Keywords

To the degree that flourishing and its related concepts like well-being and thriving are psychological constructs, they are produced somehow by the brain. This is not to say that flourishing is not also an important construct in the domain of philosophy, economics and other related fields, but rather that if one cares about the “neuroscience of flourishing” one must first boil down its definition to only feature psychological concepts and then build a definition based on what the brain does.

Flourishing is the presence of “positive feelings and positive functioning in life” (Keyes, 2002, p. 208). In this paper, I briefly review a common perspective on the neuroscience of flourishing as a trait of the person and reflected by particular forms of brain structure and/or patterns of neural functioning. I also briefly review another perspective on flourishing that emphasizes the brain as doing the things flourishing people do. I spend more time, however, fully fleshing out a third perspective, which is to think of the brain as representing the degree to which the human it belongs to believes they are flourishing. Further, I will describe how the brain represents the facets of psychological flourishing common and unique to hedonic well-being, the positive emotional aspects of flourishing including subjective well-being and happiness, and eudaimonic well-being, living well and actualizing one’s potential (Huppert & So, 2013; Ryff & Keyes, 1995; Seligman, 2011).

1 Perspective 1: The Brain as Reflecting “Trait Flourishing”

Many psychologists suggest that, even though flourishing can be thought of as the state of an individual at a particular point in time, it has trait-like qualities. Diener and Lucas (1999), for example, suggest that subjective well-being, the affective and cognitive components of flourishing as defined by the individual, is fairly stable across the life span. They and others also provide evidence that subjective well-being is correlated with personality traits. For example, extraversion and neuroticism are consistently positive and negative predictors, respectively, of subjective well-being (Diener & Lucas, 1999).

When examining how the brain represents the trait of flourishing, researchers typically correlate some form of well-being derived from questionnaires with some form of brain structure or functioning. One measure of brain structure is voxel-based morphometry, which measures the density of gray matter in a particular region. Gray matter density often, but not always, positively correlates with increased performance of whatever function is associated with that region (Kanai & Rees, 2011). Researchers have found that subjective well-being is related to gray matter density in regions associated with self-oriented imagery and memory such as the precuneus (Sato et al., 2016), and in regions associated with emotion and emotion regulation such as the orbitofrontal cortex (Kong et al., 2019) and rostral anterior cingulate cortex (Matsunaga et al., 2016). In addition, those investigating eudaimonic well-being have found it be correlated with gray matter density in the insula (Lewis et al., 2014), a region associated with producing conscious feeling states associated with the body.

Another trait-like neural metric that researchers have used to investigate well-being is resting state functional connectivity, which reflects the degree to which brain regions’ activity correlate with other brain regions’ activity when people are not doing a particular task. Researchers have found that there is increased resting state functional connectivity between the rostral prefrontal cortex and superior parietal lobule for those exhibiting high vs. low post-traumatic growth (Fujisawa et al., 2015), which the authors interpreted as reflecting differences in executive functioning. Researchers also found that the left middle temporal gyrus and fusiform gyrus were hubs of a functional network that was stronger in people who were high vs. low in flourishing (Goldbeck et al., 2019), which they interpreted as possibly reflecting greater memory-based social day dreaming.

There are some benefits of assessing the relationship between trait-like neural metrics and flourishing. If flourishing has components of it that are stable, and possibly genetically heritable (Baselmans et al., 2019), then these components are most likely captured by these trait-like neural metrics (Pennington et al., 2000). This approach is similar to that taken when investigators characterize the trait-like neural metrics of various forms of psychopathology such as depression (Gotlib & Hamilton, 2008) and anxiety (Etkin et al., 2009). Thus, this approach allows researchers to draw parallels and contrasts in the stable neural make-up of both flourishing and non-flourishing traits.

