Establishing a Comprehensive Hierarchical construct of Eustress (CHE)

Eustress as a positive response to challenging situations has received increasing attention across diverse literatures, reflecting its potential to improve wellbeing, work performance, and personal growth. In the process, eustress has been defined, measured, and manipulated in myriad ways, leading to fragmentation and vagueness. Because a unified and well-specified construct would significantly support eustress research, we developed one here. Rather than basing it on our subjective views, we developed it empirically, extracting 57 unique features of eustress from 80 theoretical, interventional, empirical, and psychometric articles. Organizing and interpreting these 57 features produced a Comprehensive Hierarchical construct of Eustress (CHE). According to CHE, eustress emerges from three sources: (1) successful goal-directed action, (2) experiencing the moment in an enjoyable, fulfilling, or meaningful manner, and (3) positive stable qualities of the individual. Within each source, CHE establishes specific facets of eustress hierarchically, which in turn organize the 57 eustress features extracted initially. Bibliometric analyses identified CHE's hierarchical elements addressed most often in the eustress literatures. Overall, these results suggest that eustress cannot be specified with a simple definition but should instead be viewed as a family resemblance structure having statistical properties. Rather than taking a single form, eustress manifests itself as diverse states during successful goal-directed action and fulfilling momentary experience. Regularly producing eustress in these manners likely establishes CHE's trait-like qualities for generating eustress effectively on future occasions. Interestingly, these qualities overlap highly with well-established elements of wellbeing, suggesting that wellbeing contributes to eustress in challenging situations.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-024-06750-7.