Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Well-being — how well a life goes for the one living it, as psychology measures it — subjective and eudaimonic well-being, flourishing, vitality and meaning in life, and what predicts them (ADR-025).
13 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-060 v2 | A life story constructed from adolescence on is the form a person’s diachronic identity takes, and its content shapes later well-being | McAdams (2019), LIT-595: narrative identity is “a person’s internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming”, which gives a life “unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence”. It arrives in adolescence and young adulthood, on the back of autobiographical memory and autobiographical reasoning, as the third layer of a psychological self after the actor of traits and the agent of goals. Stories with agentic and redemptive themes go with well-being and generativity, and in one longitudinal therapy study the story “changes first, and then the storyteller gets better”. A review essay: every finding is cited, not shown, and it concedes that having a life story may be a modern cultural construction. Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452) denies the first half for many people. | Proposed |
| THEORY-074 | Implicit accessibility of the true self-concept is not what self-report scales of authenticity or of need satisfaction measure, though those two self-reports are not shown to be separate constructs | Schlegel, Hicks, Arndt & King (2009), LIT-606: true-self accessibility, the speed of “me” judgments for traits a person takes to be her true self, correlated .05 with AI-3 authenticity and .20 with basic need satisfaction (N = 124), and each predicted meaning in life independently. The authors read this as showing the constructs differ, and concede the difference is confounded with method, reaction time against self-report. The two self-reports correlated .52, and felt autonomy was only one third of the need-satisfaction composite, whose autonomy items include “I can pretty much be myself”. So the paper separates the implicit measure from both self-reports, and does not separate authenticity from autonomy. Proposed: one sample for the correlations, method unresolved. | Proposed |
| THEORY-077 v2 | Goals pursued for identified or intrinsic reasons receive more sustained effort, which carries their better attainment, and attaining them raises well-being more than attaining goals pursued under pressure | Sheldon & Elliot (1999), LIT-589: a goal is self-concordant to the degree its reasons are identified or intrinsic rather than external or introjected. In two semester-long student samples, self-concordance predicted sustained effort, and effort fully carried its link to attainment (self-concordance β = .02 and .08, ns, with effort in the model). In the same two samples attainment raised well-being more when goals were self-concordant (interaction β = .11, .23), partly through accumulated daily experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Everything is self-report and correlational, and the structural models fit only after revision. It is evidence for the autonomous end of SDT’s continuum, not for integration as distinct from identification. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1305 | In Kasser and Ryan’s two cross-sectional samples, holding constant how much a person aspires to overall, the relative importance of extrinsic aspirations (money, fame, image) goes with less self-actualization and vitality and more physical symptoms, and of intrinsic aspirations (growth, relationships, community, health) with the reverse; the paper does not test whether this survives the reasons for pursuing the goals | Kasser and Ryan (1996), LIT-1977, read in NOTE-1525 from the scan on the SDT site. Active as a careful reading of reported associations with their sizes and samples: 100 community adults and 192 students, all self-report. The intrinsic and extrinsic results are nearly one contrast, since both enter after an overall score averaged across all seven domains. Not shown: causation, need satisfaction as mediator, or that the pattern holds once the autonomy of one’s reasons is controlled, which the paper names as an open question. | Active |
| THEORY-1307 | In Slemp et al.’s meta-analysis of 881 mostly cross-sectional samples, perceived support for autonomy, competence and relatedness each correlated strongly with satisfaction of all three needs (ρ = .44–.62) and negatively with their frustration, but the three supports intercorrelated .67–.71, and their need-specificity appears only in joint models: with all three entered, relatedness support carried relatedness satisfaction (β = .56) and autonomy support added nothing to it (β = .007) | Slemp et al. (2024), LIT-1969, read in NOTE-1507 from the CC BY Online First PDF. Active as a statement of what the meta-analysis reports, its Table 2 reproduced from its Table 1 matrix. It is a statement about correlations, which the authors interpret as effects on theoretical grounds only; it does not say support causes need satisfaction, or that the needs are distinct in the world. | Active |
| THEORY-1308 | In Chen et al.’s student samples from Belgium, China, the USA and Peru, need satisfaction related to life satisfaction and vitality and need frustration to depressive symptoms with no detectable difference across countries, and neither relation was moderated by how much a person valued or desired the need | Chen et al. (2015), LIT-2000, read in NOTE-1527. Two cross-sectional studies, N = 683 and 1,051. The relations and the null moderations are as reported. Proposed because universality is inferred from failures to reject, with fewer than 150 per country in the test half, and because explicit valuation and desire are the only measures of need strength. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1310 | In Sheldon, Elliot, Kim and Kasser’s three studies of most satisfying events, self-esteem was as salient as autonomy, competence and relatedness in every sample and the largest unique predictor of event affect balance among ten candidate needs in two of the three US samples (β = .28, .38); the authors, SDT researchers, concluded that there may be four fundamental needs and judged it imprudent to treat self-esteem as an outcome | Sheldon et al. (2001), LIT-1966, read in NOTE-1502 from the scan on selfdeterminationtheory.org. Active as a statement of what the paper reports and concludes, checked against Tables 2–7 and p. 336. It does not say self-esteem is a need: the criteria are self-reports of one remembered event, and the self-esteem items read like well-being, which is QUESTION-369’s problem in miniature. | Active |
