Love of Life as a New Construct in the Well-being Domain

Abstract

Love of life is defined as a generally positive attitude towards one's own life, a liking for it, and pleasurable attachment to it. The Love of Life Scale (LLS) was constructed by the author. It consists of 16 short statements with high internal consistency (α = .91) and temporal reliability (.81). Factor analysis yielded three high-loaded factors labeled Positive attitude towards life, Happy consequences of love of life, and Meaningfulness of life, with moderate interfactor correlations. The LLS had significant and positive correlations with the Oxford Happiness Inventory (Argyle, Martin, & Lu, 1995), optimism, self-esteem, hope, satisfaction with life, and extraversion. Therefore, the LLS received strong concurrent validational support in terms of these correlations. A factor analysis of the total scores on the LLS and the six other questionnaires yielded a general factor of well-being onto which the LLS loaded .78. The simultaneous multiple regression revealed that the best predictors of love of life were tapped by happiness, optimism, self-esteem, and hope. It was found that there was no gender difference on the LLS.