Carol Ryff

Introduction

Carol D. Ryff is an American psychologist who did more than anyone else to give "well-being" a scientific definition with parts. For most of the twentieth century, research on positive mental states ran on happiness and life satisfaction — measures that everyone agreed were thin, but that nobody had an agreed way to replace. Ryff's answer, proposed in 1989, was a six-dimensional model: self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth. It reframed well-being as something a person does rather than something a person feels, and supplied the questionnaire that let thousands of studies measure it.

Her Scales of Psychological Well-Being have been translated into more than two dozen languages and administered in national surveys across several continents. That success is precisely why the model has been subjected to the most serious measurement critique in contemporary well-being research — an argument, conducted in a single journal volume, about whether the six dimensions are genuinely six.

Early Life and Education

Ryff took her undergraduate degree at Pennsylvania State University and stayed there for doctoral work in human development, completing her PhD in 1978. Her dissertation, "Towards a salient behavior-change construct in adult development and aging: the implementation-culmination sequence," was already working the territory she would occupy for the rest of her career: not merely what constitutes healthy functioning in adulthood, but how change in that functioning is organized and sequenced over a life.

Popular biographies give 1950 as her birth year; none of the institutional sources that would settle the question publish it, and the detail is otherwise unremarkable except for how often it is repeated without a source.

Academic and Professional Career

Ryff joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in 1985 and has built her career there. She is Hilldale Professor of Psychology, director of the university's Institute on Aging, and principal investigator of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), a national longitudinal study of health and well-being.

MIDUS is the infrastructure on which much of her later work depends, and it deserves a description. What began as a survey of adults became, with substantial National Institute on Aging support reported at roughly $26 million for its second wave, a longitudinal study following thousands of people between their mid-thirties and mid-eighties with extensive psychosocial and biomarker assessment — cardiovascular, neuroendocrine and immune measures, later joined by neuroimaging. The design made it possible to ask whether psychological well-being has biological correlates that mirror ill-being, rather than merely having the opposite sign, and Ryff's group pursued that question systematically.

Her honors include the Henry A. Murray Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, which recognizes scholars who integrate theory and method to understand personality in context — a fitting description of what her model was for. She is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and of the American Psychological Association's division on adult development and aging.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Constructing the model

Ryff's 1989 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — "Happiness is everything, or is it?" — made an argument from omission. The field's existing measures of well-being, she noted, came largely from studies of morale and life satisfaction, and lacked any theoretical account of what positive psychological functioning consists in. She went looking for that account in the clinical, developmental and humanistic traditions rather than in the happiness literature, assembling:

Erik Erikson's psychosocial stages, for the idea that adulthood brings distinct developmental tasks rather than a plateau — see Erik Erikson
Abraham Maslow's self-actualization and Carl Rogers' fully functioning person, for growth as a continuing process — see Abraham Maslow
Gordon Allport's concept of maturity and Carl Jung's individuation
Charlotte Bühler's life tendencies and Bernice Neugarten's work on personality change in later life
Marie Jahoda's criteria for positive mental health, the closest ancestor of the whole exercise

What emerged was six distinguishable dimensions rather than a single scale: self-acceptance (holding a positive attitude toward oneself, including one's past), positive relations with others (warm, trusting relationships with capacity for empathy), autonomy (self-determination and resistance to social pressure), environmental mastery (competence in managing one's surroundings), purpose in life (goals and a sense of directedness), and personal growth (openness to continued development). The important structural claim is that these are not components of happiness — some of them involve strain — and a person can score high on one and low on another.

From theory to instrument

Ryff then did the harder thing and operationalized it. The first version ran to 120 items, twenty per dimension; later forms of 84, 54, 42 and 18 items circulated as researchers demanded brevity. Shortening had an underappreciated cost — the widely used 18-item form shares only six items with the 42-item form, meaning that studies using different versions are not, strictly speaking, measuring the same instrument.

Eudaimonia versus hedonia

Ryff also drew the line that organizes most well-being research today: between eudaimonic well-being, understood as functioning well in the sense of realizing one's potential, and hedonic well-being, understood as feeling good — happiness, positive affect, life satisfaction — the tradition associated with Ed Diener. Her empirical claim was stronger than a distinction: that the two are related but distinguishable, and that eudaimonic well-being has correlates the hedonic measures miss, including biological ones.

Well-being and biology

The third strand, and the reason her work reaches outside psychology, is the search for what she calls positive health: the neurophysiological substrates of flourishing. With Burton Singer and colleagues, she showed that well-being and ill-being are not simply mirrored — that they have partly distinct biological signatures across cardiovascular, neuroendocrine and immune markers. Since then her group has tested whether purpose in life and quality relationships predict longevity and reduced inflammatory risk, always with the same methodological worry visible: correlation is not protection.

