#wellbeingresearch — Public Fediverse posts
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DATE: September 5, 2026 at 06:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Massive review confirms the connection between emotional intelligence and human flourishing
A review of psychological research indicates that emotional intelligence has a robust and reliable connection to human flourishing, predicting success across school, work, and personal health. The findings suggest that people with higher emotional intelligence tend to experience greater well-being, though the strength of this connection depends on how the traits are measured. The research was recently published in the journal PNAS.
For decades, psychologists have debated what makes some people thrive while others struggle. One popular idea is emotional intelligence, a concept that rapidly gained public attention in the 1990s. Broadly speaking, the term refers to how well a person navigates their own feelings and the feelings of others.
Since its introduction, the idea has spawned thousands of academic papers and grown into a multibillion-dollar training industry. Yet, because researchers define and measure this concept in various ways, its exact relationship with life success has remained difficult to synthesize.
Psychologists generally divide emotional intelligence into three categories. The first is an ability-based model. This model treats emotional skills like a cognitive test, assuming there are objectively right and wrong answers when identifying or managing emotions.
The ability model specifically looks at how well people recognize emotions, use them to guide decisions, and regulate them. The second category is a trait-based model, which relies on self-reported personality characteristics. Under this model, researchers ask participants to rate their own adaptability, assertiveness, and impulse control.
A third category, called a mixed model, combines both objective abilities and self-reported traits into a single assessment. Beyond the differing definitions of emotional intelligence, researchers also look at a wide variety of life outcomes. To find out how these different models connect to positive life experiences, researchers Tyler J. Robinson and Ethan Zell from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro analyzed decades of data.
The researchers wanted to see if emotional intelligence consistently relates to human flourishing. Flourishing is a broad psychological term encompassing mental health, physical health, psychological adjustment, and workplace success. To answer this question, Robinson and Zell conducted a second-order meta-analysis.
A standard meta-analysis is a statistical technique that pools the results of many individual studies to find an overall trend. A second-order meta-analysis goes a step further, combining the results of multiple previous meta-analyses. This approach acts as a quantitative summary of previous summaries, providing a broad view of an entire scientific field.
By pooling data from 62 previous meta-analyses, the researchers gathered information from more than 3,000 individual studies. This massive sample included over one million participants, allowing the researchers to look for overarching patterns across different ages and cultures. The data included populations from Western nations, non-Western nations, children, adolescents, and adults.
The researchers found a reliable, positive association between overall emotional intelligence and human flourishing. This positive link appeared across 77 unique life outcomes. The most prominent associations emerged in areas like workplace leadership, job performance, and psychological adjustment.
The data showed that emotional intelligence was linked to better outcomes regardless of the participants’ age group or geographic region. When looking at different categories of life outcomes, the researchers noticed slight variations in the strength of the connection. Emotional intelligence was most strongly related to success in the workplace.
The connection was slightly weaker, though still reliably present, for cognitive abilities and general academic performance. The researchers also found strong associations between emotional intelligence and specific outcomes like lower rates of job burnout, higher subjective well-being, and better romantic relationship satisfaction.
To put these findings into perspective, the researchers compared emotional intelligence to the Big Five personality traits. The Big Five is a well-established psychological framework that measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The analysis revealed that emotional intelligence is just as strongly, if not more strongly, associated with human flourishing than any of the Big Five personality traits.
Out of all the specific outcomes analyzed, only one showed a negative relationship with emotional intelligence. That outcome was a form of self-centeredness known as nonpathological narcissism. The researchers noted that individuals with this specific type of narcissism tend to artificially inflate their own scores on self-report questionnaires.
Because they overrate their own emotional abilities, the data showed an inverse relationship between their actual traits and their reported emotional intelligence. More conventional, pathological narcissism was linked to lower emotional intelligence. Measurement styles heavily altered the broader results as well.
The association with human flourishing was most pronounced when researchers used the mixed or trait-based models, which rely on participants rating their own emotional skills. When studies used objective performance tests to measure emotional abilities, the association with life outcomes was weaker. This pattern became especially apparent when looking at how both emotional intelligence and life outcomes were measured.
The researchers found the strongest connections when both variables were assessed using self-report questionnaires. When one variable was measured subjectively and the other was measured objectively, the relationship between the two shrunk considerably. This dependence on measurement methods highlights an important limitation in the data.
When participants fill out multiple surveys about themselves, they may naturally rate themselves positively across the board. This shared method of data collection can artificially inflate the statistical connection between self-reported emotional intelligence and self-reported life satisfaction. The researchers noted that the particularly strong link to workplace outcomes might be partly driven by this shared measurement style, as many workplace studies rely on self-reported surveys.
Because the data in this review is entirely correlational, it cannot prove that high emotional intelligence causes a person to flourish. It is entirely possible that flourishing in life makes a person more emotionally intelligent over time. Alternatively, a third unmeasured factor, such as a stable upbringing or access to resources, could independently contribute to both higher emotional intelligence and greater life success.
The researchers also excluded studies that evaluated training programs. Because of this exclusion, they could not determine if actively training emotional intelligence causes a subsequent increase in human flourishing. Objective tests of emotional intelligence also face modern challenges.
