Natural language use is a promising candidate for the development of innovative measures of well-being to complement self-report measures. The type of words individuals use can reveal important psychological processes that underlie well-being across the lifespan. In this preregistered, cross-sectional study, we propose a conceptual model of language markers of well-being and use written narratives about healthy aging (N = 701) and computerized text analysis (LIWC) to empirically validate the model. As hypothesized, we identified a model with three groups of language markers (reflecting affective, evaluative, and social processes). Initial validation with established self-report scales (N = 30 subscales) showed that these language markers reliably predict core components of well-being and underlying processes. Our results support the concurrent validity of the conceptual language model and allude to the added benefits of language-based measures, which are thought to reflect less conscious processes of well-being. Future research is needed to continue validating language markers of well-being across the lifespan in a theoretically informed and contextualized way, which will lay the foundation for inferring people's well-being from their natural language use.
Copyright: © 2024 Meier et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.