Abstract
Both hedonic and eudemonic components of well-being have been related to different variables such as mental and physical health, or social and economic factors. However, and despite the growing interest in the study of well-being, there is scarce evidence on the role that these components play in high cognitive processes such as attentional deployment towards emotional information. The aim of the present study is to disentangle the relation between current affect (state hedonic well-being), integrative well-being (i.e. hedonic, eudaimonic and social well-being), and attentional biases towards emotional information. Participants (N = 119) performed and eye-tracking task where they were asked to freely watch a series of 108 pairs of faces depicting happy, sad or neutral expressions in three types of conditions (i.e. happy vs. neutral, sad vs. neutral, and happy vs. sad faces). Results showed that both current affect and integrative well-being were associated with a maintenance attentional bias towards positive information (i.e. happy faces). Further, using bootstrapping mediation analysis, we found that the relation observed between current affect and positive maintenance attentional biases was totally mediated by integrative well-being levels. We discuss the relevance of the present results in the incipient research on cognitive and emotional processes and well-being.
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Notes
In the section below, we only report the mediational model for the Happy vs. Sad condition as the same results were found for the Happy vs. Neutral condition (see supplementary material for the mediational models for Happy vs. Neutral condition).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by MINECO PSI2014-61764 (EXPLORA), PSI2014-56303-REDT, PSI2015-69253-R and BES-2013-064936 grants. We also thank Prof. Almudena Duque, Teodoro Pascual, Natalia Poyato, Pablo Roca, Ines Nieto and Teresa Boemo and Agustin Hayes for their collaboration.
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Blanco, I., Vazquez, C. Integrative Well-Being Leads Our Attentional System: An Eye-Tracking Study. J Happiness Stud 22, 787–801 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00251-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00251-7