Doing Well-Being: Self-Reported Activities Are Related to Subjective Well-Being

Activities and Subjective Well-Being (SWB) have been shown to be intricately related. However, the literature leaves an open question about whether individuals understand how their everyday activities relate to their SWB. The assessment of activities has been limited to predefined types of activities and/or closed-ended questions. In two studies, we examine the relationship between self-reported everyday activities and SWB, while allowing individuals to express their activities freely with open-ended responses analyzed with state-of-the-art (transformers-based) Natural Language Processing. In study 1 (N=284), Yesterday’s reported activities did not significantly relate to SWB, whereas activities reported as having the most impact on one’s SWB in the past four weeks had small significant correlations to most of the SWB scales (r = .14 – .23, p < .05). In Study 2 (N=295) individuals showed strong agreement in which activities they consider increasing versus decreasing SWB (AUC = .995), where words describing activities increasing SWB related to physically and cognitively active activities and social activities (“football”, “meditation”, “friends”), whereas words describing activities decreasing SWB mainly illustrated activity features related to imbalance (“too”, “much”, “enough”). Individuals reported both activities and descriptive words that reflect their SWB, where the activity words had generally small significant correlations to SWB (r =. 17 – .33, p < .05) and the words had generally strong correlations to SWB (r = .39 – 63, p < .001). We infer this correlational gap as a well-being – activity description gap and discuss potential explanations for the gap.