In well-being research the term happiness is often used as synonymous with life satisfaction. However, little is known about lay people’s understanding of happiness. Building on the available literature, this study explored lay definitions of happiness across nations and cultural dimensions, analyzing their components and relationship with participants’ demographic features. Participants were 2799 adults (age range=30-60, 50% women) living in urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa and United States. They completed the Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation (EHHI), reporting, among other information, their own definition of happiness. Answers comprised definitions referring to a broad range of life domains, covering both the contextual-social sphere and the psychological sphere. Across countries and with little variation by age and gender, inner harmony predominated among psychological definitions, and family and social relationships among contextual definitions. Whereas relationships are widely acknowledged as basic happiness components, inner harmony is substantially neglected. Nevertheless, its cross-national primacy, together with relations, is consistent with the view of an ontological interconnectedness characterizing living systems, shared by several conceptual frameworks across disciplines and cultures. At the methodological level, these findings suggest the potential of a bottom-up, mixed method approach to contextualize psychological dimensions within culture and lay understanding.

Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyday life. In this preregistered meta-analysis, we synthesized the evidence for these daily associations between affect and alcohol use. We included individual participant data from 69 studies (N = 12,394), which used daily and momentary surveys to assess affect and the number of alcoholic drinks consumed. Results indicate that people are not more likely to drink on days they experience high negative affect, but are more likely to drink and drink heavily on days high in positive affect. People self-reporting a motivational tendency to drink-to-cope and drink-to-enhance consumed more alcohol, but not on days they experienced higher negative and positive affect. Results were robust across different operationalizations of affect, study designs, study populations, and individual characteristics. These findings challenge the long-held belief that people drink more alcohol following increases in negative affect. Integrating these findings under different theoretical models and limitations of this field of research, we collectively propose an agenda for future research to explore open questions surrounding affect and alcohol use.

Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it (EFRN, 2014). The flow concept was introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and interest in flow research is growing. However, to our best knowledge, no scoping review exists that takes a systematic look at studies on flow which were published between the years 2000 and 2016. Overall, 252 studies have been included in this review. Our review (1) provides a framework to cluster flow research, (2) gives a systematic overview about existing studies and their findings, and (3) provides an overview about implications for future research. The provided framework consists of three levels of flow research. In the first “Individual” level are the categories for personality, motivation, physiology, emotion, cognition, and behavior. The second “Contextual” level contains the categories for contextual and interindividual factors and the third “Cultural” level contains cultural factors that relate to flow. Using our framework, we systematically present the findings for each category. While flow research has made progress in understanding flow, in the future, more experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to gain deeper insights into the causal structure of flow and its antecedents and consequences.

This study aims to analyse: the relationship between socio-demographic variables and overall HRQoL and its domains; the predictor role of negative psychological dimensions (anxiety, depression and stress) and positive ones (subjective happiness, self-esteem and life satisfaction) on overall HRQoL and its domains. The sample consisted of 465 Portuguese students (53.5% girls), aged 13–18 years (M = 15.20, SD = 1.16). The students answered to the following measures: Kidscreen-27, Subjective Happiness Scale, Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale, Self-Esteem Rosenberg Scale and Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale-Children. Gender, age and chronic disease predicted perceptions of some HRQoL domains. The results showed that both negative and positive psychological dimensions predicted HRQoL and its domains. Depressive symptoms were a negative predictor and self-esteem a positive predictor of overall HRQoL and all of its domains. These results create opportunities for new insights into health and optimal functioning of adolescents from an ecological perspective.

Scientific research on leisure has proven its contribution to physical and psychological well-being in adolescents, especially regarding the practice of structured leisure activities. Leisure is considered a privileged context for adolescents to develop and learn several developmental skills, such as emotion regulation (ER). Nevertheless, the relationship between leisure and ER has been under-researched in adolescents. The present cross-sectional study aims to test a conceptual model concerning the relationship of leisure attitudes and leisure satisfaction with adolescents’ positive functioning and to explore the role of emotion self-regulation strategies in that relationship. Thus, we hypothesized that leisure attitudes would be a predictor of leisure satisfaction; leisure satisfaction would be a predictor of positive functioning dimensions (self-esteem; satisfaction with life; psychological well-being); and the relationship between leisure satisfaction and positive functioning dimensions would be mediated by emotion self-regulation strategies [cognitive reappraisal (CR) and expressive suppression (ES)]. The participants in this study were 654 adolescents from 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, aged between 14 and 19 years old. Data were collected using self-report questionnaires. The structural equation analysis showed that leisure attitudes are a significant predictor of leisure satisfaction, and that leisure satisfaction significantly predicts all positive functioning dimensions. CR mediated the relationship between leisure satisfaction and self-esteem. These findings highlight the importance of developing positive attitudes toward leisure to increase adolescents’ levels of leisure satisfaction. This study also supports the importance of leisure satisfaction for achieving adolescents’ positive functioning. Future studies should continue to examine the role of emotion self-regulation strategies on leisure, especially regarding CR.