Overlap and Distinction between Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-being; A genetically-informative approach to elucidate current discussions

What well-being consists of has long been a question of great interest in a wide range of fields, dating back to ancient philosophy. How we define well-being has a large influence on clinical applications as well as public... [ view full abstract ]

What well-being consists of has long been a question of great interest in a wide range of fields, dating back to ancient philosophy. How we define well-being has a large influence on clinical applications as well as public policy and social norms. It is therefore important to know whether the complexity of the manifold concept well-being can be captured in one framework. While a variety of definitions of the term well-being have been suggested, we assess the validity of a single framework for well-being. Previous research has shown that affective and cognitive measures of well-being, such as subjective happiness and satisfaction with life, load on one common genetic factors (Bartels and Boomsma, 2009). Much less is known, however, about the overlap between these hedonic measures of well-being and eudaimonic measures, such as flourishing and meaning to life.

With a molecular genetic approach, we investigated the overlap and distinction between hedonic (subjective) and eudaimonic (psychological) well-being. Using the large database of the Netherlands Twin Register, we will estimate genetic correlations. Furthermore, polygenic scores for the Well-being spectrum (including subjective well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism) will be calculated based on the recent multivariate GWAMA (Baselmans et al., Biorxiv). With these PGS we will predict flourishing, one of the typical measures of Eudaimonic well-being.