Successful Outcomes, Fulfilment, and Positive Affect: Establishing Facets of Eustress Across Real-Life Challenging Situations.

Abstract

Establishing the features associated with eustress-the positive experience of a challenging situation-is essential for understanding and fostering eustress effectively in applied settings. Using the Situated Assessment Method, we conducted a pre-registered study in which 251 UK adults evaluated eustress in 20 real-life challenging situations (e.g., "Give a public speech in front of a large audience"). Participants also evaluated nine processes that potentially influence eustress in these situations, taken from the Comprehensive Hierarchical construct of Eustress, CHE (e.g., successful outcomes, fulfilment, positive affect). Finally, in a multilevel design, participants completed unsituated trait measures for eustress, distress, and stress mindset. Reliable individual differences were observed in average eustress judgments across situations (a trait-level measure), along with substantial situation effects and a large individual by situation interaction. The nine influential processes correlated strongly with eustress across situations, indicating high construct and content validity (explaining a median variance of 83% in individual-level regressions). Individual eustress averaged across situations correlated with trait eustress and trait stress mindset but was unrelated to trait distress. Exploratory factor analyses on situated and trait measures derived from the CHE model revealed a dominant general factor of eustress, accompanied by modest multidimensional structure. These findings align with existing theories of stress, contrast different types of eustress measurement, and provide rich descriptive profiles for personalized context-sensitive interventions to foster eustress when desirable.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11205-026-03909-6.