Between "we" and "well-being": Do basic psychological needs mediate the relationship between interdependent...

The role of identity content in adolescent subjective well-being (SWB) is poorly understood. To address this gap, the present longitudinal study examined the relationships between two dimensions of interdependent self-construal (relational and collective) and SWB (positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction). We also investigated whether basic psychological needs satisfaction could serve as a mechanism explaining the relationship between interdependent self-construal and SWB. The sample consisted of 971 Serbian adolescents (M_age = 15.64, 64.5% female), who completed surveys at three time points over a 12-month period. The results of random intercept cross-lagged panel modeling indicated that: (1) adolescents reporting consistently higher levels of collective self-construal also reported consistently higher levels of SWB, whereas adolescents reporting consistently higher levels of relational self-construal showed consistently higher positive affect but neither higher life satisfaction nor lower negative affect; (2) within-person deviations in interdependent self-construal were not associated with subsequent deviations in SWB; and (3) the satisfaction of basic psychological needs did not mediate the association between interdependent self-construal and SWB at the within-person level. Overall, the findings suggest that the relationship between interdependent self-construal and SWB operates primarily at the between-person level rather than the within-person level, indicating that stable patterns of self-definition are more strongly related to adolescents' well-being than within-person changes in self-definitions over the one-year study period.