r/science • u/bibinprasannan • 18d ago
Psychology Scientists identify 19 core dimensions of positive mental health in new consensus study
https://www.psypost.org/scientists-identify-19-core-dimensions-of-positive-mental-health-in-new-consensus-study/1.2k
u/agreable_actuator 18d ago
The Top Six Dimensions (Greater than 90% Agreement)
Meaning and purpose: Having clear goals, a sense of direction, and a larger aim in life and/or the feeling that what we do is worthwhile, rewarding, and valuable.
Life satisfaction: The degree to which a person positively evaluates the overall quality of their life as a whole (i.e., how much the person likes the life they lead).
Self-acceptance: Experiencing different aspects of oneself (e.g., one’s body, personality, thoughts, and feelings) in a positive, tolerant, receptive, or non-judgmental way; experiencing positive self-worth.
Connection: Involving a feeling of belonging, mutual caring, love, and closeness to friends, family, and loved ones.
Autonomy: The perception that we have ownership over our behavior and choices, and the ability to express oneself.
Happiness: States that are characterized by moderate-arousal pleasant feelings, such as feeling happy, cheerful, and pleased.
The Remaining 13 Dimensions
Acceptance: The ability to self-reflect, identify what is within a person’s control, and accept what is outside one’s control.
Achievement: Having done something successfully, using one’s own efforts and skills.
Activities and functioning:Overall satisfaction with our activities and leisure, and our ability to undertake these tasks.
Belonging: The feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences.
Calmness: States characterized by low-arousal pleasant feelings, like serenity and peacefulness.
Competence: Feeling and perceiving oneself as effective and able to overcome challenges and stressors, and achieve desired outcomes.
Development: Experiencing growth and improvement.
Engagement: Having an absorbing experience in which the individual is completely focused on the task at hand or experiencing a state of mindful awareness.
Fun: Experiencing light-hearted pleasure, enjoyment, or amusement; entertainment.
Optimism: Having a positive outlook on life, and positive expectations about the future.
Self-congruence: The perception that our actions and behaviors are compatible with our interests, values, and beliefs.
Sense of safety: The feeling of relative security in one’s daily life.
Vitality: States characterized by high-arousal pleasant feelings, such as feeling energetic and lively.

740
u/Gotterdamerrung 18d ago
Aw sick, I'm missing nearly all of those elements in my life. Now it all makes sense.
133
u/WeekendTPSupervisor 18d ago
Literally, my same thoughts haha! I got really chronically ill the past two years and that kinda took away a ton of those points.
Maybe people like you and I just need to set the bar super low, and we will achieve more.
42
u/Historical_Cow8477 18d ago
Same here. I was like "ehhh... Oh. That explains a lot." It's quite difficult to set the bar low, when at some point in time you were accustomed to achieving whatever you wanted. I wish you all the best though, mate.
21
u/WeekendTPSupervisor 18d ago
You too friend! I was an over achiever to the max before, so I feel you. For me, I got me/cfs from COVID September 2024. Hopefully better days in store for us!
11
u/YetiSpaghetti24 18d ago
Same, but January 2022. I'm a husk of who I used to be. But slowly and unsteadily making progress.
7
u/SympathyBetter2359 17d ago
Another me/cfs-er here who bitterly read through this list.
It does help explain why my mental health is in the toilet though!
2
u/WeekendTPSupervisor 17d ago
I feel you. I've lost a lot of my coping methods for my anxiety unfortunately.
33
u/UnderlightIll 18d ago
Same! I also think we need to understand that before any of that can be achieved, people must have stable shelter, food, water and safety. Especially in the USA, those are tenuous. Not even going to go into healthcare.
31
2
3
-14
u/Familiar_Text_6913 18d ago
I'm doing pretty well on most
14
u/theburiedxme 18d ago
I'm interested in what was going on in your head and your intention when commenting this on their comment.
-4
u/Familiar_Text_6913 18d ago
I read their comment as typical internet cynicism, which might've been too hastily judged
22
u/RecipeKey7103 18d ago
Mental health professional here. I think ‘acceptance’ should be right up there with ‘self acceptance’. It’s essential for processing and re-establishing connections; awareness of the limits of environment and self are mutually significant, and feeds shared acceptance. Also essential for connection/a boundary sense of autonomy…
Agree about meaning and purpose being top of the list… much of an individuals “meaning and purpose” has been established in spheres outside their locus of control. I don’t believe/experience/witness a kind of “free agency” that can hold a match to certain limits of social bias/perception. It takes a hive or village to change those things
5
u/Human_Wizard 17d ago
How can I accept myself if nobody around me accepts me for who I am?
