PERMA-Profiler
A 23-item look at the five pillars of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment
Well-being is not one number. Seligman's PERMA model splits it into five pillars: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment — plus health and loneliness. The PERMA-Profiler, built by Julie Butler and Margaret Kern at the University of Pennsylvania, asks 23 questions covering all of these. It's not a diagnostic tool. It's a way to see which parts of your life are holding up well and which one could use some attention.
What this assessment measures
Well-being is not one switch. In Flourish, Martin Seligman argued that it rests on five separate pillars: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. How they combine differs from person to person — someone can have rich relationships yet no sense of meaning, another can be high-achieving and still flat. A single total score flattens those differences.
The PERMA-Profiler, built by Julie Butler and Margaret Kern at the University of Pennsylvania, follows that model. Its 23 items cover the five pillars plus negative emotion, physical health, and loneliness. It doesn't hand you one "happiness score"; it breaks the parts out so you can see what your well-being actually looks like.
Dimensions
- Positive Emotion (P): how often joy, contentment, and calm show up
- Engagement (E): how absorbed you get in what you're doing, including losing track of time
- Relationships (R): feeling loved and supported, satisfaction with relationships
- Meaning (M): life has direction and value
- Accomplishment (A): progress toward goals, handling daily responsibilities
- Negative Emotion (N): frequency of anxiety, anger, sadness
- Health (H): self-rated physical health and vitality
- Loneliness: how lonely your daily life feels (single item)
Scoring
Each item runs 0-10. Every dimension is the mean of its items; the overall score is the mean of the 15 PERMA items plus the happiness item.
Psychometrics
- Internal consistency: dimension alphas range 0.71-0.95 (Butler & Kern, 2016)
- Validation samples exceeded 30,000 people
- Convergent validity with existing well-being measures (life satisfaction, positive and negative affect) is solid
- An official Chinese translation is published by the original authors, with further regional validation studies
About your score
Butler and Kern deliberately set no official cutoffs — they argue against slicing a continuous score into a sick/not-sick dichotomy. The bands in our interpretation are reference points to help you see roughly where you stand, not labels. Well-being is fluid; where you are today is not where you'll be tomorrow.
Note
This assessment is for self-exploration, not diagnosis. It does not replace professional evaluation. If you're going through a rough patch, talk to someone — a person you trust or a mental health professional.
*Butler, J., & Kern, M. L. (2016). The PERMA-Profiler: A brief multidimensional measure of flourishing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 6(3), 1-48.*
Result Interpretation
After completing the 23 questions, you'll receive an immediate, detailed report with:
- Your score — calculated automatically based on your responses
- Score interpretation — what your score means in practical terms
- Dimension breakdown — separate scores for each sub-scale
- Context — how your results compare to general population norms where available
All results are displayed on screen. No account or login needed.