Feeling Most Like Yourself May Depend on Who You Are With

There is a familiar feeling that psychologists have spent decades trying to pin down: the sense that what you are doing in a given moment is exactly what you are meant to be doing. Researchers call it personal expressiveness, and it is considered one of the clearest experiential signals of eudaimonia, the classical Greek notion of flourishing by living in accordance with one’s true self. A new pair of studies published in the Journal of Adult Development by Eli A. Waxler of Claremont Graduate University suggests that this feeling, far from being a purely private affair, is tightly woven into the fabric of everyday social life. In adulthood, the moments when people feel most authentically themselves tend to be the moments they spend in the company of others.

Personal expressiveness has its roots in eudaimonic identity theory, a neo-Eriksonian framework developed by psychologist Alan Waterman that connects identity development with well-being research. The theory draws on Aristotle’s idea of the daimon, the set of inherent potentials, capacities, and interests that give direction to a person’s development. When people engage in activities that express those potentials, they report a distinctive subjective fit, a feeling that the activity reflects their true self rather than merely producing pleasure or enjoyment. Decades of research have linked this experience to identity commitment, identity achievement, autonomy, flow, and positive emotion, while showing that it remains statistically distinct from hedonic enjoyment. In other words, personal expressiveness is not just feeling good; it is feeling real.

What has remained surprisingly unclear is how this experience relates to the social world. Classic studies of college students found that the activities rated as most personally expressive were often relational ones: spending time with friends, helping others, engaging with a romantic partner, or participating in religious and community life. Waterman himself concluded that activities experienced as personally expressive are likely to involve connections with others. Theoretical perspectives converge on the same intuition. Self-determination theory treats relatedness as a basic psychological need, the belongingness hypothesis frames social bonds as a fundamental human motivation, and Erikson’s lifespan model holds that identity is enacted and confirmed through participation in social roles. Yet almost no research had directly tested how personal expressiveness unfolds in the social contexts of adult daily life.

The first study addressed the question at the level of activities. Waxler analyzed cross-sectional data from 294 adults aged 23 to 78, with an average age of about 40, who each nominated an activity they considered important, meaningful, and descriptive of themselves. Participants had typically pursued these activities for roughly 18 years, underscoring how deeply embedded identity-relevant pursuits become in adult life. Each person rated the activity on the six-item feelings of personal expressiveness subscale of the Personally Expressive Activities Questionnaire, a measure asking, among other things, whether the activity feels like what the respondent is meant to do. Internal consistency was high, and participants also reported whether the activity was typically individual, group or team based, or both.

The results defied the pattern seen in younger samples. Personal expressiveness did not differ reliably across social formats, with the analysis of variance yielding an effect size near zero, and nonparametric robustness checks confirmed the null result. When activities were coded into domains and grouped into other-oriented categories such as socializing and religious or altruistic pursuits versus everything else, relational activities did show descriptively higher expressiveness, 5.81 versus 5.39 on a seven-point scale, but the difference fell short of statistical significance, partly because only 20 activities fell into the other-oriented group. Crucially, expressiveness also showed striking continuity across the adult lifespan: levels did not differ between emerging, established, middle, and later adulthood, and the link between activity characteristics and expressive classification held steady in every age group.

That null pattern at the activity level pointed to a possibility that broad categories may simply be the wrong lens. If personal expressiveness in adulthood is not strongly structured by whether an activity is typically done alone or with others, perhaps it varies moment to moment depending on the situation. The second study tested exactly that using experience sampling, a method that captures life as it happens rather than in retrospect. Fifty-two adults, averaging about 40 years of age, received six random prompts per day on their smartphones for seven days, drawn from a 14-hour window matched to their sleep schedule. Of 2,184 prompts, 1,478 were completed, a compliance rate of nearly 68 percent. At each signal, participants rated three adapted items measuring momentary personal expressiveness and reported whether they were alone or with others.

The momentary data told a very different story from the retrospective one. Across all observations, personal expressiveness averaged 4.55, but it was significantly lower when people were alone, 4.31, than when they were with others, 4.79, a moderate difference. More strikingly, 76 percent of the variability in expressiveness occurred within individuals across moments rather than between them, meaning that the feeling of being one’s true self fluctuates substantially over the course of a single day. To untangle the temporal dynamics, Waxler estimated a Bayesian lagged multilevel mediation model that asked whether above-average expressiveness at one moment predicted social presence at that moment, and whether social presence in turn carried forward to the next prompt.

The model’s estimates were precise and internally consistent. Above-average momentary expressiveness was associated with roughly 53 percent higher odds of being with others at the same prompt, with an odds ratio of 1.53 and a 95 percent credible interval well above one. Being with others at one moment, in turn, more than tripled the odds of being with others at the next prompt, an odds ratio of 3.42, reflecting the simple but powerful fact that social engagement tends to persist. The indirect effect of expressiveness on subsequent sociality through concurrent social presence was positive, with a posterior probability exceeding 0.99 that the effect exceeded zero, while the direct effect of expressiveness on later sociality was essentially zero. In plain terms, feeling deeply yourself and being with others travel together in the moment, and because social moments chain together, expressive moments are embedded in ongoing stretches of connection.

The combined findings reshape how scientists should think about authenticity in adulthood. Broad activity categories, it turns out, capture little of the action: by midlife, intrinsically motivated pursuits are so long-standing and integrated into the self that whether one paints alone or volunteers in a group matters less than theorists once assumed. Instead, personal expressiveness appears to function as a momentary process through which established identities are socially enacted. The pattern fits neatly with broaden-and-build theory, which holds that positive experiences expand thought-action repertoires and build social resources over time, and with self-determination theory, suggesting that expressiveness may mark the experiential integration of autonomy, competence, and relatedness during identity-congruent activity. It also echoes earlier diary research showing that eudaimonic activity predicts greater meaning the following day, hinting at upward spirals linking authentic engagement and connection.

The authors are careful about limits. The data are correlational, so the studies cannot determine whether being with others produces expressiveness, whether expressive people seek company, or whether both flow from unmeasured factors. The experience sampling sample was small and locally recruited, social context was reduced to a simple alone-versus-with-others distinction, and the first study relied on a single self-nominated activity per person. Still, this appears to be among the first research programs to measure personal expressiveness in real time, and the approach opens a window that retrospective questionnaires cannot provide. If the findings hold in larger and more diverse samples, they carry an arresting implication: the experience of being most fully oneself may be inseparable from the experience of being with others, a reminder that even the most inward sense of authenticity is, at root, profoundly social.

Subject of Research: Personal expressiveness as a momentary, socially embedded marker of eudaimonic identity functioning in adult daily life

Article Title: With Others, More Myself: Personal Expressiveness as Identity Enactment in Adult Daily Life

Article References: Waxler, E. A. (2026). With Others, More Myself: Personal Expressiveness as Identity Enactment in Adult Daily Life. Journal of Adult Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-026-09579-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10804-026-09579-5

Keywords: personal expressiveness, eudaimonia, identity, experience sampling, social context, adult development, well-being, self-determination theory, authenticity, daily life, positive psychology, Journal of Adult Development