The authors pointed out that recent studies show artificial intelligence language models perform just as well as, or better than, humans on objective emotional intelligence tests. This raises questions about what these tests are actually measuring. It remains debated whether text-based tests capture practical emotional skills or if they simply measure a person’s reading comprehension and ability to understand written scenarios.
To improve the quality of future research, the authors suggest refining how emotional intelligence is categorized. They recommend moving away from the mixed model, which blends traits and abilities in a way that creates conceptual confusion. Instead, they suggest that future studies explicitly separate objective emotional abilities from self-reported personality traits. Separating these variables would help scientists determine exactly how distinct emotional skills contribute to a fulfilling life.
The study, “Robust associations of emotional intelligence with human flourishing: A second-order meta-analysis,” was authored by Tyler J. Robinson and Ethan Zell.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #EmotionalIntelligence #HumanFlourishing #WellBeing #WorkplaceLeadership #JobPerformance #PsychologicalHealth #WellBeingResearch #EI #PersonalityTraits #MetaAnalysis
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DATE: August 28, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People who believe in free will tend to feel more positive
URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-in-free-will-tend-to-feel-more-positive/
People who believe more strongly in free will tend to feel better in their everyday lives, and experimentally encouraging these beliefs may increase positive feelings, according to research published in Social Psychological & Personality Science.
Belief in free will generally refers to the conviction that people can freely choose how to act and are therefore responsible for their decisions. Although whether free will actually exists is a topic of longstanding debate among philosophers and scientists, psychologists have increasingly studied whether believing in free will matters for how people think and behave.
Previous research has linked stronger free will beliefs with judgments of intentionality and responsibility, punishment decisions, victim blaming, and prosocial behavior. Past research has also found that people who believe more strongly in free will tend to report greater overall well-being and life satisfaction. However, these broad evaluations do not necessarily tell us how people actually feel from moment to moment in their everyday lives.
Positive affect, including experiences such as happiness and joy, is an important aspect of well-being in its own right and has been linked with health, relationships, success, and a sense of meaning. Kathi Diel and colleagues therefore examined whether believing in free will is associated specifically with positive feelings in daily life and whether changing these beliefs can actually influence how people feel.
Studies 1 and 2 involved secondary analyses of previously collected experience-sampling datasets. Study 1 drew on a broader study of social comparison in everyday life. The final sample included 429 adults living in Germany, recruited through research panels and databases, social media, and flyers at the University of Cologne.
Participants completed the 15-item Free Will Inventory, which assessed belief in free will, determinism, and dualism on seven-point scales, along with measures of trait self-control, moral identity, religious beliefs, political orientation, life satisfaction, and demographics. They then completed six days of mobile assessments, receiving five prompts per day between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. and indicating at each prompt whether they currently felt “good” or “bad.” In total, participants provided 9,229 reports of their momentary affect.
Study 2 drew on a separate pre-existing dataset from a larger project examining daily well-being during the UEFA EURO 2024 football tournament. The final sample included 952 participants from England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, who provided 3,627 daily assessments. At intake, participants rated their belief in free will from 1, “no belief in free will,” to 7, “absolute belief in free will,” and reported demographic information, political orientation, and life satisfaction. After each match played by their national team, they rated how happy and satisfied with life they felt that day on seven-point scales.
Study 3 was a new, preregistered experiment involving 1,053 English-speaking adults recruited through Prolific. Participants were randomly assigned to read a passage presenting supposed scientific evidence either supporting or challenging free will, selected three statements consistent with that viewpoint, and described a personal experience related to each. After each description, they rated how they felt from 1, “extremely bad,” to 7, “extremely good,” before completing a manipulation check.
In Study 1, stronger belief in free will was associated with a greater likelihood of feeling good in everyday life. This relationship remained after accounting for beliefs in determinism and dualism, as well as self-control, life satisfaction, moral identity, religious beliefs, political orientation, age, gender, and education. In the most comprehensive model, each one-point increase in free will belief corresponded to a 15% increase in the odds of reporting positive affect. An exploratory finding suggested that the association might weaken at extremely high levels of free will belief.
Study 2 replicated the central finding across five European countries: people with stronger free will beliefs reported greater daily happiness, even after accounting for demographic factors and both their general and day-to-day life satisfaction. However, the possible weakening of the relationship at very high levels of free will belief found in Study 1 did not replicate.
Study 3 provided experimental evidence that adopting a free-will perspective could influence affect. Participants in the pro-free-will condition clearly interpreted the material as more supportive of free will, confirming that the manipulation worked. They also reported substantially more positive feelings about their personal experiences than those in the anti-free-will condition, averaging 5.20 versus 3.25 on the seven-point affect scale (d = 1.77).
The experimental findings complement the first two studies by suggesting that the association is not solely because happier people happen to believe more strongly in free will; encouraging a stronger free-will perspective itself produced more positive affect.
Of note is that the first two studies were correlational and therefore could not determine whether stronger free will beliefs actually caused better everyday moods; however, Study 3 provided experimental evidence supporting a causal effect.
