The PERMA Model Explained: Seligman's Five Elements of Wellbeing

The PERMA model is psychologist Martin Seligman’s list of what wellbeing is made of. In his 2011 book Flourish, he named five elements that people pursue for their own sake: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment, which give the model its initials.¹ In a 2018 online survey of US adults, PERMA scores measured largely the same general wellbeing as ordinary happiness and life-satisfaction questions.² Seligman accepted that result and called his model a good start, not a finished theory.³

That makes PERMA more useful as a map of where wellbeing can come from than as a scorecard or a proven recipe. It swaps a vague question for a sharper one: not “am I happy?” but “which of the five has thinned out lately?” A month of dull meetings can be short on pleasure and still full of accomplishment, and seeing that shows you where to start. Other frameworks for a good life are collected under purpose, happiness and life design.

What the PERMA model says: five routes to wellbeing

The PERMA model holds that wellbeing rests on five elements, each valued for its own sake and not only as a means to something else. The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, which promotes Seligman’s theory, presents them as five building blocks of flourishing, with strategies to build each and with different people drawing on them to different degrees.⁴

• Positive emotion: what you feel: pleasure, warmth, comfort
• Engagement: flow: being so absorbed in an activity that time seems to stop
• Relationships: positive connections with other people, valued for their own sake
• Meaning: belonging to and serving something you believe is bigger than you
• Accomplishment: achievement pursued for its own sake, even when it brings no pleasure or meaning

The list grew out of an earlier, three-part theory of happiness: positive emotion, engagement and meaning. Seligman added accomplishment after noticing expert bridge players who play only to win, with no obvious pleasure or meaning in it. He added relationships because, as he put it, “very little that is positive is solitary.” Meaning, in his sense, is belonging to and serving something you believe is bigger than you.¹

To illustrate with an ordinary week: the pleasure of a long lunch with a friend is positive emotion; an afternoon so absorbed in a hard piece of work that time disappears is engagement, the state psychologists call flow; a colleague who covers for you without being asked is a relationship; finishing a half marathon that nobody else cares about is accomplishment. Meaning might be the charity you have volunteered for since university; how it connects to having a sense of purpose is a topic of its own.

The Penn center now lists the fourth element as “meaning and mattering”, adding the belief that you make a difference to other people. It also names two tests an element has to pass: people pursue it for its own sake, and it can be defined and measured independently of the other elements.⁴ That second test is the one later research put under pressure.

To use the list, take the five one at a time and name the last time each showed up: a good laugh, an absorbing hour, a real conversation, something that mattered, something finished. The one you struggle to place is the obvious spot to start looking.

1. 2002Authentic Happiness: three elements
2. 2011Flourish: the five PERMA elements
3. 2016The PERMA-Profiler questionnaire
4. 2018A direct test, and Seligman's reply
5. 2022PERMA+4 for the workplace

Each step answered a new question: what the elements are, how to measure them, whether they are distinct and what they miss.

How PERMA is measured: the PERMA-Profiler

The standard questionnaire is the PERMA-Profiler, published in 2016 by Julie Butler and Margaret Kern. It asks three questions for each of the five elements, each rated from 0 to 10, and adds questions on negative emotion, loneliness, physical health and overall happiness, 23 in all.⁵

The developers tested it in more than 30,000 people worldwide, mostly online volunteers, and the largest group, about half of them in the US, came through Authentic Happiness, a University of Pennsylvania website built around Seligman’s work. So the norms describe people keen enough on wellbeing to seek out a questionnaire, not the general population. Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Positive Psychology and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to Seligman supported the work. Its authors advise reporting the five scores separately and decline to recommend an ideal profile, because the measure is meant to describe rather than prescribe.⁵

As an illustration, a new manager a year into a lonely role might score high on accomplishment and engagement and low on relationships. An averaged score would bury that; the profile shows where to look. The questions are self-reportsself-report: A measure in which people describe their own behavior, feelings or circumstances, usually by answering a questionnaire. When the same person supplies both of the things being compared, shared habits of answering can make the link between them look stronger than it is.Full entry in the glossary of how you feel, so a low bar tells you where to look, not what is wrong with you.

