structured face-to-face interview, individuals seeking psychological treatment and healthy control individuals rated how they have been feeling in general and relative to specific comparison standards and were each time invited to substantiate their ratings. Independent coders assessed number, type, direction, and specificity of reported comparisons. When asked to explain why they chose a particular rating of their well-being, 93% of clinical participants and 61% of nonclinical participants spontaneously reported some type of comparison standard. Both groups reported highest well-being ratings relative to social and past temporal comparisons and lowest relative to prospective temporal comparison. Furthermore, clinical participants engaged in more upward than downward comparisons, whereas this was not the case for healthy control participants. Our findings suggest that evaluations of well-being are informed by different comparison types and that individuals with clinical complaints use more comparisons when evaluating their well-being. The results encourage further investigation of comparative thinking as an underlying mechanism of judgment of well-being and ill-being.