There are, however, challenges with this approach to examining the neural basis of flourishing. First, due, in part, to inconsistencies across studies in both psychological and neural measurement, the relationships between the two are inconsistent as well. Indeed, whereas one study found that lower subjective well-being was related to more connectivity in the default-mode network (a brain network characterized by its prominence during resting states and reduction in activation during tasks; Luo et al., 2016), another study found that greater eudaimonic well-being was associated with more default-mode network connectivity (Luo et al., 2017). Although these forms of well-being can be differentiated, they are probably not so distinguishable as to be supported by opposite patterns of neural functional organization. Even when the well-being metrics are similar, there are still discrepancies in their relation with these trait-level neural metrics. For example, Sato et al. (2016) found subjective happiness to positively correlate with gray matter density in the precuneus, whereas Kong et al. (2015) found it to negatively correlate with gray matter density in the precuneus.

Second, even when researchers conduct systematic reviews of the findings in order to highlight any consistent relationships (M. L. King, 2019), it is difficult to interpret these findings without postulating how these brain regions and networks function to contribute to flourishing and well-being. For example, that the middle temporal gyrus and fusiform gyrus were hubs of a functional network for high flourishing individuals (Goldbeck et al., 2019) required the authors to interpret this pattern as “increased memory-based social daydreaming.” This interpretation is possible, but almost certainly not a function that the researchers thought, a priori, strongly characterizes flourishing individuals. So these trait brain metrics may be helpful as a starting point for psychologists, but are not yet sufficient for understanding how flourishing is produced by the brain.

2 Perspective 2: The Brain as Doing “Flourishing Behaviors”

Modern theories of personality suggest that personality traits are best described as a collection, or density distribution, of trait-relevant behaviors (Fleeson, 2001), interpretations and motivational processes (Jayawickreme et al., 2018). For example, although extraverts do not always act extraverted, they do extravert-relevant behaviors most of the time, and are motivated to do extravert-relevant behaviors and interpret the world in an extraverted way. Neuroscience perspectives on personality (DeYoung, 2015) suggest that the brain is the source of this interpretation, motivation, and (production of) behavior and personality consists of reliable patterns of these processes. For example, extraversion is correlated with cortical volume in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC; DeYoung et al., 2010) perhaps because the vmPFC makes positive interpretations of the environment (Roy et al., 2012) and motivates people to obtain things they feel positively about (Nakao et al., 2012) (Table 1).

Table 1 Implications of this affective neuroscience perspective (ANP) on flourishing
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This approach can work if researchers focus on one particular aspect of flourishing and identify the interpretational, motivational, and behavioral functions produced by the brain to support that aspect. For example, self-determination theory (SDT) posits that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are fundamental psychological needs and must be satisfied for someone to flourish (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Therefore, one might propose that people flourish when they exhibit greater activation/density/functional connectivity in regions of the brain that support intrinsic motivation for autonomy, competence, and/or relatedness (Reeve & Lee, 2018). In another example, participants high in self-reported meaning in life exhibited enhanced functional connectivity in the medial temporal lobe, which the researchers interpreted as supporting mental simulation of the past and future (Waytz et al., 2015). The researchers then showed through a series of experiments that mentally simulating the past and future caused increases in self-reported meaning.

The primary challenge with this perspective when applied to flourishing is that, unlike personality, flourishing is often treated as an outcome or reflection of various behaviors, interpretations, and motivations instead of the causal agent of those processes (Huppert & So, 2013; Ryff & Keyes, 1995; Seligman, 2011). This leaves open the possibility of multiple causes of each of the behaviors, interpretations, and motivations that then lead to or constitute flourishing. For example, having good relationships is an aspect of flourishing, but there are multiple behaviors that lead to having good relationships and the sources of these behaviors may reside in very different regions of the brain. This multiple-cause of a single effect might also explain the inconsistencies when attempting to find neural correlates of trait flourishing (Perspective 1).

