Across three studies, we examine individuals’ trait interests with their affective evaluations of work activities. Despite strong conceptual links between trait interests and emotions, there has been little research on the interplay between the two fields of research. We make three contributions providing a more nuanced view of interests. First, emotions can serve as indicators of trait interest—thus; we locate the emotion term interest as but one potential indicator of trait interest. Second, by examining trait interests with positive and negative affect anchor labels, we find that trait interest approach responses can be different from trait interest avoidance responses—aspects of work activities people are averse to and avoid. Last, building on this new evidence for trait interest avoidance, we find that avoidance-congruence—derived from passive-negative affect anchors—also relates to commensurate facets of job satisfaction. Further, not only does use of avoidance-congruence lead to incremental prediction of commensurate job satisfaction facets, but also the variance in job satisfaction accounted for by traditional congruence is subsumed by avoidance-congruence: suggesting that what people avoid might be equally or more important for understanding their job satisfaction than what they would like to do
