Aims of Corey's Research

Life expectancy in the U.S. increased dramatically over the 20th century, but those longer lives are not necessarily filled with greater health. Rather, the number of years spent living with disability has increased, both because of the longer life spans and the emergence of chronic problems — e.g., depression, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes — at younger ages. Longer life spans in the future will only have value if those added years are accompanied by a sense of well-being and the absence of pain, disability, or dementia. As David Cutler (2004) said in Your Money Or Your Life, “A population that lives long but is in poor health is not (much) better off than one with a shorter but healthier life span” (p. 5). My research establishes that being healthy over a life span is more than being disease or disability-free, and that promoting health requires more than reducing disease and disability. Through my focus on subjective well-being, complete mental health, complete population health, and personal change and growth, I aim to promote policies and programmatic interventions that facilitate increases in life span through reductions in physical and mental illness and increases in life qualify through enhancements in mental and physical health.

Corey's Streams of Research

Subjective well-being. When measured directly, health, particularly mental health, is equated with happiness and life satisfaction (i.e., how people feel), which do not capture the psychological (Ryff & Keyes, 1995) or social dimensions of an individual’s functioning in life. The quality of individuals' relationships to, and functioning in, community and society remain an understudied aspects of individuals’ health. I therefore initiated a study of social well-being (Keyes, 1998), defined as individuals’ perceptions of the quality of their relationships with other people, their neighborhoods, and their communities. As predicted theoretically, social well-being is multidimensional, and Americans view the quality of their functioning in life based on whether they see social life as meaningful and understandable (social coherence); see society as possessing potential for growth (social actualization); feel they belong to and are accepted by their communities (social integration); feel they accept other people (social acceptance); and see themselves as having something worthwhile to contribute to society (social contribution).

Mental Health. Because psychiatric science regarded mental health as the absence of mental illness, there has been no standard by which to measure, diagnose, and study the presence of mental health. My research conceptualizes mental health as a syndrome of positive feelings and functioning in life that are measured by subjective emotional well-being (i.e., hedonia) and subjective psychological and social well-being (i.e., positive functioning). Specifically, flourishing is a state of mental health in which people are free of DSM mental illnesses such as major depression and filled with high levels of emotional, psychological, and social well-being. Human languishing, is a state of emptiness in which individuals are devoid of emotional, psychological, and social well-being, but they are not mentally ill. Moderately mentally healthy adults are not depressed or languishing, but neither have they reached the level of flourishing in life. My research debunks the myth that people who are not mentally ill are mentally healthy (Keyes, 2002). About 12% of adults reported a major depressive episode during the preceding 12-month period, meaning that 88% were not depressed and should have been mentally healthy during that period. However, just under 20% fit the criteria for "flourishing" and about 12% were languishing. Adults who were flourishing missed fewer days of work, were more productive at work, had fewer physical health limitations, and were at lower risk of chronic physical diseases such as cardiovascular disease. While adults who were moderately mentally healthy functioned better than adults who were languishing, an astonishing finding was that languishing adults functioned no better than depressed adults (e.g., in terms of sick days, low productivity, physical limitations, and risk for chronic disease). My research therefore shows that the absence of depression is not necessarily the presence of mental health (i.e., flourishing), and the promotion of mental health (i.e., "flourishing") can improve the health and well-being of the U.S. population.

Population Health as a Complete State. Physical and mental health conditions frequently co-occur. Complete health reflects the combination of physical and mental morbidity as well as physical and mental well-being (Keyes & Grzywacz, 2002; WHO, 1948). This multidimensional population standard creates four groups characterized by differential clusters of indicators of morbidity and health. Complete health is the absence of physical and mental morbidity and the presence of sufficient levels of physical and mental well-being; incomplete health reflects either high levels of physical health and well-being but poor mental health (high morbidity or low well-being) or high levels of mental health and well-being but poor physical health (high morbidity or low well-being); and complete ill-health (high physical and mental morbidity and low physical and mental well-being). Less than one-third of adults were completely healthy, 22.4% were completely unhealthy, and 45.8% had incomplete health, of which 6.7% were physically healthy but mentally unhealthy, while 39.1% were physically unhealthy but mentally healthy (Keyes & Grzywacz, 2002). Although some of the behavioral risk factors typically targeted in health promotion programs were associated with increased odds of being completely healthy (e.g., regular physical activity), other salient disease prevention targets such as smoking did not differentiate completely healthy individuals from incompletely healthy individuals (Grzywacz & Keyes, 2004). Measures indicative of greater social capital and healthy behaviors such as exercise were equally strong predictors of complete health.p> Individual Change and Growth. Since so few Americans are “flourishing” or have “complete health,” it will take a great deal of change and growth among U.S. citizens to achieve complete states of health (mental, physical, or both). However, many changes in life that should be beneficial can result in “mixed” states of mental health, because humans react to life emotionally and cognitively. Because feeling and thinking are semi-autonomous, people can have incongruous reactions—i.e., we can think one way about an event (e.g., positively) and simultaneously feel another way about that event (e.g., negatively). I have developed and tested a theory (Keyes, 2000; Keyes & Ryff, 2000) that hypothesizes that incongruous reactions (thoughts and feelings) to improved functioning create a mixed mental state that may destabilize the improvement. Two studies based on representative samples of the U.S. population have strongly supported predictions from my theory of subjective change. That is, individuals who experienced more improvements in more domains of life reported the highest levels of personal growth and the same level of satisfaction with life, while at the same time they reported higher levels of negative emotion, lower levels of positive affect, and greater dysphoric (depressive-like) affect as individuals who experienced no change. This raises intriguing questions for creating effective techniques and interventions for promoting positive health changes. Are interventions most effective, and the resulting changes more enduring, when they cause individuals to change what they do without causing them to perceive themselves as new, revised, or different people?

2-page CV and references to the above citations.

Recent publication by Corey Keyes.

Faculty Profile.