The authors look at the question of subjective well being in psychology. Psychologists have been investigating happiness and subjective well-being since at least 1967 when W. Wilson's published an overview of the topic. The contemporary authors acknowledge past efforts but offer an alternative approach that emphasizes a wider range of inner factors and how they interact with external circumstances. The authors also seek to move away from explaining subjective well-being based on demographic data, like gender, age, socio-economic background etc. and to focus more on basic processes and psychological factors. The authors wish to look at certain "adaptive" processes such as habituation and coping methods in order to illuminate how these processes operate to produce subjective well-being. In the end, the authors seek a more rigorous understanding of subjective well-being that will allow them to make robust predictions and theories based on knowing its components and their causal operations. (Zach Rowinski 2004-08-01)