well-being.
19 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-436 | Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health | A narrative review that defines psychological flexibility by four dynamic abilities (adapting to situations, reconfiguring resources, shifting perspective, balancing domains). Flexible regulation beats any fixed strategy (Bonanno 2004; Cheng 2001). Inflexibility marks depression and anxiety, and cardiac vagal control may integrate its forms. Causal direction is open. It recommends experience sampling and multi-informant measures over global self-report. | Read |
| NOTE-439 | The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior | Needs in SDT are innate psychological nutriments, identified functionally by the costs of their thwarting, not by individual differences in their strength. The three needs organize findings on intrinsic motivation and internalization, predict that both the “why” (autonomous vs controlled regulation) and the “what” (intrinsic vs extrinsic aspirations) of goals affect well-being, and explain need substitutes and rigid defences when needs are thwarted. Autonomy is self-organization, defended as an evolved, domain-general design feature. | Read |
| NOTE-440 | Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions | The authors set out nine criteria a basic psychological need must meet, separate need frustration from mere lack of satisfaction, review need frustration’s costs (ill-being, compensatory behaviour, need substitutes) and propose it as transdiagnostic, review the interplay with sleep, food, sex and safety, map need-supportive and need-thwarting practices on a circumplex, and argue that the needs are universal in their effects (“output side”) while the practices that satisfy them vary (“input side”). Novelty, morality and beneficence are weighed as fourth needs and not yet admitted. | Read |
| NOTE-442 v2 | Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being | SDT’s canonical short statement. Social contexts that support competence, autonomy and relatedness sustain intrinsic motivation and let people internalize and integrate extrinsic regulations; controlling, rejecting or overchallenging contexts undermine intrinsic motivation and leave regulations external or introjected. Autonomy is graded: four kinds of extrinsic motivation lie on a continuum of relative autonomy (Ryan & Connell’s quasi-simplex). Basic needs are defined by their consequences for well-being, and need-deprivation is offered as a principal source of distress and psychopathology. | Read |
| NOTE-448 | Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model | Sheldon and Elliot’s integrated model of goal striving. Self-concordance (identified + intrinsic − introjected − external reasons) predicts sustained effort, effort fully mediates attainment (Study 1 β = .02 ns vs .76; Study 3 β = .08 ns vs .72), attainment predicts change in well-being more strongly when goals are self-concordant (interaction β = .11, .23), and accumulated daily autonomy, competence and relatedness partly mediate attainment’s effect on well-being (Study 3). Three correlational student samples; SEM fits reached after adding paths the modification indices suggested. | Read |
| NOTE-469 | Thine Own Self: True Self-Concept Accessibility and Meaning in Life | Five studies with students. True-self accessibility, the residual speed of “me” judgments for one’s own true-self traits, predicts MLQ presence of meaning (β = .29, .24, .19 in Studies 1, 2, 4) beyond actual-self accessibility, affect, need satisfaction, liking, overlap, state self-esteem and AI-3 authenticity. Subliminal true-self primes raised reported meaning against actual-self primes (Study 3, ANCOVA F = 4.46) and against disliked actual-self primes (Study 5, contrast F = 5.07), with disliked true-self traits as effective as liked ones. | Read |
| NOTE-470 | “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The Evolution of Narrative Identity | McAdams’s review essay on narrative identity: “the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”. Storytelling is placed in human evolution as a tool for simulating social life and binding groups. The self is layered as actor, then agent, then author, with the life story arriving in adolescence on the back of autobiographical memory, theory of mind and autobiographical reasoning. Story features predict well-being and generativity. Culture supplies master narratives. Claims are cited, not shown. | Read |
| NOTE-961 | Bruno et al. — self-assessed well-being in chronic locked-in syndrome | Of 168 members of the French LIS association invited, 91 answered and 65 gave usable ratings: 47 (72%) rated their present life at or above the midpoint between their best period before LIS and their worst period ever (median +3), 18 (28%) below (median −4). Happiness was associated with longer time in LIS (OR 1.5 per year), recovered speech (OR 20.5) and absence of anxiety (OR 0.19). All had chronic LIS after a brainstem vascular accident, a median of 8 years earlier; 55% had recovered some speech and 70% some limb movement, and answers were given with a proxy’s help. | Read |
| NOTE-1105 | Kahneman, Wakker and Sarin — Back to Bentham? Explorations of experienced utility | Decision utility, an outcome’s weight in choice, and experienced utility, its hedonic quality, are distinct and can be measured separately. Experienced utility is instant (real-time report) or remembered (retrospective). Remembered utility follows a Peak-End rule with duration neglect, and choices follow remembered utility, so people choose dominated painful episodes. Total utility is axiomatized as a time integral of ordinal instant utility with a neutral zero. For the record, the dissociation is not a counterexample to potential read within the moment. It shows that potential read from deferred choices measures memory, and that a system’s model of its own past states is systematically biased. | Read |
| NOTE-1500 | Ryan et al. — We know this much is (meta-analytically) true | A narrative synthesis of 60 meta-analyses bearing on self-determination theory, written by its co-founder and colleagues, not preregistered. It finds the support concentrated in cognitive evaluation, organismic integration and basic needs theory; one or two meta-analyses each for causality orientations and goal contents; none for relationships motivation theory, and none of basic-need frustration. Most pooled effects are cross-sectional correlations with high heterogeneity. Integrated regulation is not separated from identified regulation in the meta-analyses it reports. | Read |
