PERMA-Profiler (PERMA-P)

Abstract

The PERMA-Profiler (PERMA-P) is a psychometrically validated, multidimensional self-report assessment developed by Julie Butler and Margaret L. Kern (2016) to operationalize Martin E. P. Seligman’s multidimensional model of flourishing. While traditional approaches to subjective well-being have predominantly focused on unidimensional constructs such as life satisfaction or positive affect, Seligman’s Well-Being Theory posits that human flourishing arises from five distinct, intrinsically valued pillars: Positive Emotion (P), Engagement (E), Relationships (R), Meaning (M), and Accomplishment (A). To provide a comprehensive picture of psychological and physical functioning, the PERMA-Profiler supplements these 15 core items (three items per pillar) with measures of Negative Emotion (N), Physical Health (H), Loneliness, and an overall happiness item, yielding a 23-item instrument. Items are scored on an 11-point continuous response scale ranging from 0 to 10 with context-specific anchors (e.g., 0 = never / not at all / terrible to 10 = always / completely / excellent). Across extensive psychometric evaluations involving over 34,000 participants from adult community, collegiate, and organizational populations across multiple continents, the PERMA-Profiler demonstrates robust internal consistency (subscale Cronbach’s α values generally ranging from .71 to .94), acceptable to strong test-retest reliability, and well-substantiated convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity against established instruments such as the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). Confirmatory factor analyses confirm both five-factor oblique and hierarchical/bifactor structures, establishing the scale as an indispensable diagnostic and evaluative tool in positive psychology, organizational science, educational leadership, and preventative mental healthcare.

Keywords

PERMA-Profiler, PERMA model, flourishing, subjective well-being, positive psychology, eudaimonia, psychometrics, Martin Seligman, Margaret Kern, psychological assessment, positive emotion, engagement, life satisfaction

Authors

The PERMA-Profiler was authored and validated by:

• Julie Butler, M.A. — Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program, Department of Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
• Margaret L. Kern, Ph.D. — Associate Professor and Psychometrics Researcher at the Centre for Positive Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Correspondence regarding the instrument can be directed to Dr. Margaret L. Kern via academic channels at the University of Melbourne, Centre for Wellbeing Science, Victoria, Australia.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the PERMA-Profiler is to provide a brief yet granular multidimensional measurement of well-being that captures the breadth of human flourishing beyond the scope of single-score, hedonic assessments. For several decades, psychological assessment treated subjective well-being (SWB) primarily as a combination of high positive affect, low negative affect, and high global cognitive appraisal of life satisfaction. Although these constructs offer valuable insight, they frequently fail to differentiate how or why an individual is thriving, nor do they diagnose specific deficits that could guide targeted psychosocial interventions.

In response to Seligman’s (2011) seminal Well-Being Theory, Butler and Kern designed the PERMA-Profiler to yield a descriptive profile across the five fundamental pillars of psychological flourishing, alongside critical covariates of physical health, psychological distress, and social isolation. The instrument is engineered to meet specific clinical, organizational, educational, and population-level objectives:

• Targeted Intervention Mapping: Rather than indicating that an individual has “low well-being,” the profile identifies specific domains of vulnerability. For instance, an employee may exhibit high accomplishment and positive emotion but experience severe deficiencies in meaning and interpersonal relationships. Interventions can thus be tailored precisely to the domain of concern rather than utilizing generic well-being programs.
• Organizational and Workplace Diagnostics: Human resource professionals, executive coaches, and organizational psychologists use the PERMA-Profiler to evaluate workplace engagement, psychological safety, and occupational burnout, enabling institutional changes that support both productivity and mental health.
• Higher Education and Youth Thriving: Educational institutions deploy the tool to monitor student adjustment, holistic academic thriving, and resilience, recognizing that academic performance is intricately tied to psychological health.
• Epidemiological and Longitudinal Research: Because the scale is concise (taking approximately three to five minutes to complete) and freely accessible, it facilitates large-scale cross-sectional and prospective longitudinal research examining the pathways connecting multidimensional well-being to chronic disease prevention, longevity, and economic productivity.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the PERMA-Profiler is multidimensional flourishing, conceptualized as an optimal psychological state composed of five independent yet interrelated eudaimonic and hedonic components, supplemented by physical and affective indicators.

