Integrative Well-Being Leads Our Attentional System: An Eye-Tracking Study

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.