Emotions in Everyday Life Trampe, Debra; Quoidbach, Jordi; Taquet, Maxime
PloS one,
12/2015, Letnik:
10, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Despite decades of research establishing the causes and consequences of emotions in the laboratory, we know surprisingly little about emotions in everyday life. We developed a smartphone application ...that monitored real-time emotions of an exceptionally large (N = 11,000+) and heterogeneous participants sample. People's everyday life seems profoundly emotional: participants experienced at least one emotion 90% of the time. The most frequent emotion was joy, followed by love and anxiety. People experienced positive emotions 2.5 times more often than negative emotions, but also experienced positive and negative emotions simultaneously relatively frequently. We also characterized the interconnections between people's emotions using network analysis. This novel approach to emotion research suggests that specific emotions can fall into the following categories 1) connector emotions (e.g., joy), which stimulate same valence emotions while inhibiting opposite valence emotions, 2) provincial emotions (e.g., gratitude), which stimulate same valence emotions only, or 3) distal emotions (e.g., embarrassment), which have little interaction with other emotions and are typically experienced in isolation. Providing both basic foundations and novel tools to the study of emotions in everyday life, these findings demonstrate that emotions are ubiquitous to life and can exist together and distinctly, which has important implications for both emotional interventions and theory.
Happiness and Social Behavior Quoidbach, Jordi; Taquet, Maxime; Desseilles, Martin ...
Psychological science,
08/2019, Letnik:
30, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
It is often assumed that there is a robust positive symmetrical relationship between happiness and social behavior: Social relationships are viewed as essential to happiness, and happiness is thought ...to foster social relationships. However, empirical support for this widely held view is surprisingly mixed, and this view does little to clarify which social partner a person will be motivated to interact with when happy. To address these issues, we monitored the happiness and social interactions of more than 30,000 people for a month. We found that patterns of social interaction followed the hedonic-flexibility principle, whereby people tend to engage in happiness-enhancing social relationships when they feel bad and sustain happiness-decreasing periods of solitude and less pleasant types of social relationships that might promise long-term payoff when they feel good. These findings demonstrate that links between happiness and social behavior are more complex than often assumed in the positive-emotion literature.
A key function of morality is to regulate social behavior. Research suggests moral values may be divided into two types: binding values, which govern behavior in groups, and individualizing values, ...which promote personal rights and freedoms. Because people tend to mentally activate concepts in situations in which they may prove useful, the importance they afford moral values may vary according to whom they are with in the moment. In particular, because binding values help regulate communal behavior, people may afford these values more importance when in the presence of close (versus distant) others. Five studies test and support this hypothesis. First, we use a custom smartphone application to repeatedly record participants' (n = 1166) current social context and the importance they afforded moral values. Results show people rate moral values as more important when in the presence of close others, and this effect is stronger for binding than individualizing values-an effect that replicates in a large preregistered online sample (n = 2016). A lab study (n = 390) and two preregistered online experiments (n = 580 and n = 752) provide convergent evidence that people afford binding, but not individualizing, values more importance when in the real or imagined presence of close others. Our results suggest people selectively activate different moral values according to the demands of the situation, and show how the mere presence of others can affect moral thinking.
A fast-growing body of evidence from experience sampling studies suggests that affect dynamics are associated with well-being and health. But heterogeneity in experience sampling approaches impedes ...reproducibility and scientific progress. Leveraging a large dataset of 7016 individuals, each providing over 50 affect reports, we introduce an empirically derived framework to help researchers design well-powered and efficient experience sampling studies. Our research reveals three general principles. First, a sample of 200 participants and 20 observations per person yields sufficient power to detect medium-sized associations for most affect dynamic measures. Second, for trait- and time-independent variability measures of affect (e.g., SD), distant sampling study designs (i.e., a few daily measurements spread out over several weeks) lead to more accurate estimates than close sampling study designs (i.e., many daily measurements concentrated over a few days), although differences in accuracy across sampling methods were inconsistent and of little practical significance for temporally dependent affect dynamic measures (i.e., RMSSD, autocorrelation coefficient, TKEO, and PAC). Third, across all affect dynamics measures, sampling exclusively on specific days or time windows leads to little to no improvement over sampling at random times. Because the ideal sampling approach varies for each affect dynamics measure, we provide a companion R package, an online calculator (
https://sergiopirla.shinyapps.io/powerADapp
), and a series of benchmark effect sizes to help researchers address three fundamental
hows
of experience sampling:
How many
participants to recruit?
How often
to solicit them? And for
how long
?
Although previous research has uncovered various ways people can savor or dampen their positive emotional experiences, the
unique impact of each of these strategies on well-being remains unknown. The ...present study examines the relative impact of the main positive emotion regulation strategies on two components of well-being: positive affect (PA) and life satisfaction (LS). A total of 282 participants completed measures of PA, LS, overall happiness, and the savoring and dampening strategies they typically used. Results show that when experiencing positive events, focusing attention on the present moment and engaging in positive rumination promoted PA, whereas telling others promoted LS. In contrast, being distracted diminished PA, while focusing on negative details and engaging in negative rumination reduced LS. As the strategies targeted different components of well-being, our results further show that regulatory diversity (i.e., typically using various strategies rather than a few specific ones), was beneficial to overall happiness. Our findings suggest that there are several independent ways to make the best (or the worst) out of our positive emotions, and that the cultivation of multiple savoring strategies might be required to achieve lasting happiness.
The End of History Illusion Quoidbach, Jordi; Gilbert, Daniel T.; Wilson, Timothy D.
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
01/2013, Letnik:
339, Številka:
6115
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We measured the personalities, values, and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68 and asked them to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to ...predict how much they would change in the next decade. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This "end of history illusion" had practical consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences.
This study builds on earlier work showing that adult emotional competencies (EC) could be improved through a relatively brief training. In a set of 2 controlled experimental studies, the authors ...investigated whether developing EC could lead to improved emotional functioning; long-term personality changes; and important positive implications for physical, psychological, social, and work adjustment. Results of Study 1 showed that 18 hr of training with e-mail follow-up was sufficient to significantly improve emotion regulation, emotion understanding, and overall EC. These changes led in turn to long-term significant increases in extraversion and agreeableness as well as a decrease in neuroticism. Results of Study 2 showed that the development of EC brought about positive changes in psychological well-being, subjective health, quality of social relationships, and employability. The effect sizes were sufficiently large for the changes to be considered as meaningful in people's lives.
When individuals feel similar to their future self, they are more likely to delay present gratification and make plans for the long run. But do these feelings of similarity actually correspond with ...heightened well-being for the future self? Theoretically, making patient decisions in the present could lead to a future self who is better off and thus more satisfied. Alternatively, perceived overlap with the future self could cause people to continually deny themselves pleasures in the present, diminishing satisfaction over time. To adjudicate between these possibilities, we use a 10-year longitudinal data set (N = 4,963) to estimate how thoughts about one’s future self in an initial survey predict life satisfaction 10 years later. Controlling for initial life satisfaction, greater perceived similarity to the future self is linearly associated with greater life satisfaction 10 years after the original prediction, a finding that is robust to a number of alternative analyses.
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