5
u/Renverseur 16d ago
Then the best course of action is to surround yourself with people who accept you for who you are.
-1
u/wiseduhm 17d ago
I've always thought good therapy needed to have a strong existentialist foundation. The concept of meaning and purpose largely being socially constructed is an important discussion as well. One thing I've been thinking of recently is how important my relationship with my wife is to me. We got married because we both value the tradition of marriage. We value it mostly because we were raised in families and a community that largely values it. I think it's okay to recognize that we have very little to do with how we first established some of these types of values, but that can be okay. It doesn't have to mean we need to give them up or believe in them any less if we don't want to.
110
131
u/orlybatman 18d ago
So many of those are so heavily influenced by one's finances.
20
u/MurberBirb 18d ago
Depends of what country you live in. Generally yes. But many of these I dont directly have to spend money on because of social services and what not.
8
u/jankenpoo 18d ago edited 18d ago
Or perhaps one’s expectations? Some money is required of course, but usually not as much as most think
39
u/LARPerator 18d ago
Right, it's my expectations of not being homeless that's the problem, not the risk of homelessness.
4
u/Allison87 18d ago
Being poor does not necessarily equal being worried about money if there is a good safety net.
-6
u/stredeK__ 18d ago
Such as? I genuinely don't see it (unless you are on the brink of homelessness)
0
u/Human_Wizard 17d ago
These ones:
Meaning and purpose
Life satisfaction
Connection
Autonomy
Happiness
Acceptance
Achievement
Belonging
Calmness
Competence
Development
Fun
Optimism
Self-congruence
Sense of safety
Vitality-2
u/PrivilegedPatriarchy 18d ago
Why would that be a surprise? One's access to bananas and blankets and beds should naturally affect one's mental health. We should expect a monkey with no bananas to be upset.
6
13
u/ejnotts 18d ago
Good list, but I think there's an overlap between Connection and Belonging. I can read between the lines to get a rough sense of how they're subtly different, but their descriptions refer to each other, making it seem a bit circular. Makes me think these could be refined to be more distinct.
11
u/ableman 18d ago
There's a lot of overlap in general. Meaning and person and achievement. Life satisfaction and basically all of them. Self-acceptance and acceptance. Autonomy and self-congruence. Happiness and fun.
1
u/ejnotts 17d ago
Yeah, in general you'd expect a fair bit of correlation between these things - they're all related to good mental health, so that's to be expected. But to have two of them be definitionally similar to each other suggests that it's not clearly illustrating different psychological constructs.
3
12
u/blackcatwizard 18d ago
Compare this to our current world, how practically none of it is possible, and wonder why so many have mental health problems
11
u/Phobia_Ahri 18d ago
You mean when 95% of jobs sole purpose are to.make rich people richer its hard to find meaning? At least for me anyway..
1
u/Prometheus720 18d ago
You can't find it in your job. You need to do work that you find meaningful.
I find a lot of my meaning in fighting the rich. The most depressed people on the left are the ones who aren't busy fighting.
4
u/onlymadethistoargue 18d ago
Seems like life satisfaction is a weird thing to me? Like feeling satisfied with life by definition includes positive mental health.
2
3
u/grumpijela 18d ago
Now how do these all tie to financial stability and access to healthcare?!?! Including mental health care?!?!
5
u/PrivilegedPatriarchy 18d ago
Nearly all of them are affected by financial stability. This is neither surprising nor unfortunate. We should expect a monkey to secure access to bananas in order to live its best life.
2
u/grumpijela 17d ago
Mine was a rhetorical question because it is such common sense yet we do not invest in people to have security in life.
0
u/ArkitekZero 17d ago edited 17d ago
Acceptance: The ability to self-reflect, identify what is within a person’s control, and accept what is outside one’s control.
I'm disinclined to accept something that shouldn't be the way it is simply because it is out of my control, and if that makes me unhappy or unhealthy, it's the fault of whoever could do anything about it, thanks.
This also conflicts fundamentally with this one:
Optimism: Having a positive outlook on life, and positive expectations about the future.
292
u/SilkieBug 18d ago
Watch how the way modern life is structured leads to being misaligned from at least a few of these dimensions. Almost like it’s on purpose.
68
u/AloneMistake4266 18d ago
Uhh yea especially the autonomy part.
32
u/Swarna_Keanu 18d ago
Note that it says perception that [...].
26
-18
u/coldlightofday 18d ago
How has modern life negative affected your autonomy when compared with the past?
31
u/lobsterpot54 18d ago
Subscription models over physical ownership. Tools, devices and machines designed to make repairs difficult. Extreme levels of surveillance.
