Cognitive Outlooks and Well-Being

The top-down approach to well-being focuses on how people attend to and construe information in their lives and how these processes affect their well-being. In this chapter, we review evidence that attention and construal, broadly conceived, influence well-being. We then discuss specific types of attention and construal (i.e., cognitive outlooks) that affect wellbeing. Such cognitive outlooks include gratitude, self-esteem, optimism, locus of control/autonomy, competence, connectedness, attributional style, and ruminative style. For each cognitive outlook, we review research that demonstrates an association between the cognitive outlook and well-being. We then discuss evidence for causal effects and theoretical accounts of these effects. We conclude with a brief discussion of questions that future research can explore.