Terminology and the Well-being Literature

Summary & key facts

This paper is a short opinion piece about how researchers use words like “emotional well-being,” “mental well-being,” and “flourishing.” The authors argue that “emotional well-being” is only one part of mental health and that it should include things like being able to manage feelings and having emotions that fit the situation. They offer a simple map called WHO+ that puts mental well-being alongside physical, social, and spiritual well-being, and they say we should study specific parts of well-being (like purpose or emotion regulation) instead of treating everything as one big thing.

Key facts:

• The authors say “emotional well-being” is only a subset of mental well-being, so it does not cover all psychological parts of a person’s mind.
• They argue emotional well-being should include positive feelings, the ability to regulate emotions, and having emotions that are proportionate to what is happening in life.
• Mental or psychological well-being is itself only one part of overall human well-being, which also includes physical, social, and spiritual dimensions.
• The authors propose the WHO+ framework, which extends the World Health Organization’s idea of health to include spiritual well-being for people who value it.
• Because well-being covers many areas, any single measure or definition will be partial; this means researchers should study more specific aspects like purpose, life satisfaction, or emotion regulation.
• The paper notes that definitions of emotion and what makes an emotion “good” are still debated, so more theory and clearer language are needed in the field.

Topics

Health, psychology, and well-being Mental Health Research Topics Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction

Categories

Psychology Social Psychology Social Sciences

Tags

Epistemology Flourishing Linguistics Philosophy Psychology Psychotherapist Social psychology Sociology Terminology Well-being