Major Publications

Ryff, C. D. (1989). "Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069–1081.
Ryff, C. D. (1995). "Psychological well-being in adult life." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 4, 99–104.
Ryff, C. D., & Keyes, C. L. M. (1995). "The structure of psychological well-being revisited." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 719–727.
Ryff, C. D., & Singer, B. H. (1996). "Psychological well-being: Meaning, measurement, and implications for psychotherapy research." Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 65, 14–23.
Ryff, C. D., & Singer, B. H. (1998). "The contours of positive human health." Psychological Inquiry, 9, 1–28.
Ryff, C. D., Love, G. D., Urry, H. L., Muller, D., Rosenkranz, M. A., Friedman, E. M., & Singer, B. H. (2006). "Psychological well-being and ill-being: Do they have distinct or mirrored biological correlates?" Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 75, 85–95.
Ryff, C. D. (2014). "Psychological well-being revisited: Advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia." Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 83, 10–28.

Impact and Legacy

Ryff's influence is difficult to overstate and easy to miss, because it arrives through other people's datasets. Her scales are the default measure of eudaimonic well-being; MIDUS is one of the most heavily mined longitudinal resources in the behavioral and social sciences; and her distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being structures how the field — and increasingly national statistical agencies — think about what to ask people. Her six dimensions also became the standard outcome measure in well-being therapy, the clinical approach developed in psychosomatics for residual symptoms after remission.

The criticisms are substantial, and the most important of them was published in the same journal in the same year as her rebuttal.

"Bad news indeed" for the six-factor model. In 2006, Kristen Springer and Robert Hauser factor-analyzed Ryff items drawn from three large North American samples — notably including MIDUS itself, one of the datasets Ryff directed. Their finding was that once methodological artifacts were handled (negative-wording effects and adjacency effects), the estimated correlations among four of the six latent dimensions — environmental mastery, personal growth, purpose in life and self-acceptance — were so close to 1.0 that "there are scant meaningful empirical differences among them." Their conclusion was blunt: either the measures cannot capture the distinctions the theory draws, or the distinctions themselves are incoherent, and the continued use of these indistinct subscales to explain different outcomes should stop. Springer, Hauser and Jeremy Freese pressed this in a follow-up titled "Bad news indeed for Ryff's six-factor model of well-being," arguing that Ryff's reply had largely failed to engage the actual finding.

The reply. Ryff and Singer published "Best news yet on the six-factor model of well-being" in the same volume. Their response had two parts. Methodologically, they argued that Springer and Hauser's corrections — for negatively worded items, adjacent items and redundant items — were each problematic in rationale or implementation, and that the resulting latent correlations were therefore questionable. Substantively, they assembled five categories of evidence for the six dimensions' distinctiveness: factorial validity, psychological correlates, sociodemographic correlates, biological correlates and intervention effects.

Whether the measurement model matches the theory. A more fundamental objection, pressed by Ulrich Schimmack, targets not the factor structure but the logic. Ryff's theory is what philosophers call a list theory of well-being: it enumerates desirable attributes. The trouble with list theories, as L. W. Sumner noted, is that they vary from author to author and rest on no deeper principle that explains why these attributes and not others are included. A related point concerns the measurement model. A list implies a formative construct — the six attributes constitute well-being, and the arrows should run from indicators to construct. The structural equation models widely used with these scales assume a reflective construct, in which an unobserved well-being causes the six. Take the published loadings at face value and the implication is awkward: if autonomy loads at .38, then about 14% of the variance in autonomy scores reflects the latent well-being factor, yet researchers routinely interpret autonomy scores as measures of well-being itself. This is a charge about misreading models rather than about collecting bad data, and it applies to a large literature, not to Ryff alone.

The hedonic–eudaimonic split may itself be too neat. Subsequent work, including Disabato and colleagues' cross-cultural examination, has found that hedonic and eudaimonic well-being are so highly correlated that a single higher-order factor often fits better than two. If so, the framework she popularized may be partitioning one construct into two. And because almost all of the evidence comes from self-report, the entire literature shares whatever problems self-report has.

What should be said on Ryff's side is that the strongest attack came from within her own house, using data she had built and shared. Springer and Hauser could not have run their analysis at all without a large longitudinal study that made a well-being instrument available to researchers outside its originator's control. Whether or not the six dimensions survive as separate scales, that is the standard against which openness should be measured.

Learn More

Ed Diener, whose subjective well-being tradition Ryff defined her model against
Abraham Maslow, whose self-actualization fed the personal growth dimension
Erik Erikson, whose adult stages supplied the developmental frame
Eudaimonia, the philosophical tradition her model operationalizes
Well-Being, the wider territory these measures now map

References

Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069-1081.