Abstract: Well-being has been an everlasting theme of the human lives. Kahneman and his colleagues proposed the he Appraisal System, which provided the framework for studying subjective well-being (SWB). Relevant researches and significant findings in the neural basis for SWB in the past decade were reviewed in details, which covered four aspects (instantaneous utility, remembered utility, decision & predicted utility) of the Appraisal System and internal & external factors for global SWB.

Key words: SWB, neural mechanism, appraisal system