Terminology and the Well-being Literature

Abstract

In this commentary, we offer some remarks concerning distinctions that might be drawn between psychological well-being, emotional well-being, well-being more generally, and flourishing. We put forward a flexible map of flourishing to help understand the relative place of these and other terms, and their respective nestings. We discuss some of the challenges concerning terminology related to the use of ordinary language, as well as practices of branding ordinary language expressions that potentially threaten understanding, and we offer some suggestions as to how to navigate some of these terminological challenges in the well-being literature.

In this paper, we would like to offer some remarks on terminology in the well-being literature prompted by the recent paper by Park et al. (2022). Park et al. (2022) put forward a consensus definition for the term “emotional well-being.” They discuss the scope of the term, its expression across the lifespan and in different cultures and contexts, and the need for greater research on emotion and emotional well-being. We agree with the authors that emotional well-being is an important component of complete human well-being or flourishing, that it deserves greater attention, and that some aspects of emotional well-being have been neglected. However, we disagree with the authors that “emotional well-being” is a good choice of term to encompass “all psychological aspects of well-being.” The adjective “emotional” is not broad enough and not synonymous with “psychological” or “mental.” There are cognitive aspects of well-being, for example, that extend beyond the emotions. In what follows, we will discuss what we understand as the scope of emotional well-being and will discuss Park et al.’s proposed definition. We will try to situate emotional well-being within its broader contexts of mental well-being, and of flourishing, and we will conclude with brief remarks on some of the challenges of terminology.

The Scope of Emotional Well-being

The definition of emotional well-being given by Park et al. is “a multi-dimensional composite that encompasses how positive an individual feels generally and about life overall.” As suggested above, neither the term “emotional well-being” nor the proposed definition covers all aspects of mental well-being. The term and the definition cover many aspects of mental well-being, but not all. They specifically do not cover cognitive aspects of well-being. Having knowledge or having a good memory, for example, are arguably aspects of mental well-being. But knowledge and memory are not emotional states; they may affect emotional states, but they are not emotion per se. Knowledge and memory extend beyond how an individual feels. Likewise, while having a sense of meaning may in some sense be felt, meaning extends beyond feelings, and includes cognitive components. In the increasingly embraced tripartite division of meaning in the psychology literature into coherence, significance, and purpose (Martela & Steger, 2016; Hanson and VanderWeele, 2021) or comprehension, mattering, and purpose (George & Park, 2016), the first of those components — coherence or comprehension — is especially related to cognition; it may be conceived of as “the intellectual perception that one’s life, values, and relation to the world express an intelligible pattern and are part of a context or narrative that makes sense of one’s existence or existence in general” (Hanson & VanderWeele, 2021). Again, this falls neither under the term emotional well-being nor under the authors’ proposed definition, but it is nevertheless a part of mental well-being. Again, emotional well-being is a subset of mental well-being. Emotional well-being does not encompass all psychological aspects of well-being.

While we would maintain that emotional well-being, properly conceived, is only a subset of mental well-being, we also believe that Park et al.’s proposed definition is itself too narrow even as a definition for emotional well-being. Park et al.’s definition concerns “how positive an individual feels generally and about life overall.” The definition does pertain to emotional well-being, but we believe emotional well-being encompasses more than this. We would maintain, for example, that emotional well-being ought also to include not only “how positive an individual feels” but also a capacity for emotion regulation (Gross, 2015). Likewise, we would maintain that emotional well-being would include a certain proportionality of emotion to objective circumstances. A person who always felt positive and happy, even with the loss of a loved one, or in the face of a terrible injustice, would not be best described as experiencing emotional well-being. There would in fact be something about their emotions that would not be proportionate or good. The physical analogue would be someone’s being incapable of experiencing physical pain — the body would then not be in a healthy state. It would not be functioning as it ought.

An alternative broader definition of emotional well-being might be “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s emotional life are good.” This would include, for example, positive emotional states, but also emotion regulation, and some proportionality of emotion to circumstances. As indeed indicated by Park et al. (2022), further theory is still required as to what constitutes emotion, and what constitutes “good” in this context — a more “formal ontology of emotion.” Potential definitions of an emotion might include “a non-discursive mental experience concerning what one values arising from perceptions about some putative good or its absence” (cf. Hacker, 2017) or “an acute disturbance of the individual, psychological in origin, involving behavior, conscious experience, and visceral functioning” (Young, 1943), though definitions have been and will inevitably continue to be disputed (Gendron & Feldman Barrett, 2009; Izard, 2010; Widen & Russell, 2010; Mulligan & Scherer, 2012).

