Fig. 1: Overview of experimental design and analytical processes.

A The study was conducted in two sessions. Initially, participants (n = 210) assessed their levels of SWB, including PA, NA, and LS, and then undertook FAST. FAST involved generating consecutive concepts from given seed words, including “friend,” “money,” and “key,” and evaluating these concepts across three dimensions: valence, importance, and other- vs. self-relevance. After the first session, they were invited to the second session within three days. In this second session, participants (n = 192) were presented with a realistic dilemma in which the values of social relationships and monetary gains conflicted, and were required to indicate the percentage of salary increase that would motivate them to accept the job offer, with options ranging in 20% intervals from 20% to 200%, or selecting ‘unlikely’ if no salary increase could justify the move (i.e., the extent to which they prioritized one value over the other). B To assess semantic relationships between participants’ generated concepts and the target concepts (i.e., ‘friend’ or ‘money’), we applied the Word2vec model, pre-trained on the Google News corpus, and represented each concept as a 300-dimensional vector. The semantic similarity was quantified by calculating cosine similarity and WMD between the generated concepts and target concepts. These were computed through the cosine of the angle between one concept and another, and the minimal semantic distance required to transition from one concept set to another, respectively. We also analyzed how participants’ concepts increasingly aligned with ‘friend’ or ‘money’ across trials (i.e., convergence), using linear regression on individual cosine similarity values. Smoothed similarity functions captured the trend of alignment over time. Then, we validated our results using an independent sample (n = 350) for which data on SWB and FAST-related variables were available. Next, we investigated the relationship between SWB and evaluation scores on the generated concepts. Lastly, we examined whether the cosine similarity, WMD and convergence scores would predict participants’ decisions in the dilemma task.