Is PERMA anything more than happiness by another name?

PERMA scores and ordinary happiness scores measured almost the same thing in a direct 2018 test. In a 2018 study, Fallon Goodman, Todd Kashdan and colleagues compared the PERMA-Profiler with the older measure of subjective wellbeing, which combines life satisfaction with positive and negative feelings, and found the two converged on a single wellbeing factor.²

The study

Limited evidence

PERMA and happiness questionnaires side by side (US, 2018, 517 adults)

Participants completed the PERMA-Profiler alongside standard life-satisfaction, happiness and negative-emotion questions, as part of a larger project on personality and wellbeing, administered by an outside organization, the Quiet Revolution. The underlying PERMA and subjective wellbeing factors correlated at 0.98. The five PERMA elements correlated with one another at about 0.6 on average, and a search for distinct types of people found only groups who scored high, middling or low on everything. George Mason University’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being funded two of the authors.²

A correlation that close means the two questionnaires rise and fall almost together, as two measures of one thing would. The biggest caveat is who answered: online survey takers in one country, who may rush, which the authors note could make answers to different questionnaires look more alike than they are.²

Seligman’s reply, in the same journal in 2018, accepted the data but not the conclusion. He had claimed PERMA names the building blocks of wellbeing, not a new kind of wellbeing, so in his view a near-perfect overlap with overall wellbeing confirms that the elements feed into it. His analogy is a pitching coach: fans’ overall ratings of a pitcher may track their ratings of each pitch almost exactly, yet “pitch well” is useless advice, while telling the pitcher to work on the curveball is not. He also raised a measurement problem: when people rate everything about themselves in one online sitting, a general halo can inflate the correlations, and ratings from partners, bosses or colleagues might separate the elements more.³

PERMA is merely a good start on the complex work-in-progress that will result in an adequate theory of the elements of well-being.

Both sides agree on a practical point: measuring wellbeing and building it are different jobs. To check how someone is doing overall, a short standard wellbeing measure covers most of what PERMA captures. To decide what to change, the five elements give more to work with, though Seligman notes that little is known yet about which interventions affect which element.³ To take an invented example, a team lead running a yearly pulse survey gains little from 15 extra PERMA items, while someone trying to work out why a good job feels empty has more to go on when they can see which element is missing.

Further reading

• 

  Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

  by Martin E. P. Seligman

  Seligman's own account of the five PERMA elements. Read it with this article's caveats: he calls the model a start, not a finished theory.

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PERMA+4: adding health, mindset, surroundings and money at work

PERMA+4 is a 2022 extension for the workplace by Stewart Donaldson, Llewellyn van Zyl and Scott Donaldson. It keeps Seligman’s five elements and adds four: physical health, mindset, the physical work environment and economic security.⁶

The authors argue that PERMA leaves out things known to matter at work, such as whether people are healthy, whether their surroundings let them concentrate and whether they can meet their bills. They drew the four additions from earlier reviews and a meta-analysis by their own research group, and they measure all nine elements with a 29-item questionnaire, the Positive Functioning at Work scale. It is a perspective paper, not a new trial, and the authors are candid: the individual factors relate strongly to wellbeing and work performance, they write, but evidence for the framework’s practical usefulness is still lacking.⁶

Picture a hospital ward, as an illustration, where staff score well on meaning and relationships but work double shifts in a windowless room and worry about rent. PERMA alone would steer a manager toward team-building; PERMA+4 puts sleep, the room and pay on the list too. The lesson for anyone buying a wellbeing program is to check those four first, since a workshop on positive emotion cannot fix workload, safety or pay. The wider question of what employee wellbeing covers sits behind this choice.