However, our basic point here is that emotional well-being, as a term, is not sufficiently broad to encompass all psychological aspects of well-being and, conversely, that emotional well-being itself is nevertheless broader than the definition proposed by Park et al. (2022).

Situating Emotional Well-being

The work of Park et al. (2022), as they describe it, was motivated in part by the conceptual confusion generated by the proliferation of terms and measures concerning well-being, and the search for an umbrella term for its various psychological aspects. We have argued above that emotional well-being is a subset of mental well-being, which might be defined as, “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s mental life are good.” Emotional well-being is a subset of mental well-being, because a person’s emotional life is a subset of their mental life. However, mental well-being or psychological well-being is itself a subset of the overall multidimensional well-being of a person, which might be defined as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good” (cf. VanderWeele, 2017). Human well-being includes mental well-being but includes also other ontological dimensions, including physical well-being, social well-being, and perhaps additionally spiritual well-being (Larson, 1996; Cloninger et al., 2010; VanderWeele et al., 2021).

We would argue that the reason for the proliferation of conceptualizations and measures around well-being pertains to the extraordinary breadth of the concepts involved. If well-being relates to “all aspects of a person’s life being good” then it will not be possible to generate an exhaustive list. Any attempt at measurement, or at enumerating domains, will always be partial. This pertains to well-being generally, but also specifically to mental or psychological well-being, and to emotional well-being. This is not cause for despair, but merely indicates that, to make scientific progress, we need to focus research on more distinct specific aspects of well-being, such as, purpose, or life satisfaction, or emotion regulation. The composite constructs and measures are precisely that — composites. There can be value in grouping various aspects of life into “emotional well-being” or “psychological well-being” or “human well-being” but in doing so we will lose some understanding and granularity. The dynamics of different aspects of well-being will often play out differently with respect to their causes, their effects, and their mechanisms (Trudel-Fitzgerald et al., 2019).

A Map for Situating Terms: WHO+ Framework

In thinking about human well-being, we have found it helpful to employ a flexible conceptual map concerning human flourishing (Lomas & VanderWeele, 2022). The World Health Organization’s definition of health from 1946 — still in place today — is that health is “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO, 1946). This is health, not just of the body, but of the whole person, i.e., human well-being. We would, however, argue that this should be extended so as to also include spiritual well-being (Larson, 1996; Cloninger et al., 2010; VanderWeele et al., 2021) for those persons who embrace such notions, which — significantly and relevantly — includes the large majority of the world’s population (Diener et al., 2011). Thus, an alternative, but arguably equivalent, definition of human well-being to the one we gave in the previous section might be “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s physical, mental, social, and spiritual life are good.” We refer to this expansion of the World Health Organization’s definition and conceptualization as the WHO+ framework (Lomas & VanderWeele, 2022). Physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being could then each be analogously defined as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s physical [or mental, or social, or spiritual] life are good.”

Much of psychology is of course focused on various aspects of mental or psychological well-being and numerous measures have been developed. However, psychology does not constitute the whole of a human person. Medicine and public health have put forward various standards and measures concerning physical health. Similar conceptualization and measurement is likewise possible with regard to social and spiritual well-being. While, within the context of the well-being literature, social connection is often viewed as a determinant of physical or psychological well-being (Holt-Lunstad, 2022), it is also possible to consider the extent to which relationships and communities are, or are being experienced as, good on their own terms, i.e., viewed as collective intersubjective phenomena and considered as ends themselves. Likewise, while the empirical literature is still in its infancy, assessment approaches for spiritual well-being have also begun to be developed (Paloutzian & Ellison, 1982; Fisher, 2010; VanderWeele et al., 2021). These various categories — physical, mental, social, and spiritual — are of course not mutually exclusive. Certain notions, such as vitality, may lie at the intersection of two or more of these domains. However, considering the human person more broadly can help situate the study of mental or psychological or emotional well-being within the broader study of human well-being.

