Network analysis suggests working memory as a key target for facilitating subjective well-being.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Mental Health

Background:

• Rising stress-related psychopathology necessitates effective prevention programs, particularly for young adults during a critical developmental period.
• Current prevention programs often target multiple processes, leading to time-intensive interventions.
• Simplifying these programs is crucial for wider dissemination and scalability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationships between key psychological processes targeted in prevention programs and subjective well-being.
• To identify potential mechanisms that could simplify current multi-process interventions for young adults.

Main Methods:

• Assessed emotion regulation, reward responsiveness, working memory, and delay discounting in 463 healthy young adults.
• Employed regularized partial correlation networks to map interrelationships between constructs.
• Utilized a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with Bayesian hill-climbing to infer potential causal pathways.

Main Results:

• Working memory emerged as a central node significantly associated with well-being in network analyses.
• Reward responsiveness and reappraisal, while correlated with well-being, appeared as downstream effects in the causal model.
• Emotion regulation strategies, including reappraisal, rumination, and catastrophizing, were not found to be direct causal links to well-being in the DAG.

Conclusions:

• Findings suggest working memory may be a critical mechanism underlying subjective well-being.
• Working memory could be a simplified, key target for future mental health interventions.
• Further research is required to validate these network findings and their robustness.