Integrated Approach to Personality and Well-being

The research described in this issue were supported by the Polish National Science Centre Grant NSC 2013/11/B/HS6/01135. This special issue of the Polish Psychological Bulletin is devoted to well-being (WB) considered within the context of an integrated approach to personality. We believe the articles in this special issue increase our understanding of well-being in two ways. First, they provide new knowledge about the functions of eudaimonic well-being and subjective well-being and about the relationships between them. Second, they extend our understanding of individual differences in well-being by examining relationships between subjective well-being (SWB) and personality in a broader meaning, an integrated approach to personality. The research described in the papers of this special issue examined if characteristic adaptations (socio-cognitive personality constructs) mediate relationships between basic, biologically determined traits, and SWB. This possibility was suggested by McCrae (1996; McCrae & Costa, 1999; McCrae & Suttin, 2018) in the Five Factor Theory of Personality (FFT) and by McAdams and Pals (2006) in the New Big Five Theory of Personality. Both of these theories include two components of personality: traits and socio-cognitive constructs. In these models, traits are defined as they have been traditionally, as predispositions in thinking, feeling, and behavior that are relatively constant across time. Socio-cognitive constructs (e.g., values, attitudes, skills, beliefs about self, other people and world) concern individual differences that develop in the course of the lifespan as a result of experience, and such constructs are called “characteristic adaptations” in both models (McAdams & Pals, 2006; McCrae & Costa, 1999; McCrae & Suttin, 2018). Additionally, McAdams and Pals (2006) suggest that relationships between well-being and both traits and characteristic adaptations may vary as a function of various components included in their model (such as traits, characteristic adaptations or environmental factors). Despite the advantages these two theories provide over previous trait-only theories, they do not integrate concepts or constructs of personality that have been developed in various domains. Nowadays, a strong need for developing a consensual and integrative paradigm in personality psychology has been recognized (e.g., Back, 2017). A call for more dynamic models of personality (including emotion-regulation and self-regulation processes as constructs of personality) was also called for during the last conference of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences (ISSID 2017). The present papers focus on well-being. Interest in and research on WB has increased meaningfully over the past two decades in part because well-being is a universal goal (e.g., Diener & Diener, 1996). Contemporary research focuses on two types of well-being, subjective well-being, a construct that was introduced by Diener (1984), and eudaimonic well-being. SWB refers to a broad spectrum of phenomena, including different affective (momentary and long-term) evaluations and cognitive (general and more field-specific) appraisals of one’s own life (Diener, Scollon, & Lucas, 2003). Much of the research on the antecedents of SWB has found that individual differences in SWB (represented by Life satisfaction, Positive and Negative Affect) are related to individual differences in basic biologically conditioned personality traits (“happy personality”, Costa & McCrae, 1980; DeNeve & Cooper, 1998; Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999), in temperament traits (Bojanowska & Zalewska, 2017), and to configurations of temperament traits (types) responsible for Anna M. Zalewska* John B. Nezlek** Mariusz Zięba*