What critics say PERMA still has to prove

The strongest criticism of PERMA is that it names five things linked to wellbeing without showing why these five, or how they produce wellbeing. Goodman and colleagues point to a review that found 196 distinct facets of wellbeing across 99 questionnaires, and they argue that nothing in the theory explains why these five were chosen above the others. They add a circular problem: if accomplishment is part of the definition of wellbeing, researchers cannot also study it as a predictor of wellbeing.²

Myth

PERMA is a proven model of what causes wellbeing.

Fact

PERMA is a list of five elements linked to wellbeing. Its author calls it a good start, and it still awaits testing as a model of cause and effect.

Donaldson and colleagues sum up similar critiques: PERMA reads as a listing of phenomena related to wellbeing rather than a formal theory, and no argument was given for treating the five as components rather than mere correlates.⁶

Seligman concedes part of this. In 2018 he wrote that the list is not exhaustive, naming health, vitality and responsibility as candidate elements, and he set out the tests still missing: ratings from other people as well as self-reports; follow-up over time, asking whether PERMA today predicts wellbeing later; and experiments that target one element at a time.³ Until those are done, PERMA is a well-organized list, not a tested model of cause and effect. So treat any promise that raising one element will lift your overall wellbeing as a hunch, not a finding.

Programs built on positive psychology give a partial answer. A 2020 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary of 50 randomized trials of multi-component positive psychology programs found small improvements in wellbeing and depression scores, and the effects shrank considerably when low-quality studies were set aside.⁷ The review covers positive psychology programs in general, not PERMA in particular, so the result modestly supports the broad approach, not the five-part structure. Single exercises such as gratitude visits, which Seligman offers as ways to build the elements, have their own evidence and deserve their own look.³

The model is also a product. Penn’s Positive Psychology Center brands the name with a trademark sign, PERMA™, and offers PERMA workshops, alongside its Penn Resilience Program, to corporations, schools and universities, health care, the US government and the military; it says more than a million people have attended its programs.⁸ That does not make the model wrong, but it is worth knowing who is selling training when you read claims about what it can do.

What if your profile stays low for weeks?

A PERMA-Profiler result diagnoses nothing, but a profile that stays low, especially with frequent sadness or worry, deserves attention. The UK’s NHS lists lost motivation or interest, and no enjoyment in life, as psychological signs of depression.⁹ The urgency order below is ours; the routes themselves are those given by NIMH (the US National Institute of Mental Health) and the NHS, apart from the line for other countries.

• Straight away, if suicide or self-harm is on your mind or you are not sure you can stay safe. NIMH’s route in the US is the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, reachable by phone, text or online chat, and, where a life is threatened, 911 or an emergency room.¹⁰ For UK readers, the NHS says to phone 999 or head to A&E when a life is in danger or you doubt you can keep yourself, or someone else, safe; its page also gives Samaritans’ number, 116 123.¹¹ Readers in other countries should phone their local emergency number.
• Over the next week or two, if the low mood is sticking around. The NHS advises a GP appointment once depression symptoms have lasted longer than 2 weeks, for most of each day and on every day.⁹ For urgent advice below emergency level, NHS guidance points to 111, online or by phone, choosing its mental health option.¹¹ That 111 service is England’s; Scotland uses NHS 24 on 111, and Wales has NHS 111 Wales.¹² Outside the UK, your usual doctor is the place to begin.
• At your next routine appointment, if you feel flat rather than low. NIMH suggests a primary care provider as a first stop: they can screen your mental health and refer you to a social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist.¹⁰

The bottom line

PERMA is a clear, memorable list of five places wellbeing can come from, and its author calls it a start, not a finished theory. When measured, the five elements mostly move with plain happiness, so treat a PERMA score as one reading of how you are doing and the elements as places to look when life feels thin. At work, check health, surroundings and money before buying a wellbeing program built on the five.