What Made You Feel Good Yesterday? Exploring the Relationship between Personality and Daily Positive Effect Regulation

Abstract

Despite the natural human predilection towards feeling good, little is known about how people maintain and create positive feelings in daily life. What kinds of daily behavior are associated with day-to-day positive feelings? The current study explored daily behaviors and its relationship with positive feelings to understand how certain daily behavior affects temporal and long-term happiness considering one’s personality. Specifically, we defined behavior types for positive affect regulation and tested these behavior types are associated with personality, and state and trait happiness. First, using the Daily Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, & Schwarz, 2004), we collected undergraduates’ actual daily behaviors in which they felt positive feelings and extracted four activity factors. Then, we examined the extent to which people engage in those types of behavior that are influenced by one’s personality, state happiness, and long-term well-being. Also, we tested the moderating effect of personality on the relationship between the frequency of certain types of behaviors and trait happiness. Our results suggest that the activity factors that were significantly associated with vii affective personality traits moderate the relationship between certain types of behavior and long-term happiness. The limitation and future questions were discussed.

Committee Chair

Randy J. Larsen

Comments

Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/K7K07274

Degree

Master of Arts (AM/MA)

Author's Department

Psychology

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

Spring 5-15-2013

Language

English (en)

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