Reduced Resting-State Connectivity Is Associated with Subjective Well-Being and Engagement in Chinese Children and Early Adolescents

Subjective well-being is a critical protective factor during childhood and adolescence, yet its neural mechanisms remain poorly characterized, in part because prior neuroimaging work has relied on unidimensional hedonic scales and pathological cohorts. We examined whole-brain neural correlates of multidimensional well-being in a typically developing Chinese cohort (N = 196, ages 6–18 years) using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), network-based statistics, and graph-theoretical analysis. Well-being was assessed with the PERMA-Profiler, in which higher scores indicate greater flourishing across five domains. Higher overall well-being, driven mainly by the Engagement dimension, was associated with reduced functional connectivity (FC) across large-scale networks. The strongest pattern involved functional decoupling between the default mode network (DMN) and task-positive networks and between the somatomotor and ventral attention networks. Complementary topological analyses linked higher engagement to lower global network integration. Edge-level FC associations survived stringent correction for multiple comparisons, and engagement-specific topological associations proved more robust than total well-being scores after accounting for nonlinear age effects. Rather than indicating dysfunction, this sparse connectivity profile may reflect a more economical, lower-density resting-state architecture in healthy development. These findings position engagement as a candidate bridging between positive psychological functioning and intrinsic brain network organization in youth, and demonstrate that multidimensional well-being frameworks can reveal domain-specific neural signatures invisible to unidimensional approaches.