In plain language
Does living according to your values make you happier, or does being happy help you live according to your values? Approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy assume that acting on personal values promotes well-being, while the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion suggests the arrow may also run the other way. This study followed 468 Australian young people (about half female) from their final year of high school to roughly one year after leaving school, measuring their life satisfaction, positive and negative emotions, and four aspects of their values: how important their values were, how much social pressure they felt around them, how active they were in pursuing them, and how successfully they enacted them.
The results favoured the well-being-first direction over this one-year window. Students with higher life satisfaction in Grade 12 went on to report increases in value importance, values-driven activity, and success at living their values a year later. In contrast, valued action in Grade 12 did not predict later well-being once baseline well-being was taken into account. The two also moved together over time: young people whose values became more important, who felt less pressured, and who got better at enacting their values reported more happiness, less sadness, and a more satisfying life across the transition out of school.
The findings suggest that if young people are to find the sense of meaning and direction that values provide, they also need to feel satisfied with their lives — supporting their well-being may itself help them build a values-driven life as they enter adulthood.
Key findings
- Life satisfaction in Grade 12 predicted increases in value importance, values-driven activity, and successful enactment of values one year after leaving school.
- Valued action in Grade 12 did not predict later well-being once baseline levels of well-being were statistically controlled.
- Changes in values and well-being were correlated over time: increased success at enacting values went with increased positive affect.
- Increasing success and decreasing perceived social pressure around values were associated with greater life satisfaction; increasing pressure and decreasing success were associated with greater negative affect.
- Values were predicted by life satisfaction but not by positive emotion, consistent with a broaden-and-build account in which well-being facilitates valued action.
- The study assessed four distinct dimensions of valuing — importance, perceived pressure, activity, and successful enactment — in 468 young people across the school-to-adulthood transition.
How to cite
APA
Williams, K. E., Ciarrochi, J., & Heaven, P. C. L. (2014). Relationships between valued action and well-being across the transition from high school to early adulthood. The Journal of Positive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.920404
BibTeX
@article{williams2014relationships,
title = {Relationships between valued action and well-being across the transition from high school to early adulthood},
author = {Williams, Kathryn E. and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Heaven, Patrick C. L.},
journal = {The Journal of Positive Psychology},
year = {2014},
doi = {10.1080/17439760.2014.920404}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.