Advancing our understanding of valued living: An ecological momentary assessment of behavioral and experiential aspects of valued actions, well‐being, and emotional distress

Although engaging in valued actions is often positively related to mental health, this relationship is not always consistent at the daily level, suggesting that how valued actions are experienced is also important. We examined three valued action aspects (extent of engagement, awareness of engaging in valued actions, and perceived effort) and their within- and between-person associations with happiness, meaning in life, and emotional distress (anxiety and sadness) at the daily level. A total of 114 adults reported these variables three times per day for 10 days. We estimated contemporaneous, temporal, and between-person networks using a multilevel vector autoregressive (mlVAR) model and identified communities via exploratory graph analysis. In the contemporaneous network, momentary engagement was positively associated with momentary happiness and meaning, and momentary perceived effort was positively associated with momentary emotional distress. Valued action aspects were positively interrelated and clustered together. Temporally, awareness predicted subsequent meaning, which in turn predicted lower emotional distress and higher happiness. At the between-person level, higher average engagement in valued actions clustered with higher average happiness and meaning, whereas higher average perceived effort and greater awareness clustered with higher emotional distress. Overall, findings suggest that, beyond engagement alone, the experiential aspects of valued actions are also important for understanding how valued actions relate to mental health in daily life.