Psychological Well-Being and the Human Conserved Transcriptional Response to Adversity

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.