Keynote Presentation International Positive Psychology Association 7th IPPA World Congress 2021

This is your brain on wellbeing (#33)

Christian Waugh 1
  1. Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC, United States

To the degree that wellbeing and thriving are psychological constructs, they are produced somehow by the brain. To establish a “neuroscience of wellbeing” one must first boil down its definition to only feature psychological concepts and then build a definition based on what the brain does. In this talk, I first briefly review the “trait” perspective on the neuroscience of wellbeing, which treats wellbeing as a trait of the person that is reflected by particular forms of brain structure and/or patterns of neural functioning. The challenge with the “trait” perspective, however, is that these neural metrics and definitions of wellbeing have been operationalized inconsistently, which has led to mixed findings. I then briefly review the “behavioral” perspective on wellbeing that emphasizes the brain as doing the behaviors that people with high wellbeing do. The challenge with this perspective is that wellbeing is typically thought of as an outcome of various behaviors, not necessarily the causal agent of those behaviors. Finally, I spend more time fully fleshing out the “belief” perspective, which is to think of the brain as representing the degree to which the human it belongs to believes they have wellbeing. In particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) forms these wellbeing beliefs by generating positive evaluations of life circumstances (e.g., optimism, life satisfaction), the self (e.g., self-esteem, confidence), relationships (e.g., relationship satisfaction, perceived support), and goal progress (e.g., autonomy, purpose). This “belief” neuroscientific perspective on wellbeing is parsimonious, helps explain the overlapping yet distinct features of hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing, and forms the basis for neurologically constrained psychological models of wellbeing.

 

  • Keywords: Biology, Neuroscience, Positive emotions