CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Fredrickson and Losada (2005) defined Flourishing as ?to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience?. Some authors, believe that Flourishing is a concept more comprehensive than subjective well-being (Keyes, 2013; Crespo & Mesurado, 2014). Keyes (2002) views flourishing as featuring emotional, psychological and social well-being traits. Emotional well-being is conceptualized as the presence or absence of positive feelings about life, including an hedonistic perspective about happiness. Psychological well-being is the individual?s perception of fulfilment in personal life. Finally, social well-being deals with the relationship between individuals and society ?individuals feel they belong to and are accepted by their communities; they perceive themselves as contributing to society (Keyes, 2005; 2002). Based on Self-determination theory, Baar, Deci and Ryan (2004) have proposed that individuals have three innate psychological needs: competence (perception of ability to face optimally challenging tasks); autonomy (feeling to be the initiator of one?s own actions) and relatedness (sense of mutual respect and reliance with others). A previous study found that flourishing is associated with different dimensions of basic psychological need satisfaction (competence, relatedness and autonomy) (Diener et al. 2010). Moreover, another important construct associated with well-being is personality traits. Singh et al. (2012) have shown that neuroticism is significantly negatively associated with well-being, whereas agreeableness is significantly positively associated with well-being, and extraversion, openness and conscientiousness have not significant association with well-being. However, there are not studies about the relationship between personality traits with others types of well-being as flourishing. In this study we are interested in analyzing the relationship between personality traits and basic psychological needs with flourishing and with positive and negative feeling; and we are interested especially in study the unique contribution of the individual variables: personality traits and basic psychological needs, to different types of well-being. One hundred seventy one Argentinean students (M age= 20.07; SD = 1.05; 70 males 40.94%) participated in this study by completing Flourishing Scale (FS) (Diener et al. 2010); The Scale of Positive and Negative Experience (SPANE) (Diener et al. 2010); Ten-Item Personality Inventory (PITI) (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann Jr., 2003), and Ryan and Deci?s Basic Need Satisfaction Scale (BNS; 2000). We carried out three Block lineal regressions to test our objectives. The results have shown that both personality traits and basic psychological needs are associated in a positive way with flourishing and positive feeling, explaining 58% and 29% of the variance respectively. On the other hand, personality traits and basic psychological needs are negatively associated with negative feeling explaining 28% of the variance. In all cases, both variables personality and basic psychological needs explain similar percentage of variance of different aspect of adolescence well-being. Conclusion, The results confirmed the hypothesis that the three basic psychological needs of relatedness, competence, and autonomy and personality traits are associated with different types of well-being in adolescents. However, seem to have a stronger influence on flourishing than positive and negative feelings. Maybe this is because the flourishing is deeper and more stable wellbeing than positive and negative feelings. This implies that satisfaction of these three needs and functional personality traits would promote to have a purposeful and meaningful life, and to be engaged and interested in one?s activities in Argentinian students.