Meaning and well-being refer to how individuals evaluate, experience, and make sense of their lives. This broad area includes everyday judgments of life quality, deeper questions of purpose and fulfillment, and responses to existential concerns such as uncertainty, isolation, responsibility, and mortality.
In psychological research, these constructs are usually approached from several complementary perspectives. Subjective well-being focuses on happiness, life satisfaction, and perceived quality of life. Eudaimonic and existential well-being emphasize meaning, purpose, authenticity, personal growth, and coherent life direction. A related but distinct perspective examines existential concerns, including anxiety about death, isolation, meaninglessness, freedom, and the limits of human life.
These perspectives operate at different levels of analysis. Measures of life satisfaction and well-being capture how people evaluate their lives and functioning. Measures of existential well-being assess whether life feels meaningful, self-endorsed, and purposeful. Measures of existential concern and death anxiety focus on how individuals respond to fundamental uncertainties and limits.
Rather than representing competing frameworks, these approaches are best understood as complementary. Together, they provide a broader view of human functioning – from everyday satisfaction and quality of life to deeper questions of meaning, purpose, vulnerability, and mortality.
Assessment in this domain reflects this diversity. Some instruments provide global indices of well-being, others assess specific components such as life satisfaction, psychological needs, purpose, or existential fulfillment, and others capture existential anxiety, isolation, and death-related attitudes.
This domain is closely connected to mood, self-related processes, religion and spirituality, coping, and resilience, but remains distinct in its focus on how individuals evaluate, interpret, and situate their lives as a whole.