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What is a good life and how it can be achieved is one of the fundamental issues. When considering a good life, there is a division between hedonic (pleasure attainment) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning pursuing and self-realization). However, an integrated approach that can compare the brain functional and structural differences of these two forms of well-being is lacking. Here, we investigated how the individual tendency to eudaimonic well-being relative to hedonic well-being, measured using eudaimonic and hedonic balance (EHB) index, is reflected in the functional and structural features of a key network of well-being—the default mode network (DMN). We found that EHB was positively correlated with functional connectivity of bilateral ventral medial prefrontal cortex within anterior DMN and bilateral precuneus within posterior DMN. Brain morphometric analysis showed that EHB was also positively correlated with gray matter volume in left precuneus. These results demonstrated that the relative dominance of one form of well-being to the other is reflected in the morphometric characteristics and intrinsic functions of DMN.

The ability to detect emotional changes is of primary importance for social living. Though emotional signals are often conveyed by multiple modalities, how emotional changes in vocal and facial modalities integrate into a unified percept has yet to be directly investigated. To address this issue, we asked participants to detect emotional changes delivered by facial, vocal and facial-vocal expressions while behavioral responses and electroencephalogram were recorded. Behavioral results showed that bimodal emotional changes were detected with higher accuracy and shorter response latencies compared with each unimodal condition. Moreover, the detection of emotional change, regardless of modalities, was associated with enhanced amplitudes in the N2 and P3 component, as well as greater theta synchronization. More importantly, the P3 amplitudes and theta synchronization were larger for the bimodal emotional change condition than for the sum of the two unimodal conditions. The superadditive responses in P3 amplitudes and theta synchronization were both positively correlated with the magnitude of the bimodal superadditivity in accuracy. These behavioral and electrophysiological data consistently illustrated an effect of audiovisual integration during the detection of emotional changes, which is most likely mediated by the P3 activity and theta oscillations in brain responses.