Across seven preregistered studies with 1,362 participants, people judged meaningfulness more by benefits to society than by benefits to themselves, whereas judgments of happiness weighed self-benefits equally or more heavily. This pattern held when evaluating jobs, other people's lives, advice, and one's own experiences, though self-benefits played a larger role in first-person meaning judgments than in third-person ones. The findings indicate that meaning perceptions are more self-transcendent than happiness perceptions.
After effective antidepressant treatment in patients with acute major depressive disorder (MDD), plasma glutamate levels increased while levels of inflammatory cytokines (IL-17, IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, and IL-8) decreased. Greater improvement in cognitive impairment was associated with smaller changes in glycine. Improvements in depressive and anxiety symptoms, reductions in feelings of despair, and alleviation of somatic anxiety symptoms were linked to changes in inflammatory cytokines. These findings suggest that N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR)-related indicators and inflammatory markers change with effective treatment and may be associated with clinical outcomes.