Article summary with Cognitive outlooks and well-being by Margolis & Lyubomirsky

What is this article about?

The top-down approach to well-being focuses on how people attend and construe information and how these processes then affect their well-being. This article is a review of evidence that attention and construal, the way someone understands the world or a particular situation, influence well-being. Different cognitive outlooks will be reviewed in their association with well-being.

What are construal and attention?

Construal is someone's subjective perception and evaluation of a situation. Many researchers believe that the individual differences in the effects of life events on well-being, can be explained by construal. Construals are continuously formed throughout life. Construal predicts well-being, but also seems to influence well-being directly.

Gross and Thompson came up with the modal model of emotion (2007) that indicates that someone must direct their attention to particular elements of something, before they are able to construe it. The modal model of emotion can be understood as the chain between the situation, attention, construal, and emotional response. Attention is the process by which people select a set of perceivable information to concentrate on or to construe. Attention selects the information that is to be construed. There is research that indicates that there is a bidirectional link between well-being and attention. This means that what we focus on, influences our well-being, and that how we feel, influences what seeks our attention.

What do we know from research of the relation between cognitive outlooks and well-being?

There is a lot of evidence that attention and construal impact well-being. Cognitive outlooks can be seen as specific types of attention and construal. The cognitive outlooks that are related to well-being are gratitude, self-esteem, autonomy, competence, connectedness, optimism, attributional style, and ruminative style. These outlooks have been researched and the results will be reviewed in this article.

What is the impact of appreciation and gratitude on well-being?

Appreciation and gratitude are closely related, but appreciation is viewed as a more general form of gratitude. Gratitude is the recognition of a positive outcome from an external source, including a felt sense of wonder of thankfulness. In research, there has been a focus on gratitude rather than the more general appreciation.

People who are more grateful tend to be happier as well. Gratitude may cause someone to engage in positive reframing. This means that more grateful people tend to focus their attention on positive aspects of past events to construe the event in a better light. This boosts well-being.

What is the impact of optimism on well-being?

Optimism is a lot like gratitude, but gratitude is about events in the past and optimism is about events in the future. People who are more optimistic expect the future to be more positive.

Optimism is positively associated with well-being, but there is little direct evidence of a causal effect. There have also not been any explicit theories of how optimism impacts well-being, but this could also come from the fact that we already believe this intuitively. The relationship between optimism and well-being seems self-evident, but we need more research of what exactly the relationship is.

What is the impact of self-esteem on well-being?

Self-esteem is the overall evaluation of someone's own worth. People with higher self-esteem tend to believe that they are capable and that they deserve the good that may come to them.

Multiple studies have found a positive correlation between self-esteem and well-being, but none of these studies have used experimental methods to directly test for a causal effect. There is also some evidence that self-esteem can be boosted, which can make people happier. An example of how this can be done, is with self-compassion interventions that teach people to accept their shortcomings and focus on their strengths. Low self-esteem has also been found to be correlated with higher risks of depression. The link between low self-esteem and depression is bidirectional.

What is the impact of autonomy, competence, and connectedness on well-being?

Self-determination theory suggests that people have three fundamental needs: connectedness, competence, and autonomy. If these needs are met, someone can achieve the highest form of well-being. Connectedness is also referred to as relatedness and indicates the extent to which people feel they are close to others. Competence indicates the degree to which people believe they possess mastery over their life and can bring about desired changes. Autonomy, also referred to as locus of control, indicates the degree to which people believe they control their own life, instead of being powerless against external factors.

Research supports the idea of the self-determination theory. Connectedness, competence, and autonomy seem to influence well-being. But further research using experimental methods is needed to prove the causal effects.

What is the impact of one's attributional style on well-being?

An attributional style is a pattern of attribution. Attributional models of depression suggest that the way we attribute can influence well-being. Possible attributional styles are internal versus external, stable versus unstable, and global versus specific. People with internal attributional styles, believe they are generally the cause of bad things happening. People with stable attributional styles, believe things are generally permanent and cannot be changed. people with global attributional styles, usually believe that an outcome would have happened no matter what the context would be.

People with internal, stable, and global attributional styles, have a higher risk of depression. This is because they blame themselves more easily and see negativity as inescapable and immutable. Research supports the attributional model of depression. But this research focuses on the correlation between attributinal style. We need more causal studies.

There is also some interesting evidence that the internal, global, and stable attributional styles also correlate with decreasing depression in positive environments. This can be explained by the fact that not only the negative things seem like they are your fault and inescapable and immutable, but also the positive things seem like they are your merit and stable and certain.

What is the impact of one's ruminative style on well-being?

Lastly, the impact of someone's ruminative style on their well-being has been researched. A ruminative style is how much you tend to focus your attention on something, Ruminative style is associated with the other cognitive outlooks we have discussed. People with a higher ruminative style, or people who ruminate more, have a higher risk of depression. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that rumination has detrimental effects on well-being in various ways.

To conclude, all the cognitive outlooks that have been reviewed in this article have been found to relate to well-being. This is proof for the top-down approach, but we need more causal evidence to be sure.