The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice

Two experiments revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this. Undergraduates made more accurate predictions about their affective reactions to a 5-minute speed date (n = 25) and to a peer evaluation (n = 88) when they knew only how another undergraduate had reacted to these events than when they had information about the events themselves. Both participants and independent judges mistakenly believed that predictions based on information about the event would be more accurate than predictions based on information about how another person had reacted to it.Psycholog

Happiness from the Bottom Up

This dissertation presents three papers organized around a central theme: understanding happiness from the bottom up, in the context of everyday life. The first paper asks whether, in the course of daily activities, people need to choose between two different facets of happiness: momentary happiness and life satisfaction. Results reveal a high degree of convergence: activities associated with momentary happiness are to a large extent also associated with life satisfaction (and related constructs such as feeling that one’s life is meaningful, worthwhile, and fulfilling). Activities that one might expect to be associated mainly with a satisfying life are also associated with greater momentary happiness, and activities that one might expect to be associated mainly with greater momentary happiness are also associated with greater life satisfaction. The second paper quantifies happiness in absolute terms, revealing the percentage of life that is actually “worth living.” Existing research on happiness relies on measures of happiness that have only relative meanings. In this paper, we measure happiness by leveraging a dimension of experience that does have absolute meaning: time. We collect data on the details of people’s everyday experiences, and employ a novel method to categorize episodes of time as absolutely positive or negative. We find that roughly 40% of people’s time is experienced as negative. When we offset the positive and negative utility of these episodes we find that life is a net positive, but only moderately so. The third paper examines the relationship between happiness and a particular domain of everyday experience: mind-wandering. Participants report mind wandering (i.e., engaging in task-unrelated thought) nearly half the time, but are less happy when doing so. Moreover, timelag analyses find that unhappiness tends to follow rather than precede mind-wandering, suggesting that mind-wandering causes unhappiness rather than the other way around. Interestingly, the variance in happiness explained by mind-wandering is largely non-overlapping with variance explained by people’s activities. This suggests that what people do (their activities) and think (whether and where their minds wander) may be two independent determinants of happiness.Psycholog

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.Psycholog

Beyond Positive Emotion: Deconstructing Happy Moments Based on Writing Prompts

International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media14294-302United State

Parenthood Is Associated With Greater Well-Being for Fathers Than Mothers.

The experiences of mothers and fathers are different in ways that could affect their well-being. Yet few studies have comprehensively examined gender differences in parents' well-being. In the current research, we investigated such gender differences in a large representative sample (Study 1a; N = 13,007), in a community sample using validated well-being measures (Study 1b; N = 472), and in a large experience sampling study measuring happiness during caregiving activities and during interactions with children (Study 2; N = 4,930). Fathers reported greater happiness, subjective well-being, psychological need satisfaction, and daily uplifts than did men without children (Studies 1a and 1b). During caregiving experiences, fathers reported greater happiness, whereas mothers reported lower happiness, compared with their other activities. Fathers also reported relatively higher happiness when interacting with their children than did mothers (Study 2). Across all three studies and more than 18,000 participants, parenthood was associated with more positive well-being outcomes for fathers than for mothers