No Evidence for Differential Relations of Hedonic Well-Being and Eudaimonic Well-Being to Gene Expression: A Comment on Statistical Problems in Fredrickson et al. ()

Abstract

In a study of the relation between well-being and gene expression, Fredrickson et al. (2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 110 (33), 13684–13689) concluded that hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being have similar affective correlates but different gene transcriptional correlates in human immune cells. This comment addresses four statistical problems in Fredrickson et al.’s (2013) analyses. First, an idiosyncratic two-factor scoring rather than the documented and well-validated three-factor scoring was used for the instrument assessing well-being. Second, the analyses relating hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being to affect did not include the same variables as the analyses relating these two well-being variables to gene expression, invalidating any comparison between them. Third, hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being were highly correlated, resulting in untheorized and unrecognized suppression effects that accounted for their supposed differential relations with gene expression. Fourth, the method of computing p values for the one-sample t tests discarded information and violated the assumption of independence for those tests. These problems cast considerable doubt on the validity of Fredrickson et al.’s (2013) conclusions.