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We critically re-examine Fredrickson et al.'s renewed claims concerning the differential relationship between hedonic and eudaimonic forms of well-being and gene expression, namely that people who experience a preponderance of eudaimonic well-being have gene expression profiles that are associated with more favorable health outcomes. By means of an extensive reanalysis of their data, we identify several discrepancies between what these authors claimed and what their data support; we further show that their different analysis models produce mutually contradictory results. We then show how Fredrickson et al.'s most recent article on this topic not only fails to adequately address our previously published concerns about their earlier related work, but also introduces significant further problems, including inconsistency in their hypotheses. Additionally, we demonstrate that regardless of which statistical model is used to analyze their data, Fredrickson et al.'s method can be highly sensitive to the inclusion (or exclusion) of data from a single subject. We reiterate our previous conclusions, namely that there is no evidence that Fredrickson et al. have established a reliable empirical distinction between their two delineated forms of well-being, nor that eudaimonic well-being provides any overall health benefits over hedonic well-being.

Using data obtained from 4004 participants across eight countries (Canada, India, Japan, Korea, Poland, Slovakia, Uganda, and the U.S.), the factorial reliability, validity and structural/measurement invariance of a 30-item version of Expressions of Spirituality Inventory (ESI-R) was evaluated. The ESI-R measures a five factor model of spirituality developed through the conjoint factor analysis of several extant measures of spiritual constructs. Exploratory factor analyses of pooled data provided evidence that the five ESI-R factors are reliable. Confirmatory analyses comparing four and five factor models revealed that the five dimensional model demonstrates superior goodness-of-fit with all cultural samples and suggest that the ESI-R may be viewed as structurally invariant. Measurement invariance, however, was not supported as manifested in significant differences in item and dimension scores and in significantly poorer fit when factor loadings were constrained to equality across all samples. Exploratory analyses with a second adjective measure of spirituality using American, Indian, and Ugandan samples identified three replicable factors which correlated with ESI-R dimensions in a manner supportive of convergent validity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the meaning of the findings and directions needed for future research.