Broadly, the WELLab studies wellbeing and health across the lifespan. Here are a few of our current research areas:
Short-term Dynamics
of Wellbeing
Life satisfaction is often assumed to be relatively stable from day to day. After all, the objective conditions of our lives usually do not change dramatically overnight. Our work, however, indicates that some people’s life satisfaction varies dramatically from one moment to the next along with transient emotional ups and downs. We call this tight coupling of transient emotions and global life satisfaction emotion globalizing. We developed the Individual Differences in Evaluating Life Satisfaction (IDELS) model to describe why this happens and what it might mean for psychological health. Currently, we are collecting data on momentary wellbeing experiences in daily life to further understand how different components of wellbeing vary and covary, and how people differ from one another in their dynamic wellbeing experiences.
Wellbeing and Physical Health
Are happy people healthier? Our research addresses this question by examining when and how wellbeing can support and improve physical health, through its effects on health behaviors and physiological systems. We use a combination of daily diary and longitudinal data to build a better understanding of when and how wellbeing can promote health. Our work highlights the role of temporal dynamics (e.g., variability and change) as well as level of analysis (e.g., trait versus daily measures of wellbeing) in understanding wellbeing and health links. For example, using longitudinal data from the U.S. and Japan, we found that longitudinal increases in wellbeing predict better subjective health and fewer chronic health conditions, above and beyond wellbeing levels. This finding highlights the importance of treating wellbeing as a dynamic individual difference in order to better understand when, how, and for whom, wellbeing is related to health.
Long-term Change
in Wellbeing
We study how wellbeing changes across the adult lifespan from late adolescence through older adulthood. For example, our work suggests that subjective wellbeing (i.e., life satisfaction, positive affect, and low negative affect) tends to increase during middle and older adulthood, whereas sense of purpose (a component of eudaimonic wellbeing) tends to remain stable or decrease during this same period. These findings challenge a common view that wellbeing always improves in late life, and instead suggests that some types of wellbeing may be particularly vulnerable in older adulthood. Importantly, there are substantial individual differences around these average wellbeing trajectories. We study the individual (e.g., personality), social (e.g., family support, experiences of discrimination), and cultural (e.g., country, cultural values) factors that predict these differing trajectories.
Wellbeing and Cognitive Health
Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (ADRD) is an urgent public health priority, given the prevalence of ADRD and the scarcity of disease-modifying treatments. Wellbeing is a promising prevention target that is amenable to non-invasive intervention and has been associated with lower ADRD risk. In ongoing work, we are examining bidirectional relationships between various types of wellbeing and cognitive health outcomes. For example, we recently found that older adults with higher eudaemonic wellbeing tend to have better-than-expected cognitive functioning and less-than-expected cognitive decline despite the presence of ADRD-related neuropathology in their brains. The ultimate goal of this research is to discover knowledge that will empower policymakers and clinicians to allocate scarce resource to prevention efforts that are most likely to be effective at improving wellbeing and preventing cognitive decline and dementia.