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The science of well-being lives at the heart of positive psychology. While the field has been around for 20 years, positive psychologists still face the challenge of finding optimal measurements of well-being. The PERMA framework (Seligman, 2011; 2018) can provide for a measurement model, but its added value in terms of being distinct from the already established measurement scale of Subjective Well-being (SWB; Deiner et al., 1999) has been under debate (Goodman et al., 2018). However, certain characteristics of PERMA make it unsuited for traditional factor analysis. In this paper we argue that a network approach is more suitable to understand the interrelational nature among the components of PERMA. We begin our investigation of PERMA by replicating Goodman and colleagues (2018) work. We then fit PERMA and two additional components to a network model. We then show how the components PERMA and SWB are distinct using exploratory graphical analysis. Our results show that while PERMA and SWB measure the same “type” of well-being, PERMA provides a measure that helps us understand the relationships that make up well-being that we refer to as the web of well-being.

Recent debates in the Journal of Positive Psychology about the nature and usefulness of PERMA have created confusion about its contribution toward the understanding and prediction of well-being. Th...

In family contexts, individuals are embedded in networks of relationships. Social network analysis provides a unique framework to investigate family relationships as interrelated networks above and beyond dyadic familial relationships. In the current paper, we used the notion of triadic closure to investigate how various configurations of family networks, classified by their relationship ties, differ in predicting adolescents' experiences of loneliness. We classified different types of network structures based on whether all 3 family members (i.e., child, mother, father) shared high-quality relationships with one another (closed) or whether 1 or more low quality ties existed in the family triad (open). Results indicated that, compared with adolescents in families containing 1 or more poor-quality ties, adolescents in families containing all high-quality relational ties experienced lower levels of loneliness, above and beyond the impact of gender, parents' education and mental health, and family income. Simply put, adolescents' experiences of loneliness is not tied to the number of high-quality relationships they experience within the family but rather is dependent on the presence of high-quality relationships among all family ties. With the introduction of 1 low-quality relationship within a family triad, additional low-quality relationships appear to make little difference. In line with family systems theory, our examination of the family as a whole, rather than as a summative combination of smaller relationships, indicates that a closed family structure is important for protecting adolescents against experiences of loneliness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Everyday life presents many experiences that can make people feel connected to another and leave them feeling loved. We conducted two ecological momentary assessment studies (N = 52 and N = 160) to examine people's subjective perceptions of the impact of these experiences by capturing the extent to which they felt loved at several randomly sampled times during their daily life. Individual differences in loving feelings were characterized by baseline levels, within-person variabilities, and slow and fast time scale indicators of change. Results showed that there were considerable individual differences in these characteristics and these individual differences related systematically to both psychological well-being and personality: across two studies, higher felt love baseline levels were related to greater psychological well-being as well as to higher Extraversion personality scores, while people scoring high on Neuroticism showed lower baseline levels.