We would also like to point towards what we take as an even broader concept — flourishing. We might define flourishing as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good including the contexts in which that person lives.” While the terms “flourishing” and “well-being” are often used interchangeably, flourishing arguably has a connotation of consonance with one’s environment. It is not only that the person is doing well, but the contexts in which they live are also good. In contrast, well-being might be understood as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good as they pertain to that individual.” This is still very broad, but concerns the individual. If a person is doing well within an impoverished or corrupt environment, we might say they have attained a degree of well-being, and may even be “thriving” (which etymologically can suggest doing well even in spite of one’s circumstances). However, we would not say they are not fully flourishing, since the community and environment around them are not good. Flourishing thus encompasses well-being, which encompasses mental well-being, which encompasses emotional well-being, which encompasses happiness and other more specific constructs. We have provided considerably more detail on this flexible map of flourishing elsewhere (Lomas & VanderWeele, 2022).

The Challenge of Terminology

There are inevitable challenges when trying to define terms and especially when attempting to come to consensus within a field, and even more so across fields. For the most part, we think that in the psychological and social sciences, complete consensus on terminology will often not be possible. It may, however, be possible to achieve partial consensus, or a small number of research communities for which consensus is attained within each community. If definitions are precise, and research is careful and carried out with specific constructs, then it may also be possible to synthesize research across communities, even when there are disagreements concerning terminology.

We do, however, see two related dangers concerning terminology facing the psychological research community that may threaten progress: (i) deviation of language from common usage and (ii) exclusionary branding. On the first point, when scientific terms employ expressions that are common in ordinary English, it seems best to try to use and define these terms in a way that at least roughly corresponds to ordinary speech. We argued above that emotional well-being was much too specific a term to denote all psychological aspects of well-being. It puts too much of a load on “emotional,” and moreover is a load that departs from the ordinary connotation of the word. The converse can also be the case. Seligman’s (2011) notion of “flourishing” as being positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment is too narrow for flourishing. It misses, for example, any notion of physical health, as do most definitions of flourishing in the psychology literature. Any assessment of flourishing, or enumeration of its domains, will always be partial, but let us at least put forward of definitions of “flourishing” which do not narrow the concept far beyond its ordinary usage.

A second related problem concerns exclusionary branding. It seems that some of the motivation of Park et al. (2022) for employing the term “emotional well-being” was that terms such as “psychological well-being” or “subjective well-being” were “taken” or “already in use.” The terms “psychological well-being” and “subjective well-being” are regular English expressions, and yet, these expressions have come to be associated with specific scales (Ryff & Keyes, 1995; Diener et al., 1985). However, as regular English expressions, “psychological well-being” simply concerns assessments of an individual’s psychological states, and “subjective well-being” simply concerns an individual’s subjective assessment of any aspect of their life (e.g., finances, happiness, physical health). Neither of these categories encompasses the other: psychological states can be sometimes assessed by direct observation (e.g., of textual communication) rather than subjective self-report; conversely, one can report subjectively on states that are not psychological, like one’s physical health. From Park et al.’s (2022) introduction, we believe that their actual object of interest may initially have been the broader notion of “psychological well-being,” but they shied away from the term because of its influential use by Ryff (1989) in her specific construct and scale.

We see nothing wrong with branding involving newly created terms or author names along the lines of the “Ryff Measure of Psychological Well-being” or the “Seligman Measure of Flourishing” or “PERMA” (Seligman, 2011), but when a regular English expression itself becomes branded in an exclusionary way (i.e., as the only valid academic meaning of that word or phrase), and then begins to alter the terminology of, or even the objects studied by, other researchers, such generic branding harms the field. One of the present authors, not long ago, received a review, endorsed also by an editor, prohibiting the use of “character strengths” or even “strength of character” in a paper because the Values-in-Action scale (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), which had “branded” the term, was not being employed. Branding may sometimes be helpful, but branding regular English expressions we believe will ultimately generate increasing confusion. If regular English expressions are exclusively branded, it will become increasingly difficult to use terminology that corresponds to the regular meaning of words, as per first aforementioned danger. We believe it is thus best to keep terms like “psychological well-being” and “subjective well-being” and likewise “emotional well-being” as generic English expressions. Specific construct definitions and scales can still be proposed without prohibiting or discouraging others from using the generic expressions.

Psychological concepts are embedded in, and arise from, our use of language. This makes terminology especially important, and challenging. The challenges cannot be circumvented entirely, and consensus will often be elusive, but we believe explicit definitions, adherence to ordinary meanings to the extent possible, and refusal to brand commonplace expressions would all go some way in helping to navigate the real terminological challenges, both in the well-being literature and more generally.

Additional Information

Funding

This research was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Conflicts of Interest

Tyler VanderWeele reports receiving personal and licensing fees from Flerish Inc. and Flourishing Metrics.