Relating Sensory, Cognitive, and Neural Factors to Older Persons’ Perceptions about Happiness: An Exploratory Study

Table 4

Name things that make people happy: comparison of response patterns by gender, vision, and hearing status.

Domains of SWB	Gender			Vision			Hearing
	Male	Female	p^a	Nml	Abn	p^a	Nml	Abn	p^a
Social relationships	86.54	96.77	0.04	89.89	100.0	0.10	86.27	96.83	0.04
Material wealth	65.38	48.39	0.07	59.55	44.00	0.17	56.86	55.56	0.89
Physical activity	40.38	53.23	0.17	44.94	56.00	0.33	54.90	41.27	0.15
Accomplishments	32.69	33.87	0.89	37.08	20.00	0.11	31.37	34.92	0.69
Religion	21.15	17.74	0.21	19.10	20.00	0.92	15.69	22.22	0.38
Health factors	15.38	16.13	0.91	15.73	16.00	0.97	15.69	15.87	0.98
Volunteerism/altruism	7.69	16.13	0.17	11.24	16.00	0.52	7.84	15.87	0.19
Avocation/hobbies	84.62	90.32	0.36	84.27	100.0	0.03	92.16	84.13	0.19
Ingestibles	73.08	54.84	0.04	64.04	60.00	0.71	66.67	60.32	0.48
Special events	32.69	41.94	0.31	40.45	28.00	0.26	50.98	26.98	<0.01
Nature	44.23	56.45	0.19	52.81	44.00	0.44	58.82	44.44	0.13
Positive emotion	34.62	29.03	0.52	28.09	44.00	0.13	35.29	28.57	0.44
Vision-dependent tasks	69.23	79.03	0.23	69.66	92.00	0.02	80.39	69.84	0.20

SWB, subjective well-being; Nml, normal; Abn, abnormal. ^a values for the comparison of the proportion of individuals in each group who listed any response in that domain (by two-tailed t-test). Due to multiple comparisons in this exploratory analysis, our alpha error threshold for statistical significance was set at .