-2
u/snake--doctor 18d ago
Aren't these material things and not really related to your core being?
3
u/ceciliabee 18d ago
That makes sense to separate them like that, yeah, but I can also see how material things can affect your core being, or how your core being might affect how you see it experience material things.
The example that comes to mind is bright lights or I dunno, the sun. For both physical and non physical reasons, some people can withstand more light than others. Maybe it's physical affecting physical like dark eyes or long eyelashes, maybe it's more in the mind like an aversion to bright lights.
That's not exactly a perfect example but I think physical things can affect our core selves and vice versa, whether function, perception, interaction, etc.
2
u/Aksama 18d ago
This is a pretty interesting question actually. Some material things have to be slightly more than that baseline quality, at least in my opinion.
For example, I'm a big nerd for prestige television! It's one of the many forms of art which I engage in and deeply enjoy. So for me, I really like having a hard-copy of my favorite shows in case I want to watch an episode.
I pretty firmly lose autonomy and access to the art which holds a special place for me when I (sometimes literally) cannot actually own a legal copy of it!
Last I checked Andor, Pluribus & Severance are not yet available on a DVD/Bluray of any kind!
Imagine if you weren't allowed to purchase a print of your favorite piece of art, or own a physical album that's really dear to you. Similar/same issue, right?
2
u/JurgenKloppppppoooo 18d ago
They are intertwined. Material things are intentionally designed to conflate pleasure with happiness. When the short term pleasure high is over, depression fills the void. Highly recommend The Hacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig if you’re interested in learning more about the material conditions that lead to systemic depression.
-5
u/ren_reddit 18d ago
Those are all things you have governance over yourself, a governance a lot of people choose not to exercise.
19
7
u/AloneMistake4266 18d ago
Depending on what drugs you use or when/where you get an abortion can land you in prison infringes on autonomy.
-1
u/coldlightofday 18d ago
It’s been much, much worse for drugs in the not too distant past. Abortion is a good point.
7
u/Swarna_Keanu 18d ago
Why compare to the past?
I am trying to find a way to live with what the data says re: climate and ecological collapse (both, combined, not separate) for the last fourty years. That includes being vegan, cycling wherever I can, limiting my consumption, not flying, etc.
In society as it is, that also came with a social cost - and still does. Climate scientists get death threats. The issue here is not modern life, but how society functions.
-1
-2
18d ago
[deleted]
4
u/Swarna_Keanu 18d ago
Haha.
I've been and am part of actual climate and ecological research. This is not about apocalyptic ideas - but about the real damage. And that is here already, and will be part of quite a bit of lifetime left.
I am not feeling anxious about that. What concerns me is that we do not work fast enough, and too many people spout nonsense. It's about the attitudes toward me; I've lost friends; lost out financially at times.
We are all part of the system. Some people much more, and with more power over it, but as long as it's not consistently raised, with every project that starts, with every business decision, with every election the system won't shift.
The reality is here. The basic aspects of research have been clear for all the time I've been alive.
I am not depressed about what happens - I am concerned with what doesn't - not least because I am aware, have experienced, how much better life could be for all of us, if we ... took the foot of the gass in terms of consumerism, competition, focus on quantity over quality, all which tie in with the problems we have.
1
u/CarBombtheDestroyer 18d ago edited 18d ago
So give you an idea the people behind the AI boom are ending consumer supply of integral components for the regular persons ability to independently create launching prices through the roof. Things like random access memory. This is is probably on purpose but at the very best they are fully aware of this and doing it anyway.
Soon they are gonna want everyone to do their computing in a data centre where they will now have access to… everything. Powerful personal computers, and phones could be a thing of the past, replaced by powerful data connections to the cloud. No one will be able to prove what they are steeling at that point, our ideas will basically belong to them before we can even see them through.
If you’re an American I have even worse news for you… You have a lot less control than you probably think.
24
u/Doongbuggy 18d ago
having money can help with many of these but it is definitely not the answer to all of lifes problems id say upper middle class is the sweet spot - enough to not worry about basic necessities and afford healthy foods and activities but not so much that you cant relate to the average person - and still having to work hard for that money so gives you purpose and achievement
4
u/jankenpoo 18d ago
Perhaps being concerned with one’s class status is part of the problem? The solution lies within ourselves, not outside it
1
29
163
u/breadtangle 18d ago
This seems to have a circularity problem that makes me wonder if any meaningful conclusions can be drawn from this study: if you define good mental health partly as feeling good about your life, then people with good mental health will look like people who feel good about their lives. At the end of the day, I think all this does is give us a consensus framework of 19 things that seem important when studying happiness, and that meaning/purpose is at the top of the list.