Together, the findings suggest that seeing oneself as capable of freely choosing and taking responsibility for one’s actions may be an important psychological resource for experiencing more positive feelings in everyday life, beyond overall life satisfaction.
The research “Are Free Will Believers Happier? Converging Evidence From Daily Life and Experimental Research” was authored by Kathi Diel, Giel van der Spiegel, Wilhelm Hofmann, David Wisniewski, Sonja Grelle, Yannik A. Escher, Hannes M. Petrowsky, and Oliver Genschow.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-in-free-will-tend-to-feel-more-positive/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #FreeWillBelieversHappier #PositiveAffect #BeliefInFreeWill #WellBeingResearch #DailyMoodBoost #FreedomToChoose #PsychScience #ExperientialEvidence #HappinessStudies #MindsetMatter
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DATE: August 22, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: This specific type of positive emotion predicts life satisfaction better than the rest
An analysis of data from two longitudinal studies conducted in Germany and the Netherlands found that both energized and pleasant positive emotions are associated with life satisfaction, but that this association was much stronger with pleasant positive emotions. The paper was published in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
Subjective well-being is a person’s overall evaluation of how well their life is going. It is typically described as a combination of how satisfied people are with their lives and how frequently they experience positive and negative emotions. Yet researchers still disagree about exactly how these components fit together and whether they reflect a single underlying form of well-being.
One particularly important source of confusion concerns positive affect, which is often treated as if it were one simple psychological state. In reality, the term can refer to very different experiences, ranging from calm pleasure and happiness to excitement, enthusiasm, interest, and energetic engagement.
This means that two studies can both claim to measure positive affect while actually assessing rather different emotional experiences. The distinction matters because pleasant and energized positive emotions may play different roles in well-being. Pleasant feelings may be especially closely connected to satisfaction because they signal that things are going well or that important goals have been achieved. More energized states such as interest, engagement, and enthusiasm may instead be especially useful for motivating activity, exploration, and personal growth.
Study author Jinrui Liu and her colleagues conducted a study in which they explored whether positive emotions and life satisfaction are associated with each other over time. They also wanted to know whether energized and pleasant positive emotions have associations of similar strength with life satisfaction. Finally, they wanted to know whether personality traits that predict energized positive emotions are the same ones that predict pleasant positive emotions.
Study authors analyzed data from the Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics from Germany (PAIRFAM) and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) from the Netherlands. PAIRFAM is a longitudinal study of more than 12,000 individuals from three different birth groups (those born between 1971 and 1973, between 1981 and 1983, and between 1991 and 1993). Study authors analyzed data collected between 2014 and 2021.
The LISS data used in this analysis was collected between 2013 and 2024. The LISS conducted monthly internet surveys of a sample of Dutch individuals aged 16 and older from 5,000 households in each data collection wave. They were recruited randomly from the Dutch population. The sample analyzed in this study included 17,532 participants. 53.3% of them were women.
The measure of pleasant positive emotions used in this analysis was derived from an assessment of depression in PAIRFAM, using items initially meant to capture a lack of depressive symptoms, which actually describe the presence of pleasant feelings (e.g., “I am happy”, “I feel good”).
The assessment of energized positive emotions came from the LISS dataset where the Positive and Negative Affect Scale was used. Both datasets contained a measure of life satisfaction. Additionally, both datasets contained assessments of participants’ personalities in line with the Big Five model (the BFI-20 in the PAIRFAM, and IPIP-50 in the LISS).
Results showed that both pleasant and energized positive emotions were associated with life satisfaction, but that the association with pleasant positive emotions was much stronger. The associations ran in both temporal directions, meaning that earlier life satisfaction was associated with later positive emotions and vice versa.
The associations of the two types of positive emotions with personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism also differed. Neuroticism showed a stronger negative association with pleasant positive emotions, while energized positive emotions were more strongly associated with extraversion.
“In sum, our results indicate that pleasant and energized PA [positive affect] are not interchangeable in longitudinal SWB [subjective well-being] dynamics. Both PA types showed bidirectional within-person associations with LS [life satisfaction] beyond their shared trait-like SWB factor, supporting the view that these SWB elements are further causally related beyond a common underlying construct. However, these associations were consistently stronger for pleasant PA with LS than energized PA,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the theoretical conceptualization of subjective well-being. However, it should be noted that the study authors’ measurements of energized and pleasant positive emotions were driven by the data that were available in the datasets they used. It is possible that different ways of measuring these two categories of positive emotions would yield different results.
The paper, “Jingle all the way? Pleasant and energized positive affect show differential longitudinal relationships with life satisfaction and personality,” was authored by Jinrui Liu, Joar Vittersø, Irene J. E. Teulings, Ragnhild Bang Nes, Lilian Mayerhofer, and Espen Røysamb.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #LifeSatisfaction #PositiveAffect #PleasantEmotions #EnergizedPositiveEmotions #SubjectiveWellBeing #WellBeingResearch #JournalOfPositivePsychology #HappinessStudy #BigFivePersonality #LongevityOfWellBeing