Year: 2026
Type: editorial
Abstract: Differences in wellbeing: Current and future directions ☆ In light of major demographic trends, like ageing populations, rising longevity, growing inequality, and the aftershocks of a global pandemic, building and maintaining wellbeing is one of the most important societal challenges of our time.People who feel well function better, are less susceptible to mental illness, and are better able to use their full potential.They also facilitate social innovation by forming stronger and more lasting relationships.Wellbeing is associated with a range of positive life outcomes, including longevity (James et al., 2019; Steptoe, 2019; Zaninotto & Steptoe, 2019), fewer behavioral and emotional problems (Agteren & Iasiello, 2020; Baselmans et al., 2018), and benefits across social and occupational domains, such as educational achievement, relationships, and productivity at work (Geijsen & Bartels, 2026; Lyubomirsky et al., 2005; Maccagnan et al., 2019; Oswald et al., 2015).Facilitating and building wellbeing would therefore not only improve individual (health) outcomes and reduce economic and healthcare burdens, but also nurture the resilience, creativity, and adaptability that our collective challenges demand (DiMaria et al., 2020; McCartney et al., 2025).Wellbeing, in other words, is not merely a pleasant outcome.It is a catalyst.And yet, while wellbeing has repeatedly been shown to be linked to positive life outcomes, surprisingly little is known about the causes of differences in wellbeing between people, or about the catalyzing effects that wellbeing can have.Most of what dominates the public conversation rests on (country) averages and comparisons of groups or societal and economic incentives for a happier population (e.g., the World Happiness Report, the OECD Better Life Index, national wellbeing budgets).These approaches have their value, but they tend to treat individual variation as noise around a mean.The premise of this special issue is the opposite, i.e., that this variation is not noise, but the central feature worth understanding and explaining.Why do some people feel well and function well, even under circumstances that leave others struggling?Answering that question requires us to cross disciplinary boundaries and to resist one-size-fits-all thinking or group comparisons, which is almost always a simplification of a far more interesting complexity of reality.It requires us to look beyond mean levels, to take seriously the interplay between genes and environments, to follow wellbeing across the lifespan and across timescales, and to integrate the many layers of influence (biological, psychological, social, and societal) that converge in a single person's evaluation of feeling well and functioning well.The fifteen contributions to this special issue Differences in Wellbeing: Current and Future Directions do exactly this.Assembled here, they show where the field currently stands and where it might go next.
Source: MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society)
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212463946