3 Perspective 3: How the Brain Represents Flourishing

To address the issues above, I propose that a neuroscience of psychological flourishing begins with understanding how the brain represents flourishing (Fig. 1). This perspective, therefore, addresses the subjective aspect of flourishing—those conceptions of flourishing that are primarily based on people’s report of their flourishing or well-being directly, or report of their evaluation of those parts of their life (e.g., meaning, relationships) that are thought to constitute flourishing. This subjective approach avoids the multiple-cause single effect problem by suggesting that there may be one set of brain regions that form a common system for “believing one is flourishing” even if there are multiple ways of obtaining flourishing. However, this perspective is inconsistent with more objectivist views of flourishing that stem from Aristotle’s original writings (Aristotle, 1986), which suggest that one cannot be flourishing if, objectively, one’s life is not going well or living up to its full potential (Brülde, 2007). Contributing to this subjective vs. objective debate is a little out of the scope of this chapter except to say that the brain is inherently subjective so a neuroscience of flourishing must approach it as such; however, my perspective allows for (and probably agrees with) objectivists thinking that a neuroscience approach to flourishing does not capture its entirety.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Three possible perspectives on investigating the neuroscience of flourishing. vmPFC ventromedial prefrontal cortex

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3.1 Believing One is Flourishing is about Making Positive Evaluations

My neuroscientific perspective on psychological flourishing is that the brain believes it’s flourishing when it makes positive evaluations of life events, the self, goals, and relationships. This approach is drawn from research showing that many of the evaluations that people make about their life that reflect good well-being share a strong latent positive dimension (Caprara et al., 2010). In the following section, I describe how the components of flourishing can be reframed as positive evaluations of various aspects of peoples’ lives.

Life Circumstances

Positive evaluations of circumstances that are currently drawing one’s attention are called “positive appraisals” (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003) and are theorized to cause, in part, positive feelings, which are a critical element in almost all theories of well-being and flourishing (Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002; Seligman, 2011). Life circumstances can also be more global and stable and less about individual events. Positive evaluations of current global life circumstances form the basis for “life satisfaction,” the cognitive component of subjective well-being and flourishing (Diener et al., 1985). Positive evaluations of future global life circumstances form the basis for optimism (Scheier & Carver, 1985), a trait often included in definitions of flourishing (Huppert & So, 2013).

Self

Positive evaluations of the global self are the basis for high self-esteem (Brown et al., 2001). Within self-esteem there are also different domains that map onto various facets of flourishing. Positive evaluations of one’s ability to accomplish goals are reflected in one’s sense of competence (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Positive evaluations of one’s self in a social context include one’s likability and perceived social inclusion (Leary et al., 1995).

Relationships

Quite simply, having good relationships is a fundamental aspect of flourishing (Huppert & So, 2013; Ryff & Keyes, 1995; Seligman, 2011) and knowing one has good relationships requires making positive evaluations of close others as well as the relationships with those close others (Leary et al., 1995; Martz et al., 1998).

Goals

The trickier aspects of flourishing to explain with this positive evaluation approach are forms of eudaimonic well-being, such as meaning, purpose, and autonomy, which are sometimes, but not always correlated with positive emotional hedonic well-being (Kashdan et al., 2008). However, there is evidence to suggest that eudaimonic well-being is also about having positive evaluations of aspects of one’s life—specifically, positive evaluations of one’s goals and goal pursuit. Some of the more popular “meaning in life” measures, for example, include items that feature positive evaluations of goals such as “I regard my ability to find a meaning, purpose, or mission in life as very great” (PIL; Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964). Indeed, some studies have found that meaning in life is predicted by positive evaluations of one’s goals as well as positive mood (L. A. King et al., 2006), which can reflect positive evaluations of one’s progress in pursuit of life goals (Carver, 2015). Relatedly, one’s positive evaluation of one’s freedom to pursue goals is reflected in feelings of autonomy and contributes to intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000), both key aspects of flourishing.

3.2 Positive Evaluations Are Made by the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC)

In my neuroscience of flourishing perspective, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is the brain region mainly responsible for making positive evaluations of life circumstances, the self, relationships, and goals, and therefore primarily responsible for people’s beliefs about their flourishing. The vmPFC is a member of the mesolimbic dopamine system along with the nucleus accumbens and other cortical and subcortical regions. Among the functions of the mesolimbic dopamine system is to attach motivational importance to rewarding stimuli that positively reinforce behavior (Berridge & Robinson, 2003). Therefore, this system is implicated in making positive evaluations of external stimuli (Kühn & Gallinat, 2012; Sescousse et al., 2013). Although the vmPFC and nucleus accumbens are often co-activated in studies examining reward processing (Sescousse et al., 2013), the vmPFC is more related to processing higher-order secondary rewards (Sescousse et al., 2013) and making contextual positive evaluations (Roy et al., 2012). Also, the vmPFC makes positive evaluations that are domain-independent, meaning that it creates a “common currency” of positive evaluations in order to compare the value of stimuli/events in different domains (Rangel & Hare, 2010). Therefore, I propose that the vmPFC makes positive evaluations across the different life domains that are relevant for flourishing.