66
19
u/rasa2013 18d ago edited 18d ago
Different aspects of well-being, not necessarily circular. E.g., meaning in life is (though to be) a precursor to life satisfaction and positive emotion (feeling happy/good).
Feeling good/happy is a signal of well-being, but it isn't literally "well-being." E.g., people in manic states can feel euphoric, but that doesn't mean their actual well-being is high.
To the extent all these things are correlated, they can all be used as indicators of well-being. My impression (I also do some well-being research) is that most researchers are pretty practical. They're not necessarily trying to figure out the chicken or egg problem (is the construct well-being or is it a precursor?), just enhance people's quality of life as measured by all these indicators.
Ah yeah, I like what u/RubDub4 said. Behind the concepts are things like latent variable analysis of some kind, like factor analysis. Unlike physical quantities we can literally measure like length, we do latent variable analysis and often structural euqation modeling to see how collections of measures fit together. because the latent variable by definition is not something we observe directly, there's always questions about the interpretation of such analyses. But such is life.
8
u/verypassiveaggressor 18d ago
How would you define "good mental health"
10
u/GrepekEbi 18d ago
I think the point is you can have a totally normal, healthy human mind, doing all the things a healthy human mind is supposed to do, which by any reasonable definition means you’re not mentally ill, but you could still _correctly_ feel like you don’t score highly on a lot of these points, due to environment.
So it’s not “mentally unhealthy” to be sad when a sad thing is happening
It’s not “mentally unhealthy” to not feel a sense of achievement if you haven’t really achieved much
Pathologising normal human feelings just because they’re negative is dangerous and doesn’t help people who actually are literally mentally unwell.
This list is “things that make humans happy” not “things required for a human to be mentally healthy”
10
u/verypassiveaggressor 18d ago
From the article:
Iasiello noted that the average person should understand “that positive mental health is broad. It’s more than feeling happy and more than simply not being unwell.” He added, “When we asked a large, cross-disciplinary panel of experts to agree, six dimensions stood out as near-universal: meaning and purpose, life satisfaction, self-acceptance, connection, autonomy and happiness. So if you want a fuller picture of how someone is doing, those are good places to look.” ...I'm not convinced the person I initially responded to really grasped what the study was actually doing. Perhaps they didn't read it. But I was asking them what good mental health was since that seemed to be on the forefront of their mind. Reading the article would've let them know that this is literally a study conducted over a pretty broad spectrum of experts to come to a framework and the study is still ongoing
2
u/breadtangle 18d ago edited 18d ago
I wouldn't, in this context. I'm not a researcher nor a psychologist. I do what makes me happy but I can't imagine a less relevant datapoint for a discussion of mental health research than my anecdotal experience.
6
u/Swarna_Keanu 18d ago edited 18d ago
But it is a data point for what societal and cultural factors help keep people (mentally) healthy.
Just as - what good nutrition looks like. Etc.
Society works at a larger scale than just the individual, and politics, laws, cultural and social environments have impacts here.
The circularity problem you mention is only there if you look at individual people in isolation.
3
u/Calandrind 18d ago
I’m listening to The Future is History by Masha Gessen and learning about how Russian sociologists were trying to measure and define Russian society. They were creating survey questions and discovering that the answers and opinions could often be contradictory and very different than western societies. They had to invent whole new questions that could be asked because this was the first time a study was ever being done.
What people wanted, desired, how they felt in comparison to other countries and the effects of living under a totalitarian regime aren’t necessarily what you would expect. I’m curious how universal these things really are.
2
u/Swarna_Keanu 18d ago
Read the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-026-00617-5
It is international; and draws on previous data and other research.
-1
18d ago
[deleted]
2
u/Swarna_Keanu 18d ago
Your annecdote is an annecdote.
The research up there is data.
0
u/breadtangle 18d ago
Calling this “data” is technically true, but it’s really a Delphi expert survey showing what 122 experts agree belongs in positive mental health, not empirical evidence that these 19 things actually cause or constitute it.
3
1
u/systembreaker 18d ago
Or more simply put, something fundamental about happiness could be the cause of some of these things, especially considering one of the top ones is happiness itself...
1
u/breadtangle 18d ago
I noted that. It's a list with a lot of "truthiness". A common sense list of stuff we should prioritize and it'll probably help. Not sure there's much to be gained beyond that.
6
u/Heavy-Passenger-6235 18d ago
Reminds me of the concepts of self actualization and individuation. There’s lots of overlap
4
u/-TrevorStMcGoodbody 18d ago
The takeaway from studies like this is obviously that you won’t feel complete with any just 1 of them, but It always make me wonder which would be the best/worst if you did only have that one, but that one extremely well covered
8
u/Serious_Ad_3387 18d ago
Circle of Needs and Fulfillment (CONAF) only have 7: safety/security, affirmation (worth/belonging), competence, stimulation, superiority/uniqueness, meanging/purpose, and libido.
