SATISFACTION WITH LIFE AND HUMAN NEEDS FULFILLMENT

The two notions discussed in the paper are Life Satisfaction, under Subjective Well-Being (SWB) field; and Maslow hierarchy of human needs. Issue: Human needs satisfaction is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Individuals are not required to completely satisfy one need in order for the next need to appear in the hierarchy. Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the level of life satisfaction in relation to the difficulty and convenience of achieving human needs. Approach: Mann Whitney U-Tests were conducted to determine the mean of SWL across difficulty and convenient of fulfilling 24 human needs. These human needs are the necessities and life conditions commonly and widely struggled for. Findings: The ease with which the majority of human needs can be met increases life satisfaction significantly. The findings also revealed that for five human needs for which life satisfaction did not differ significantly, meeting these human needs was unlikely to influence life satisfaction. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs classified these needs as biological and physiological needs, safety and security needs, and esteem needs.

Fairness, effectiveness, and needs satisfaction: new options for designing climate policies

Financial compensations are often proposed to address regressive distributional impacts of carbon taxes. While financial compensations have shown to benefit vulnerable groups distributionally, little is known about their impacts on emission reduction or needs satisfaction. A potential problem with cash compensations is that if households spend this money back into the economy while no additional decarbonisation policies are implemented, emission reductions that arose from the tax may at least partly be reversed. In this letter, we compare the emission savings and impacts on fuel and transport poverty of two compensation options for carbon taxes in 27 European countries. The first option consists of equal per capita rebates for home energy and motor fuel taxes. The second option is the provision of universal green vouchers for renewable electricity and public transport, supported by additional investments in green infrastructures to meet increased demand for such green consumption. Results show that the first option of tax rebates only supports small emission reductions. In contrast, universal green vouchers with expanded green infrastructures would reduce home energy emissions by 92.3 MtCO2e or 13.4%, and motor fuel emissions by 177.5 MtCO2e or 23.8%. If green vouchers and infrastructure were provided without a prior tax, emission savings would be slightly lower compared to the ‘tax and voucher’ scheme, but fuel and transport poverty would drop by 4.1 and 2.2 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, taxes with rebates would increase fuel and transport poverty by 4.1 and 1.8 percentage points. These findings demonstrate that it is important to take environmental and energy poverty impacts of compensations for unfair distributional impacts of climate policies into account at the design stage. Such compensation measures can achieve higher emission reductions and reduce energy poverty if they involve an expansion of the provision of green goods and services, and if everyone is given fair access to these goods and services.

Educational usage of Facebook and academic achievement in distance university students: Mediated by basic needs satisfaction

Facebook has been widely used among students, not only for socializing, but also for educational purposes. However, it is much less clear whether educational usage of Facebook would be beneficial for student academic achievement, especially in distance education. This paper examined whether different types of educational usage of Facebook would be differentially connected with academic achievement of distance university students. Unlike previous studies, we distinguished between the quantity and the quality of educational usage of Facebook: The former is concerned with time spent, while the latter includes three types of educational utilities offered by Facebook (communication, collaboration, and resource sharing). Taking a self-determination theory perspective, we also examined whether the connection between different types of educational usage of Facebook and academic achievement would be mediated by basic needs satisfaction in distance study. A total of 274 distance university students participated in an online survey. A path analysis demonstrated that different types of educational usage of Facebook and academic achievement were not directly associated. However, a mediation analysis showed that competence need satisfaction (and no other needs) fully mediated some linkages: time spent to achievement, communication to achievement, and resource sharing to achievement. Findings and implications of this paper are discussed.

The cities we need: Towards an urbanism guided by human needs satisfaction

This article proposes moving beyond the tyranny of economic imperatives towards a human needs-based framework to assess cities and envision their development. Existing calls for such a transition lack a foundation able to capture the various dimensions of human life in cities, which can be provided by the concept of human needs. We ask whether cities deliver satisfiers that make them good places to cater for the full range of human needs in a similar way to how they cater for economic needs. The article develops a framework that allows us to address that question. We show how the main debates in human needs theory are illustrated by urban phenomena, and search for a human needs model which is able to advance those debates and tackle the problem specifically in cities. Then we highlight the specifically urban aspects of needs satisfaction processes and construct a table of indicators to assess how cities fare in that respect, ensuring global comparability as to whether, as well as local contextualisation as to how, needs are satisfied.

Bridging the Gap Between Product Design and Customer Engagement: Role of Self-Determined Needs Satisfaction

This study aims at exploring the influence of product design on customer engagement through self-determined needs satisfaction. This study used the survey method in three ways: (1) mall intercept approach, (2) email survey, and (3) survey through Wechat. The sample was collected from 500 customers of electronic products living in Xi’an, China. The data analysis is done through structural equation modeling. Findings show that perceived product design in terms of functional, esthetic, and symbolic design is positively related to self-determined needs (autonomy, relatedness, competence) satisfaction. Furthermore, results reveal that self-determined needs satisfaction has a positive influence on customer engagement. The moderation results show that prevention focused customers moderate the relationship between functional design and self-determined needs satisfaction. Whereas, promotion focused customers moderate the relationship between esthetic design and self-determined needs satisfaction. This study adds value to the self-determination theory by examining the link between product design dimensions and customer engagement through self-determined needs satisfaction. Furthermore, this study adds value to the existing literature on regulatory focus theory.