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Nominator: Phlsph7 (talk · contribs) 13:09, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Urchincrawler (talk · contribs) 20:17, 7 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I'm going to be reviewing your article. I made a few minor edits for things like WP:SCAREQUOTES. I will continue to check for issues and publish my final review on this page.

Hello Urchincrawler and thanks for taking the time to review this article! Phlsph7 (talk) 09:11, 8 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I'm currently going through the article and here are some concerns I have about the article's writing since some things are written in a way that could be confusing or not ideal. This comment may seem long, but it's mostly me picking out the specific potential issues. The article seems otherwise mostly solid thus far. Here is what feedback I have so far. No major issues, but a few areas for minot improvements to clarity, lay person language, etc.

"these factors can be assessed and quantified from an external perspective. They include personal, social, economic, and environmental aspects such as health, education, income, housing, leisure, and security."

Since this is describing objective measures, it would help to add what is being quantified. Health, income, and housing are pretty intuitive, but specifying how leisure and education are measured objectively as it relates to wellbeing would be helpful. Perhaps "access to education" or "level of education" instead of just education and "amount of leisure time" instead of just leisure.

Good idea, I made the examples more concrete. Many of these factors are discussed in more detail in the section "Components and contributing factors". Phlsph7 (talk) 10:50, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would also rephrase this slightly, "It [mental health] involves the absence of disorders and disturbances, together with the abilities to cope with challenging situations, maintain positive relationships, and cultivate personal growth." What is meant by "disturbances"? Does this refer to traumatic events or something else? I would also change absence to "absence and management" since some people have lifelong chronic mental disorders but can still take measures to achieve psychological well-being such as medication.

I added the part about management of disorders. The term disturbances is used here in a rather general sense to express a lack of internal balance, indicating that you don't need a mental disorder to be miserable. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:50, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"According to a common view, the value of each episode of pleasure and pain depends only on its intensity and duration."

The "according to a common view" seems like weasel words (see WP: WEASEL). Commonly held is a vague description. Who is this view commonly held by? Is it commonly held by most of the world population? How do you know it's commonly held?

I added the technical terms for these positions. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:50, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Desire theories have some overlap with hedonism because people desire pleasure and the satisfaction of desires is typically pleasurable. However, people want various other goods besides pleasure, and desire theorists emphasize the diversity of desires and the individual differences from one person to another."

I would change "However, people want..." to "Desire theorists believe people want goods for reasons beyond pleasure..." or something similar. Whether or not wellbeing is based on pleasure or a want for more is believed by different groups (as your previous section on hedonism goes over.) The current wording to me came off as support for desire theory over hedonist theory, which would not be a neutral point of view. "However" should also be avoided per WP:WTW (words to watch). There are multiple instances of "However" in the article. While this is fine sometimes, it seems a few uses were unnecessary and may cause unintentional tone issues. Combing through and removing a few would help.

I reformulated the expression to avoid this concern. The term "however" usually indicates that there is a contrast between what comes before and what comes after. As I interpret MOS:EDITORIAL, the point is not that making readers aware of genuine contrasts is a problem in encyclopedic tone but to avoid inventing false contrasts unsupported by reliable sources. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:50, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would also simplify these couple sentences: "Pleasure and pain are commonly seen as symmetric phenomena that counterbalance each other. According to this view, the disvalue of an episode of intense pain can be annulled by the value of an episode of intense pleasure." I'm unsure how many lay readers would understand symmetric phenomena. Perhaps something like, "Pleasure and pain are often thought of as balancing forces to one another. In this view, the harm that intense pain inflicts on one's wellbeing is cancelled out by intense pleasure." I hope I'm not underestimating lay readers, but I've never seen "disvalue" used commonly.

I tried to reformulate these sentence to make them more accessible. I replaced the term "disvalue" with "negative value". Phlsph7 (talk) 10:50, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Emotions include subjective experiences of pleasure and pain and more complex psychological phenomena that encompass various additional aspects."

What are these various additional aspects? It's kind of vague. I assume it's the arousal and evaluative assessments that follow, but it the wording could be touched up for clarity such as "Emotions include subjective experiences of pleasure and pain alongside more complex psychological phenomena, such as ..." Urchincrawler (talk) 07:56, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I changed the order of presentation and reformualted some parts to clarify this point. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:50, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]