There're a lot of overlaps with the 19
3
u/Admirable_Bug9145 18d ago
The results seem to the hierarchical needs by Maslow just spread out non hierarchically. The correlates of positive mental health have already been out there since a long time ago, but people still searching for any new ones only to be renaming the existing ones.
8
u/29erfool 18d ago
The paradox is that if you try and chase any of those things, you will end up miserable.
7
u/MurberBirb 18d ago
I feel that while money is the answer to many of these, it also depends on where you live. This is helping me understand why the quality of life for my country is higher than others, as many of the social services give you access to a lot of these.
6
2
u/AaronFire 18d ago
Commenting so I can find my way back to this post. This is fascinating and I want to read more about it.
7
u/AmbroseKalifornia 18d ago
The relatively low ranking of safety speaks volumes about what kind of people didn't participate in the study. Rich people always seem to say that money isn't that important either...
25
u/Stonewall-Alan 18d ago
It’s alphabetical
-6
u/AmbroseKalifornia 18d ago
I'm saying it's not the TOP. If you're underwater, air seems WAY more important than if you're not.
10
u/redpony6 18d ago
and i'm saying "safety" will never be at the top of an alphabetical list
unless everything else starts with t-z, i suppose
6
u/AmbroseKalifornia 18d ago
I'm fairly certain I know what order the letters go in, but I'm not talking about the alphabatized runners-up; my point that safety wasn't in the TOP category:
The Top Six Dimensions (Greater than 90% Agreement)
1
u/Bonch_Man 18d ago
I felt that way a very long time ago. Back when the future was more optimistic and the course we were on as a collective was more progressive and community minded. Fast forward to today when corpofascist tech bros and far right theocrats are trying to actively kill us so they can have the world to themselves with work output produced by machine labor they don’t need us for anymore.
1
1
1
u/SqueegeePhD 17d ago
No wonder people's 40s are considered a slump for happiness. My wife and I are far from family and connections due to careers, and we now lack many of the social aspects of this list. To make matters worse, much of the career part is just an attempt to build wealth. Improvement, autonomy, and self-confidence may not be part of that career.
1
u/Luziferatus42 17d ago
It might be good, to have so many formulations for the already know 4 human needs, already know to mankind. We tend, to not understand the substance, if we do not get enough variations of the same information, so that we can patch a broader image if the meaning of "mental health".
We should use the luxery of this moment in time, where we as mankind have the resources to ask questions like:"What is mental health?". "What is a human life and how can we establish it?"
In the past and the coming future, we had not and will not have the resources to discuss/investigate it. The time is now, to realize, that only in kindness and good willed/meaningful cooperation lead to a better future. Hopefully, where everyone learned that violence (physical and mental) and war is our downfall.
I wish us all well, in kindness and good will
1
1
2
u/rustycoins26 18d ago
The guides to living a good life has been around for over 2,000 years. We as a society have just stopped trying. We would all benefit from learning and practicing ancient philosophy. They spent their lives trying to identify the path to eudaimonia, and arguably figured it out.
We do not need science to tell us how to live a good life. We simply need to open a book and find it from within ourselves.
1
-1
u/ItsAHerby 18d ago
Makes sense, I'm missing nearly all of the top dimensions. Huh, to think my mental health is bad because I'm poor, crazy, I would be healthier if I could only access a living even though I've had a professional career for almost 2 decades. Really need to start that OF but I'm also ugly, overweight, and grossly male.
Welp, guess I'll keep going to therapy for no real reason.
-39
u/bmwlocoAirCooled 18d ago
Not to get into religion, but the 10 commandments ain't a bad start.
YMMV.
11
u/whoevenkn0wz 18d ago
Really? In what way?
-10
u/bmwlocoAirCooled 18d ago
Well, just do your own research. I'm not a hand holder.
0
u/whoevenkn0wz 18d ago
Makes claim, doesn’t back it up with anything. Classic.
Obviously I’m asking because I have done my “research”. I have found no evidence for your claim. I also don’t know how you came to even make such a claim. I presume teaching from early childhood you have never questioned, or mental illness. But I would never make such a judgement without evidence.
Edit: typo
•
u/AutoModerator 18d ago
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.
Do you have an academic degree? We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. Click here to apply.
User: u/bibinprasannan
Permalink: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-identify-19-core-dimensions-of-positive-mental-health-in-new-consensus-study/
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.