Do you think your claims would apply to broader measures of subjective wellbeing, e.g. questions like “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?” and “Overall, how happy were you yesterday?” (often on a 0-10 scale)? Or even to more specific measures of valenced experience, like depression (e.g. PHQ-9)?
Because I’ve been wondering whether:
(a) the Weber-Fechner law is limited to perception of clear physical stimuli (weight, pain, spicyness, etc), as distinct from ‘internal’ states and cognitive evaluations (though the internal/external distinction may not make sense here).
(b) a log scale is less useful/accurate when considering long periods of time (a day, a year, a lifetime), over which the variance in average wellbeing in a population will be lower than the variance in the intensity of specific events.
Thanks for this—very interesting.
Do you think your claims would apply to broader measures of subjective wellbeing, e.g. questions like “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?” and “Overall, how happy were you yesterday?” (often on a 0-10 scale)? Or even to more specific measures of valenced experience, like depression (e.g. PHQ-9)?
Because I’ve been wondering whether:
(a) the Weber-Fechner law is limited to perception of clear physical stimuli (weight, pain, spicyness, etc), as distinct from ‘internal’ states and cognitive evaluations (though the internal/external distinction may not make sense here).
(b) a log scale is less useful/accurate when considering long periods of time (a day, a year, a lifetime), over which the variance in average wellbeing in a population will be lower than the variance in the intensity of specific events.