Life Circumstances

Perhaps the most evidence for the role of vmPFC in positive evaluations comes from studies in which people rate the subjective pleasantness or liking of various stimuli (e.g., faces, odors, Kühn & Gallinat, 2012), which then can lead to positive feeling states. For example, the vmPFC is activated more to funny rather than unfunny cartoons (Admon & Pizzagalli, 2015) and is associated with people’s amusement to funny cartoons (Goel & Dolan, 2001). Beyond evaluating simple external stimuli in the moment, the vmPFC is also associated with people’s felt enjoyment for engaging life activities (Mitchell et al., 2010). When evaluating future life circumstances, there is evidence that the vmPFC is associated with simulating future positive events (Benoit et al., 2014) and generating optimistic beliefs of possible future adverse events (Kuzmanovic et al., 2016). Lastly, the vmPFC is also associated with generating positive re-evaluations of negative events and stimuli (Doré et al., 2017) and evaluating stressors as positive (Tobia et al., 2017), both important aspects of stress resilience (Kalisch et al., 2014).

Self

The vmPFC is consistently implicated when people make positive evaluations of various facets of their selves, such as thinking about their positive self-relevant traits (Chavez et al., 2017) and associating positive traits with themselves (Frewen et al., 2013). The vmPFC, therefore, is a key region in representing self-esteem (D’Argembeau, 2013) and is associated with updating self-esteem in response to unexpectedly positive social feedback (Will et al., 2017) and maintaining positive self-esteem when threatened (Hughes & Beer, 2013). In addition to generating positive evaluations of the trait self, the vmPFC also generates positive evaluations of episodic representations of the self, such as memories (Speer & Delgado, 2017).

Relationships

The vmPFC also generates positive evaluations of others and of one’s relationships with others. Meta-analyses have shown that the vmPFC is activated when people are processing information about close others (Van Overwalle, 2009) and that this vmPFC activation is more related to the perceived closeness of the others than to perceived similarity in one’s traits with others (Krienen et al., 2010). The vmPFC has also been shown to track with people’s sense of relatedness as reflected by their belongingness to an in-group (Morrison et al., 2012) and affiliation with close family members (Rüsch et al., 2014).

Goals

Studies have shown that the vmPFC is associated with generating positive evaluations of simple goals like determining what to eat (Hare et al., 2008) as well as more meaningful, global goals like maintaining a sense of fairness and equality (Aoki et al., 2014). Although regions of the brain associated with executive functioning are more responsible for performing the operations related to goal pursuit (Berkman & Lieberman, 2009), the vmPFC represents the perceived autonomy with which one can pursue those goals. A meta-analysis showed that the vmPFC is reliably activated when people make intrinsically motivated decisions (Nakao et al., 2012), such as when people get to freely choose the objects that they employ in tasks (Murayama et al., 2010).

3.3 Refining this Neuroscience Approach to Flourishing

I have so far made the claim that the vmPFC is responsible for people’s beliefs that they are flourishing. In this next section, I discuss some refinements of this approach that address some of the nuances in the research on vmPFC functioning and flourishing.

