So far we've been talking a lot about how the support for basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness is really associated with high-quality motivation. People are most engaged when these needs are satisfied. But in the beginning of this course I also made reference to the idea that self-determination theory believes that these very conditions that produce the highest quality motivation people also produce their greatest wellness. And so, one of our assumptions is that when basic needs are fulfilled that people will show their greatest wellness, and that this finding this idea will show up across cultures, across genders, and across all ages. I just want to show you a little bit of evidence in this lecture that this is the case. And in this first study that I'm going to show you it's another study that I've done with Valery Chirkov and Youngmee Kim and Ulas Kaplan. And here we sample people from four different countries, from Turkey, from South Korea, from Russia, and from the U.S. and we ask them about their basic psychological needs satisfaction. In the table I show you, you'll see just how strong the correlations are between basic psychological needs satisfaction, and subjective well-being. In all four countries, despite their very different cultural backdrops, people's basic psychological needs satisfaction predicts their overall subjective well-being. This is shown a lot in different countries, but one recent study was done by Beiwen Chen and her colleagues and it was done in a South African population where the number of their participants who were at high risk for financial troubles, they had low financial safety and they wanted to look at, in this atmosphere where people vary in safety and family income, does psychological needs still matter? One of their most important findings from the study, from their South African sample is that, although clearly financial safety does positively predict people's well-being and income positively predicts well-being, basic psychological needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy also do so, and they do so at a much stronger rate. So, we can just see how relatively important these things are within people's makeup of well-being. Another study that I just want to mention to you is the largest scale study of subjective well-being that's ever been done, and it was done by Ed Diener and his colleagues, so this is coming from not our labs at all, but from another source and they were looking at wealth and happiness across the world, and how it's predicted by prosperity as well as other psychological factors. What's really interesting in their data for instance, when they look at positive and negative effect that people experience on a daily basis, it's true that household income has some positive effect on positive affect, and some negative effect on negative affect. Relatively speaking, the more income you make the more positive your experiences is likely to be, if you live in a richer country there's a positive effect on your daily moods. But what this data shows us that basic psychological needs satisfaction when people can have that experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness this is the strongest of all the predictors of positive and negative affect, and this again holds up across multiple countries in again the largest study of this type that's ever been done. This just goes to show again just how relatively important this is within all the things in our makeup, if we're going to be well we need to have these daily experiences of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In most recent studies, we've not only been looking at basic psychological needs satisfaction, but also the role that basic psychological need frustration can play in ill-being. And a most recent study by Biewen Chen again and her many colleagues looked at people from four different countries: from Belgium, from Peru, from China, and from the U.S. looking at people's reports of their basic psychological needs satisfaction, and their basic psychological needs frustration, predicting symptoms of wellness and symptoms of ill-being. What's remarkable is across all four of these very different countries basic psychological needs including the need for autonomy was strongly predictive of well-being, and the frustration of autonomy, competence, and relatedness strongly predictive of ill-being. And interestingly, Biewen Chen and her colleagues also measured how much people value these particular variables of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, how much they desired those things, and although there were some country differences in values for these basic psychological needs, those didn't moderate these results in any meaningful way. Its main effect regardless of people's cultural backdrop values that when they get their autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs satisfied, they have greater well-being, and when those needs are frustrated they have greater ill-being regardless of their belief systems and attitudes towards those particular outcomes. So, this is the kind of data that tells us we're on the right track when we're looking at basic psychological needs as the foundation of human well-being, and we're going to go on to show you more evidence to that effect in the subsequent lectures.