| THEORY-1319 | In Niemiec, Ryan and Deci’s post-college sample, attaining intrinsic aspirations went with more well-being and less ill-being, and attaining extrinsic aspirations, entered alongside it, added nothing to well-being and went with more ill-being; the extrinsic null is a unique-variance result, since alone extrinsic attainment correlated positively with well-being and need satisfaction | Niemiec, Ryan and Deci (2009), LIT-1960, read in NOTE-1520 from the PMC author manuscript. N = 147 at two years post-college; latent SEM and residualized-change models, all self-report. The intrinsic result and the extrinsic null are as reported; the null holds only with intrinsic attainment in the model. Proposed because one small correlational sample cannot show that extrinsic success fails to raise well-being. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1325 | In Chirkov et al.’s student samples from South Korea, Russia, Turkey and the USA, the more autonomous people’s reasons for engaging in practices of any cultural orientation, collectivist and vertical included, the higher their well-being, with no detectable difference across countries or genders; and vertical practices were much less internalized than horizontal ones | Chirkov, Ryan, Kim and Kaplan (2003), LIT-1989, read in NOTE-1513 from the published PDF on selfdeterminationtheory.org. N = 559, cross-sectional self-report. The positive relation held in every country and for every type of practice (β = .15–.42 within country); “no moderation” is twelve non-significant interactions in samples of 94–195. The primary study for SDT’s claim that autonomy is not individualism, which it supports empirically only in this form. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1327 | As Ryan and colleagues’ 2022 meta-review maps it, the meta-analytic evidence for self-determination theory is concentrated in cognitive evaluation, organismic integration and basic needs theory, is mostly cross-sectional and heterogeneous, and has gaps: no meta-analysis of relationships motivation theory or of need frustration, one or two of causality orientations and goal contents, and none that separates integrated from identified regulation | Ryan, Duineveld, Di Domenico, Ryan, Steward and Bradshaw (2022), LIT-1967, read in NOTE-1500 from the accepted manuscript on OSF. Active as a statement of what the review reports about the 60 meta-analyses it found to July 2021, which is checkable against its Tables 1 and 2 and its own summaries. It does not say the meta-analyses are sound, since the review grades none of them, and it is written by the theory’s co-founder, with several included meta-analyses by its authors. | Active |
| THEORY-1338 | In the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale as Chen et al. built it, the distinction between satisfaction and frustration coincides with item direction: every satisfaction item states a positive experience and every frustration item an aversive one, so the better fit of six factors over three, which is the scale’s evidence that frustration is a separate dimension, is also what a keying or valence factor would produce | Chen et al. (2015), LIT-2000, read in NOTE-1527 from the publisher’s typeset copy in the ULB repository. Active as a statement about the instrument, checked against its Table 3 item by item and its model comparison (ΔSBSχ²(12) = 450.79, p. 226). It does not say the frustration dimension is an artefact, only that this evidence cannot tell it from one; that test is Murphy et al.’s (LIT-1978), unread. | Active |
| THEORY-1345 | In three cross-sectional studies of undergraduates, most of the variance in adult attachment security lay within persons, across relational partners (56–79%, error included), and relationship-specific satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness predicted relationship-specific security in every relationship tested, also with the relatedness items removed; relatedness was the strongest unique predictor, then autonomy, then competence | La Guardia, Ryan, Couchman and Deci (2000), LIT-1979, read in NOTE-1523. Active as a statement of the associations the three studies report, with their sizes. It does not say that need satisfaction causes security, which the authors say their data cannot show and believe runs both ways (p. 381). | Active |
| THEORY-1347 | In Patrick, Knee, Canevello and Lonsbary’s three correlational studies, perceiving that a romantic partner fulfils one’s needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness goes with better relationship quality, with relatedness the strongest unique predictor and the partner’s fulfilment adding to one’s own; but the measure does not separate the needs, its autonomy and competence subscales correlating .96 once corrected for unreliability | Patrick et al. (2007), LIT-1971, read in NOTE-1515 from the article on the SDT site. Active as a careful reading of reported results with their sizes and samples: eight pooled samples (N = 1,918), 66 couples, and 120 diarists with 908 disagreements, all self-report, mostly women students. It does not say need fulfilment causes relationship quality, that autonomous motivation mediates it (the mediation is cross-sectional), or that the three needs are distinct dimensions. | Active |