| NOTE-1502 | Sheldon, Elliot, Kim & Kasser — What is satisfying about satisfying events? | Three studies (N = 315, 352 across the USA and South Korea, 233) asked students for their most satisfying event of the last month, week or semester and rated ten candidate needs within it. Self-esteem, autonomy, competence and relatedness were the most salient in every sample and the strongest correlates of event affect; in simultaneous regressions self-esteem was the largest unique predictor in Studies 1 and 3 (β = .28, .38). The authors concluded “there may be four fundamental psychological needs, not three”, and called treating self-esteem as an outcome “imprudent”. Security emerged in unsatisfying events; money–luxury was last throughout. | Read |
| NOTE-1507 | Slemp et al. — Interpersonal supports for basic needs, a meta-analysis | A psychometric meta-analysis of 881 samples (4,561 effect sizes, N = 443,556), over 70% cross-sectional, almost all recipient-reported. Perceived autonomy, competence and relatedness support each correlate strongly with satisfaction of all three needs (ρ = .44–.62) and negatively with their frustration (ρ = −.20 to −.55), and with autonomous motivation, life satisfaction and positive affect; weakly with performance (ρ = .14–.25). The three supports intercorrelate .67–.71; in a joint model, relatedness support carries relatedness satisfaction and autonomy support adds nothing to it (β = .007). Individualism moderated 2 of 18 relations; heterogeneity was very high (I² mostly above 90%). | Read |
| NOTE-1509 | Kermavnar et al. — A systematic map of need-fulfillment scales | A PRISMA review (searched 21 August 2023) finding 31 original self-report scales of need fulfillment in 32 primary studies, 23 of the scales based on self-determination theory, and 89 adaptations. 21 of the 31 measure satisfaction only; one measures frustration only, one thwarting, four satisfaction and frustration. The review finds the field’s terms used interchangeably, frustration items that are negatively worded satisfaction items (the BPNSFS among them, after Murphy et al. 2023), double-barrelled items, and inconsistent response formats. It names no criterion for need-hood and declines to take a side on the two-dimensional model. | Read |
| NOTE-1515 | Patrick et al. — Need fulfillment in relationship functioning | Three correlational studies of romantic relationships, mostly of women students. Perceived fulfillment by the partner of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness correlates with satisfaction (r = .72, corrected, N = 1,918), commitment, secure attachment and less defensiveness; relatedness is the strongest unique predictor of relationship outcomes; the partner’s fulfillment adds to one’s own in couples; and autonomous reasons for being in the relationship carry the association with post-disagreement satisfaction in a diary study. The autonomy and competence subscales correlate .96 once corrected. | Read |
| NOTE-1520 | Niemiec, Ryan & Deci — The path taken | 147 recent graduates, surveyed one and two years after college. Valuing intrinsic or extrinsic aspirations predicted attaining them (β = .51, .67). Attaining intrinsic aspirations went with well-being (β = .77) and against ill-being (β = −.66); attaining extrinsic ones, entered alongside, had no unique relation to well-being (β = .00) and a positive one to ill-being (β = .38). Change in need satisfaction mediated intrinsic attainment’s link to change in well-being. All self-report and correlational; extrinsic attainment’s zero-order correlation with well-being is positive (mean r = .19). | Read |
| NOTE-1523 | La Guardia et al. — Within-person variation in security of attachment | Three cross-sectional studies of undergraduates find most of the variance in attachment security within persons, across partners, and find relationship-specific satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness predicting relationship-specific security, also without the relatedness items. Relatedness predicts most, then autonomy, then competence. Mean security predicts well-being; variability across partners mostly does not. Need satisfaction and security partly mediate each other’s relation to well-being, and the authors say the direction is undetermined. | Read |
| NOTE-1525 | Kasser & Ryan — Further examining the American dream | Two cross-sectional self-report studies, 100 adults from Rochester households and 192 students. With the overall importance of all aspirations controlled, the relative importance of extrinsic aspirations (money, fame, image) goes with less self-actualization and vitality and more physical symptoms, and intrinsic aspirations (self-acceptance, affiliation, community, health) with the reverse; the two kinds load on separate factors. The paper does not test whether the pattern survives the reasons for pursuing the goals, and says that test would be interesting. | Read |
| NOTE-1526 | Ntoumanis et al. — SDT-informed health interventions, a meta-analysis | 73 experimental studies (58 RCTs, 30,088 participants) of health interventions designed on SDT. At the end of the intervention they raised perceived need support (g = 0.64), autonomy (0.37) and competence (0.31) satisfaction, autonomous motivation (0.30), health behaviour (0.45) and psychological health (0.29); relatedness (0.20), controlled motivation and amotivation did not change. Psychological health’s effect was gone at follow-up (0.14, ns). Effect-size meta-regressions link gains in need support and autonomous motivation to gains in behaviour; mediation was not tested, the number of SDT techniques predicted nothing, and need frustration was not an outcome. | Read |
| NOTE-1527 | Chen et al. — Need satisfaction, frustration and strength across four cultures | Two cross-sectional studies (Belgium and China, N = 683; Belgium, China, USA and Peru, N = 1,051) introduce the 24-item Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS). A six-factor model (satisfaction and frustration of each need) fits better than three factors and is metric-invariant across the four countries; satisfaction relates mainly to life satisfaction and vitality, frustration mainly to depressive symptoms; neither relation differs by country or is moderated by need valuation or need desire. Every satisfaction item is worded positively and every frustration item negatively. | Read |