1. Positive Emotion (P)

Positive Emotion reflects hedonic well-being and affective joy. Within the PERMA-P, it encompasses the frequency and intensity of feeling positive, joyful, and contented. It is not merely the absence of negative emotions, but the active presence of subjective feelings such as enthusiasm, optimism, and pleasure, which Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory demonstrates expand an individual’s cognitive and behavioral repertoires.

2. Engagement (E)

Grounded deeply in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, Engagement denotes deep psychological involvement, immersion, and absorption in tasks. When highly engaged, individuals often lose self-consciousness, experience altered time perception (“losing track of time”), and deploy their core character strengths in meeting challenges.

3. Relationships (R)

Relationships represent the social dimension of flourishing, capturing the subjective sense of being loved, supported, valued, and integrated into meaningful social networks. Humans are fundamentally social beings; as positive psychologist Christopher Peterson succinctly stated, “other people matter.” The R domain assesses both the reception of social support in times of need and overall satisfaction with one’s personal bonds.

4. Meaning (M)

Meaning reflects eudaimonic well-being: the belief that one’s life has direction, purpose, and significance beyond the self. Drawing from Viktor Frankl’s existential framework, the PERMA-P evaluates whether an individual feels that their daily pursuits are valuable, worthwhile, and connected to a larger transcendent narrative.

5. Accomplishment (A)

Accomplishment (or achievement) refers to the subjective perception of competence, mastery, goal attainment, and self-efficacy. Pursued often for its own sake, accomplishment captures an individual’s drive to master challenges, handle daily responsibilities successfully, and progress toward self-concordant milestones.

Supplementary Subscales: Negative Emotion, Health, and Loneliness

To avoid the fallacy that flourishing is merely the positive end of a single continuum, Butler and Kern incorporated negative and somatic markers:

• Negative Emotion (N): Evaluates the prevalence of sadness, anxiety, and anger. Research demonstrates that negative emotions can coexist with positive functioning, and monitoring them provides essential clinical safety nets.
• Physical Health (H): Captures subjective vitality, energy, physical fitness, and satisfaction with physical functioning, recognizing the bidirectional relationship between somatic health and subjective well-being.
• Loneliness: A single-item screener measuring subjective perceived social isolation, which has emerged as an independent epidemiological risk factor for mental and physical morbidity.
• Overall Happiness: A single global evaluative item summarizing general life satisfaction.

Theoretical Framework

The PERMA-Profiler is theoretically grounded in Martin Seligman’s transition from Authentic Happiness Theory (2002) to Well-Being Theory (2011). In his initial formulation, Seligman defined authentic happiness as consisting of three elements: the pleasant life (positive affect), the engaged life (flow), and the meaningful life (purpose). However, this early model faced substantial criticisms:

• It tethered happiness too closely to momentary positive emotion and life satisfaction ratings, which are heavily influenced by transient mood and personality traits like extraversion and neuroticism.
• It failed to explain why individuals deliberately pursue goals, achievements, or mastery under conditions of high distress or sacrifice, where immediate happiness is low (e.g., training for an Olympic marathon or writing a dissertation).
• It neglected social connection as an explicit, intrinsically motivated driver of human existence.

In Flourish (2011), Seligman reorganized the architecture of well-being. Under Well-Being Theory, the central topic of positive psychology shifted from “happiness” (a singular construct) to “flourishing” (a multifaceted construct). To qualify as an autonomous pillar within PERMA, an element must satisfy three rigorous criteria:

1. It contributes directly to well-being;
2. Many people pursue it for its own sake, not merely to attain one of the other elements;
3. It can be defined and measured independently of the other four elements.

