Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science

According to I. P. Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity, the establishment and dissolution of conditional reflexes enhances the higher organism’s adaptation to the external environment. Pavlov asserted that, ontogenetically, conditional reflexes are based upon innate, unconditional reflexes (UR) or instincts. Pavlov did not distinguish between URs and instincts, but he preferred the former term. Phylogenetically the URs emerged out of well-established conditional reflexes during the development of higher organisms. An outgrowth of the experimental conditioning procedure, developed during the second decade of this century, was the observation and delineation of new URs. While studying human nervous and psychiatric disorders in the 1930s, Pavlov elucidated other URs. Pavlov identified 13 major URs, but he failed to formulate an exhaustive classification scheme of URs.

Different from statistically analyzed self-reports of Subjective Well-Being (SWB), we explored how dialogue engenders the meaning of SWB as constituted through an individual’s daily experiences. A revised Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman et al. 2004) was used to describe the participants’ previous day episodically, followed by a semi-structured life world interview (Kvale 1996) for the explication through dialogue of those episodes. The results of qualitative analyses on the structure and contents of the discourse of the DRM and interviews with three participants highlighted the following: 1) the participants construed the meaning of daily experiences by organizing and weighting them in individualized ways; 2) the meaning of daily episodes emerged and was clarified in the process of collaborative dialogue in the interview as well as in the analyses, and was vividly expressed in particular protocol sequences; and 3) Kelly’s (1955) notion of Personal Construct is applicable to make sense of individualized narratives as a form of Well-Being. We concluded that the subjectivity of SWB does not merely imply the first-person authority in charge of the evaluation in the questionnaires, but rather is understood as a construct that reveals the personal meaning of one’s daily experiences. The emergent quality of this process is crucial for understanding the nature of subjectivity in SWB.