What does it mean to be well? Prior research suggests that it’s more than just the absence of illness or disease; a complete picture of psychological health is also defined in terms of the “good life,” or well-being. Amid continued debate as to what constitutes the good life, one point of relative agreement is that a person’s psychological health is contingent on their own subjective evaluation. The goal of the current study was to further our understanding of psychological functioning by investigating the neural correlates of self-evaluated psychological health and well-being. A sample of 113 incoming college freshmen completed an fMRI task in which they evaluated words and phrases related to three constructs associated with psychological health–well-being, ill-being, and social connectedness–in terms of self-descriptiveness and perceived malleability. Behaviorally, well-being and social connectedness items were more likely to be endorsed as self-descriptive than ill-being items, and social items were perceived to be more malleable. Neurally, self-evaluation was associated with increased activity in the default mode network, consistent with preregistered hypotheses. We observed strong spatial overlap in neural representations among constructs, though patterns of activity in a priori regions of interest–pgACC, vmPFC, and VS–exhibited low similarity among constructs. Furthermore, we found that these neural predictors explained additional variance in trial-level evaluations of psychological health, but not in individual differences in psychological health when aggregating across trials. Specifically, multilevel logistic regression revealed that greater vmPFC activity increased the likelihood of endorsing items as self-descriptive, but only for ill-being items. Exploratory specification curve analyses suggested that closer examination of these neural correlates using multivariate approaches may provide additional insight into individual differences in psychological health.
If you’re happy and you know it: Neural correlates of self-evaluated psychological health and well-being
