An Affective Neuroscience Perspective on Psychological Flourishing: How the Brain Believes that Things Are Going Well

Abstract

AbstractTo establish a “neuroscience of flourishing” one must first boil down its definition to only feature psychological concepts and then build a definition based on what the brain does. The “trait” perspective treats flourishing as a trait of the person that is reflected by forms of brain structure and/or patterns of neural functioning. The “behavioral” perspective emphasizes the brain as doing the behaviors that flourishing people do. I spend more time fleshing out the “belief” perspective, which is the brain’s representions of ‘having flourishing. In particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) forms these flourishing beliefs by generating positive evaluations of life circumstances (e.g., life satisfaction), the self (e.g., self-esteem), relationships (e.g., relationship satisfaction), and goal progress (e.g., purpose). This “belief” neuroscientific perspective on flourishing is parsimonious, helps explain the overlapping yet distinct features of hedonic and eudaimonic flourishing, and forms the basis for neurologically constrained psychological models of flourishing.