The happy wanderer: exploring the relationship between thoughts and well-being

Schneider, Luc (2022) The happy wanderer: exploring the relationship between thoughts and well-being. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

The relationship between what we think about and how we feel is central to the human experience. To understand this relationship is essential to the creation of impactful well-being enhancing interventions. In this thesis, we explore the relationship between thoughts and well-being, and we assess the impact of a simple well-being enhancing intervention. In chapter 1, we discuss how thoughts ought to be incorporated into models that outline the main determinants of well-being. We present a model that argues that thoughts are direct predictors of well-being, and that this relationship is moderated by individual-specific characteristics and contextual factors. In chapter 2, we present the experience sampling dataset that we use to explore this model in ecologically valid, day-to-day settings. In chapter 3, we explore the direct relationship between thoughts and well-being, showing not only that thoughts predict, but also that they can be said to cause changes in experiential measures of happiness and worthwhileness. In chapter 4, we explore how the direct relationship between thoughts and well-being is moderated by individual-specific characteristics. We show that the relationship between thoughts and our experiential measures of well-being is better captured when accounting for unobserved individual-specific factors, and that Big 5 personality traits can explain some of this individual-specific variation in the relationship between thoughts and experienced worthwhileness. In chapter 5, we explore how the relationship between thoughts and well-being differs depending on what activity people are engaged in and depending on who they are with. We show that context matters in terms of how people experience their thoughts. What people do and who they are with affect what kind of thoughts they report, as well as how these thoughts are associated with their well-being. Finally, in chapter 6, we assess the effectiveness of our experience sampling data collection tool as a well-being enhancing intervention in and of itself. We show that asking people to repeatedly report their thoughts, well-being and associated context reduces their anxiety across three different Randomised Controlled Trials. We discuss practical implications of this and of our exploration of thoughts and well-being for intervention designers, as well as implications for the broader well-being and thoughts literature.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2022 Luc Schneider
Library of Congress subject classification:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Sets:	Departments > Psychological and Behavioural Science
Supervisor:	Dolan, Paul
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4550

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