Butler and Kern (2016) operationalized this theory into a psychometric tool designed to respect both the independence and the synergy of the pillars. The PERMA model incorporates both the hedonic tradition (exemplified by Aristippus, Epicurus, and modern hedonic psychologists like Ed Diener) and the eudaimonic tradition (rooted in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and modern formulations by Carol Ryff and Edward Deci & Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory). By measuring these domains concurrently, the PERMA-Profiler bridges the longstanding theoretical divide between feeling good and functioning well.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the PERMA-Profiler has been established through comprehensive validation protocols across multiple global cohorts. In their seminal publication, Butler and Kern (2016) administered the battery across eight international samples totaling 34,880 adult respondents. Subsequent independent cross-cultural investigations have validated translations in German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, and Polish.

Convergent and Divergent Validity

Convergent validity has been established by correlating PERMA-P subscales with gold-standard well-being and clinical assessments:

• Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS): Demonstrates high positive correlations with overall PERMA (r = .70 to .82), Meaning (r = .65 to .75), and Positive Emotion (r = .68 to .78).
• Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS): Correlates strongly with PERMA Positive Emotion (r = .75 to .83) and overall PERMA (r = .72).
• Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ – Presence): Shows specific, elevated convergence with the PERMA Meaning subscale (r = .76 to .84), while showing substantially lower correlations with Physical Health (r = .30 to .38), illustrating discriminant validity among subscales.
• PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule): The PERMA Positive Emotion subscale correlates robustly with the PANAS Positive Affect scale (r = .72), while the PERMA Negative Emotion subscale correlates strongly with PANAS Negative Affect (r = .65 to .74).

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The PERMA-Profiler demonstrates strong predictive utility across diverse objective and subjective life outcomes. High scores across the PERMA subscales prospectively predict lower levels of clinical depression (measured via the CES-D and PHQ-9; r = -.55 to -.68), decreased anxiety (DASS-21), and reduced work absenteeism. In occupational contexts, higher Accomplishment, Engagement, and Relationships scores significantly predict organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), job performance ratings, and lower turnover intentions, beyond the variance accounted for by general life satisfaction.

Reliability

The PERMA-Profiler exhibits strong reliability across varied demographics, languages, and settings:

Internal Consistency

Internal consistency estimates across large-scale validation studies yield robust coefficients. Butler and Kern (2016) reported the following Cronbach’s alpha (α) ranges across their validation samples:

• Positive Emotion (P): α = .86 – .89
• Engagement (E): α = .60 – .72 (modest due to the conceptual heterogeneity of flow/absorption items)
• Relationships (R): α = .77 – .83
• Meaning (M): α = .85 – .90
• Accomplishment (A): α = .72 – .79
• Overall PERMA (16 items): α = .92 – .95
• Negative Emotion (N): α = .71 – .77
• Physical Health (H): α = .88 – .92

McDonald’s omega hierarchical (ω_h) and total (ω_t) coefficients have been evaluated in subsequent structural analyses, confirming that the overall flourishing score possesses excellent composite reliability (ω_t > .94), while each specific pillar maintains acceptable independent variance.

Test-Retest Reliability

Stability across time has been substantiated in longitudinal retest paradigms. Over test-retest intervals ranging from two weeks to six months, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and Pearson correlation coefficients consistently demonstrate stability:

• Two-week test-retest correlations range between r = .78 and .88 across the five core PERMA domains.
• Three-month stability coefficients remain strong (r = .65 – .75), reflecting that the PERMA-Profiler measures stable trait-like psychological dispositions while preserving sensitivity to significant life events and psychological interventions.