Not All Positive Evaluations Are about Flourishing

The vmPFC generates positive evaluations, but the targets of those positive evaluations are not always relevant to flourishing. For example, the vmPFC also makes positive evaluations of erotic stimuli, money, and sugary food (Sescousse et al., 2013). Therefore, one might expect the vmPFC to be consistently featured in studies examining positive evaluations of flourishing elements, but if a study demonstrates vmPFC activation, it does not necessarily mean that the study in question featured elements of flourishing.

vmPFC as “Representing” Flourishing but not Necessarily “Doing” Flourishing

Importantly, the claims I make in perspective 3 about the vmPFC representing beliefs about one’s flourishing do not necessarily suppose that the vmPFC is also involved in doing the behaviors that lead to flourishing (as reflected by perspective 2). For example, although the vmPFC is involved in reflecting on engaging activities (Mitchell et al., 2010), vmPFC activation actually decreases when people are in the midst of those engaging activities (Ulrich et al., 2016). Also, although the vmPFC represents the positive evaluation of goals and of one’s autonomy, it is not always involved with goal pursuit. That being said, the vmPFC is sometimes involved in the motivations/behaviors that one might presume would lead to flourishing, such as making altruistic charitable donations (Moll et al., 2006). Therefore, when investigating the neuroscience of flourishing, it is important to distinguish “beliefs about flourishing,” which I propose reliably involves the vmPFC, from “behaviors/motivations that contribute to flourishing,” which requires identifying the brain regions responsible for producing those specific behaviors/motivations and may or may not involve the vmPFC.

4 Implications

Integrating and Distinguishing Between Metrics of Flourishing

There is much debate over the independence of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being with the least provocative stance being that it appears as if the two forms are correlated to a substantive extent (Kashdan et al., 2008), but that each may provide distinctive value in understanding the entirety of psychological well-being and flourishing (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Although a full treatment of this debate is beyond the focus of this chapter, this positive evaluation perspective might offer some explanatory power for the relation between eudaimonic and hedonic well-being.

If, as I propose, positive evaluations are common to both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, then these evaluations could form the basis of any shared variance between the two types of well-being (Caprara et al., 2010). Positive evaluations, however, do not always lead to positive feelings (Garrett & Maddock, 2006). Although positive evaluations are necessary for generating positive feelings, positive feelings arise when those positive evaluations are particularly important, urgent, intense, enduring and lead to higher rather than lower arousal (Frijda et al., 1992; Grandjean et al., 2008). Therefore, it may be that both versions of well-being are based on positive evaluations, but that hedonic well-being also features these other factors that are necessary for producing positive feelings, whereas eudaimonic well-being may not (although it could).

Forming the Basis for Simplified Versions of Psychological Flourishing that Can then Be Related Directly to Brain Function/Structure

If one’s goal is to understand flourishing from a neuroscience perspective, then psychological measures of flourishing should represent as closely as possible the mental operations that the brain performs. This positive evaluation approach aims to provide the background to create just that type of measure (e.g., Caprara et al., 2012). One in which researchers can relate more specifically people’s positive evaluations of their life circumstances with the underlying brain structure and function supporting those positive evaluations, and then link these relationships to feelings of flourishing.

Building Flourishing by Building Positive Evaluations

One implication of this perspective is that building beliefs in flourishing would require people to increase positive evaluations of their life. Importantly, as some comprehensive positive psychology interventions have discovered (e.g., LEAF: J. T. Moskowitz et al., 2019), this can be accomplished by actually increasing the good things in people’s lives that naturally induce more positive evaluations (e.g., personal strengths, attainable goal setting, acts of kindness), and/or training people to adopt more positive evaluations of their current circumstances (e.g., noticing positive events, gratitude, positive reappraisal). Even when trying to build eudaimonic well-being by increasing meaningful circumstances in people’s lives (e.g., by building close relationships), ultimately, the brains of those people believe they are flourishing when they improve their positive evaluations of those meaningful circumstances (e.g., as occurs in gratitude interventions).

5 Summary

Flourishing is not only in the domain of psychology, but rightfully also belongs to other fields like philosophy, economics, sociology, etc. This neuroscientific perspective on psychological flourishing is not intended to replace these other theories of flourishing, but rather to provide a powerful way of understanding how the brain represents flourishing. Beyond just understanding how the brain works for its own sake, this positive evaluation perspective may also help explain the relationship between hedonia and eudaimonia as well as provide a basis for more targeted measures of flourishing. One of the keys of understanding how to have the good life is to understand how people believe (in their brain) that their life is good.