Cross-cultural evidence for the influence of positive self-evaluation on cross-cultural differences in well-being

Poster Session F - Well-Being: abstract F197We propose that cultural norms about realism and hedonism contribute to the cross-cultural differences in well-being over and above differences in objective living conditions. To test this hypothesis, we used samples from China and the United States. Results supported the mediating role of positive evaluative bias in cross-cultural differences in well-being.postprin

Does Migration Make You Happy?:A Longitudinal Study of Internal Migration and Subjective Well-Being

The authors acknowledge financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES-625-28-0001). This project is part of the ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC). Financial support from the Marie Curie programme under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / Career Integration Grant n. PCIG10-GA-2011-303728 (CIG Grant NBHCHOICE, Neighbourhood choice, neighbourhood sorting, and neighbourhood effects).The majority of quantitative studies on the consequences of internal migration focus almost exclusively on the labour-market outcomes and the material well-being of migrants. We investigate whether individuals who migrate within the UK become happier after the move than they were before, and whether the effect is permanent or transient. Using life-satisfaction responses from twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey and employing a fixed-effects model, we derive a temporal pattern of migrants’ subjective well-being around the time of the migration event. Our findings make an original contribution by revealing that, on average, migration is preceded by a period when individuals experience a significant decline in happiness for a variety of reasons, including changes in personal living arrangements. Migration itself causes a boost in happiness, and brings people back to their initial levels. The research contributes, therefore, to advancing an understanding of migration in relation to set-point theory. Perhaps surprisingly, long-distance migrants are at least as happy as short-distance migrants despite the higher social and psychological costs involved. The findings of this paper add to the pressure to retheorize migration within a conceptual framework that accounts for social well-being from a life-course perspective.PostprintPeer reviewe

Understanding decision quality through satisfaction

"PAAMS 2014 International Workshops, Salamanca, Spain, June 4-6, 2014. Proceedings"One of the most important factors to determine the success of an or-ganization is the quality of decisions made. In order to improve the decisions taken and to strengthen the competitiveness of organizations, systems such as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) have been strongly developed and studied in recent decades. The amount of GDSSs incorporating automatic nego-tiation mechanisms, such as argumentation, is increasing nowadays. The evalu-ation of these mechanisms and the understanding of their real benefits for the organizations is still a hard challenge. In this article, we propose a model that allows a GDSS to measure the participant’s satisfaction with the decision, con-sidering aspects such as problem evaluation, personality, emotions and expecta-tions. This model is intended to enable the understanding of the decision’s qual-ity achieved with an argumentation system and to evaluate its capability to po-tentiate the decision’s quality. The proposed model validates all the assump-tions found in the literature regarding the participant’s satisfaction.This work is supported by FEDER Funds through the “Programa Operacional Fac-tores de Competitividade - COMPETE” program and by National Funds through FCT “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia” under the project: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-PEst-OE/EEI/UI0760/2011 and SFRH/BD/89697/2012

The Bitter Truth About Sugar and Willpower: The Limited Evidential Value of the Glucose Model of Ego Depletion

This work was supported by European Research Council Grant 283849 (to N. Gold) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)

Memory-experience gap in early adolescents' happiness reports

Studies among adult populations show that estimates of how happy one has felt in the past tend to be more positive than average happiness as assessed using time sampling techniques. This ‘memory-experience gap’ is attributed to cognitive biases, among which fading affect bias. In this paper we report a study among 352 pupils of a secondary school in the Netherlands. These youngsters reported subsequently: 1) how happy they had felt yesterday, 2) how happy they had felt during the last month, 3) what they had done the previous day and 4) how the

Reaching back: the relative strength of the retroactive emotional attentional blink

Visual stimuli with emotional content appearing in close temporal proximity either before or after a target a stimulus can hinder conscious perceptual processing of the target via an emotional attentional blink (EAB). This occurs for targets that appear after the emotional stimulus (forward EAB) and for those appearing before the emotional stimulus (retroactive EAB). Additionally, the traditional attentional blink (AB) occurs because detection of any target hinders detection of a subsequent target. The present study investigated the relations between these different attentional processes. Rapid sequences of landscape images were presented to thirty-one male participants with occasional landscape targets (rotated images). For the forward EAB, emotional or neutral distractor images of people were presented before the target; for the retroactive EAB, such images were also targets and presented after the landscape target. In the latter case, this design allowed investigation of the AB as well. Erotic and gory images caused more EABs than neutral images, but there were no differential effects on the AB. This pattern is striking because while using different target categories (rotated landscapes, people) appears to have eliminated the AB, the retroactive EAB still occurred, offering additional evidence for the power of emotional stimuli over conscious attention

Networks of Emotion Concepts

The aim of this work was to study the similarity network and hierarchical clustering of Finnish emotion concepts. Native speakers of Finnish evaluated similarity between the 50 most frequently used Finnish words describing emotional experiences. We hypothesized that methods developed within network theory, such as identifying clusters and specific local network structures, can reveal structures that would be difficult to discover using traditional methods such as multidimensional scaling (MDS) and ordinary cluster analysis. The concepts divided into three main clusters, which can be described as negative, positive, and surprise. Negative and positive clusters divided further into meaningful sub-clusters, corresponding to those found in previous studies. Importantly, this method allowed the same concept to be a member in more than one cluster. Our results suggest that studying particular network structures that do not fit into a low-dimensional description can shed additional light on why subjects evaluate certain concepts as similar. To encourage the use of network methods in analyzing similarity data, we provide the analysis software for free use (http://www.becs.tkk.fi/similaritynets/)