Factor Analysis

The latent dimensionality of the PERMA-Profiler has been examined via exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Results

Butler and Kern (2016) tested multiple competing structural models to determine whether well-being is unidimensional, multidimensional, or hierarchical:

• Single-Factor Model: A solitary general factor loading all 15 core items demonstrated inadequate fit (CFI < .85, RMSEA > .10), rejecting the notion that flourishing is purely unidimensional.
• Five-Factor Oblique Model: Modeling the five distinct pillars (P, E, R, M, A) as correlated latent factors demonstrated acceptable fit across samples (CFI ≥ .93 – .96, TLI ≥ .91 – .94, RMSEA = .05 – .07, SRMR = .03 – .05). Standardized factor loadings across items consistently exceeded .60, with most exceeding .75.
• Hierarchical and Bifactor Models: A higher-order model (where a general Flourishing/Well-Being factor accounts for the shared variance among the five first-order PERMA factors) also produced excellent fit. Bifactor modeling has demonstrated that while a broad, shared flourishing dimension exists, the individual domain factors account for meaningful unique variance, validating the dual reporting of an overall score alongside five pillar-specific subscale scores.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Tool Name: PERMA-Profiler (PERMA-P)
• Alternative Name: The PERMA Workplace / General Flourishing Profiler
• Authors: Julie Butler and Margaret L. Kern (2016)
• Construct Assessed: Multidimensional flourishing across five eudaimonic/hedonic pillars, plus negative affect, physical health, and loneliness
• Assessment Type: Self-administered psychological questionnaire (paper-and-pencil or computerized/online administration)
• Total Item Count: 23 items
  • 15 Core PERMA items (3 items × 5 pillars)
  • 1 Overall Happiness item (combined with the 15 core items for an overall flourishing composite of 16 items)
  • 3 Negative Emotion items (anxiety, anger, sadness)
  • 3 Physical Health items (general health, comparative health, health satisfaction)
  • 1 Loneliness item
• Response Scale: 11-point rating scale from 0 to 10 (labels vary by item: 0 = Never / Not at all / Terrible to 10 = Always / Completely / Excellent)
• Scoring and Computational Rules: Subscale scores are calculated as the mean of the corresponding item values:
  • Positive Emotion (P): Mean of items 2, 9, 20
  • Engagement (E): Mean of items 4, 11, 19
  • Relationships (R): Mean of items 6, 14, 18
  • Meaning (M): Mean of items 3, 12, 17
  • Accomplishment (A): Mean of items 5, 8, 16
  • Overall Well-being / PERMA: Mean of the 15 core PERMA items plus item 23 (overall happiness)
  • Negative Emotion (N): Mean of items 7, 10, 21
  • Physical Health (H): Mean of items 1, 13, 22
  • Loneliness: Score of item 15 (standalone item)
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents aged 15 years and older in community, collegiate, clinical, or workplace settings

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The PERMA-Profiler was published in 2016 in the open-access International Journal of Wellbeing. Under the terms of its publication and the author’s open-science commitments, the PERMA-Profiler is an open-access, non-commercial instrument.

• Licensing: Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Researchers, educational institutions, clinicians, and organizations are permitted to administer, reproduce, adapt, and translate the scale free of charge, provided proper academic attribution is given to Butler and Kern (2016).
• Commercial Applications: Commercial platforms, corporate consulting firms, or commercial software integrating the PERMA-Profiler into for-profit assessment suites should contact the corresponding author, Dr. Margaret L. Kern, regarding institutional terms and permissions.

References

The following academic literature supports the psychometric structure, theoretical foundation, and clinical application of the PERMA-Profiler:

• Butler, J., & Kern, M. L. (2016). The PERMA-Profiler: A brief multidimensional measure of flourishing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 6(3), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v6i3.526
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
• Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49(1), 71–75. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa4901_13
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218
• Huppert, F. A., & So, T. T. (2013). Flourishing across Europe: Application of a new conceptual framework for defining well-being. Social Indicators Research, 110(3), 837–861. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-011-9966-7
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 141–166. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.141
• Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069
• Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. Free Press.
• Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press.

Items of the Scale