Aaron C. Weidman

Valuing Time Over Money Is Associated With Greater Happiness

How do the trade-offs that we make about two of our most valuable resources—time and money—shape happiness? While past research has documented the immediate consequences of thinking about time and money, research has not yet examined whether people’s general orientations to prioritize time over money are associated with greater happiness. In the current research, we develop the Resource Orientation Measure (ROM) to assess people’s stable preferences to prioritize time over money. Next, using data from students, adults recruited from the community, and a representative sample of employed Americans, we show that the ROM is associated with greater well-being. These findings could not be explained by materialism, material striving, current feelings of time or material affluence, or demographic characteristics such as income or marital status. Across six studies (N = 4,690), we provide the first empirical evidence that prioritizing time over money is a stable preference related to greater subjective well-being.

The Jingle and Jangle of Emotion Assessment: Imprecise Measurement, Casual Scale Usage, and Conceptual Fuzziness in Emotion Research.

Although affective science has seen an explosion of interest in measuring subjectively experienced distinct emotional states, most existing self-report measures tap broad affect dimensions and dispositional emotional tendencies, rather than momentary distinct emotions. This raises the question of how emotion researchers are measuring momentary distinct emotions in their studies. To address this question, we reviewed the self-report measurement practices regularly used for the purpose of assessing momentary distinct emotions, by coding these practices as observed in a representative sample of articles published in Emotion from 2001–2011 (n = 467 articles; 751 studies; 356 measurement instances). This quantitative review produced several noteworthy findings. First, researchers assess many purportedly distinct emotions (n = 65), a number that differs substantially from previously developed emotion taxonomies. Second, researchers frequently use scales that were not systematically developed, and that include items also used to measure at least 1 other emotion on a separate scale in a separate study. Third, the majority of scales used include only a single item, and had unknown reliability. Together, these tactics may create ambiguity regarding which emotions are being measured in empirical studies, and conceptual inconsistency among measures of purportedly identical emotions across studies. We discuss the implications of these problematic practices, and conclude with recommendations for how the field might improve the way it measures emotions.

The Benefits of Following Your Pride: Authentic Pride Promotes Achievement

Although the emotion authentic pride has been posited to promote achievement, it remains unclear precisely how this works. Here, we tested whether authentic pride promotes adaptive downstream achievement outcomes by motivating individuals to engage in appropriate behavioral responses to success and failure. In two longitudinal studies (N = 1,132), we measured pride emotional responses to a prior performance and subsequent changes in achievement-oriented behavior and performance outcomes among (a) adults training for long-distance running races and (b) undergraduates completing class exams. Authentic pride shifted in direct response to achievement outcomes, such that those who performed well felt greater pride. Furthermore, individuals who felt low authentic pride responded to these feelings by changing their achievement behavior in a functional manner. In Studies 2a, 2b, and 2c, we found that pride-driven behavioral changes led to improved future performance among low performers. In these studies we also demonstrated that the effect of authentic pride on achievement is independent of that of self-efficacy, which in fact works in an opposite manner. Taken together, these results suggest that authentic pride functions as a barometer of achievement, promoting behavioral responses that lead to improved performance.

The psychological structure of humility

Psychological inquiry into humility has advanced considerably over the past decade, yet this literature suffers from 2 notable limitations. First, there is no clear consensus among researchers about what humility is, and conceptualizations vary considerably across studies. Second, researchers have uniformly operationalized humility as a positive, socially desirable construct, while dismissing evidence from lay opinion and theological and philosophical traditions suggesting that humility may also have a darker side. To redress these issues, we conducted the first comprehensive, bottom-up analysis of the psychological structure of humility. Here we report 5 studies (total N = 1,479) that involve: (a) cluster analysis and categorization of humility-related words, generated by both lay persons and academic experts; (b) exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of momentary and dispositional humility experiences; and (c) experimental induction of a momentary humility experience. Across these studies, we found converging evidence that humility can take 2 distinct forms, which we labeled “appreciative” and “self-abasing” humility. Appreciative humility tends to be elicited by personal success, involve action tendencies oriented toward celebrating others, and is positively associated with dispositions such as authentic pride, guilt, and prestige-based status. In contrast, self-abasing humility tends to be elicited by personal failure, involves negative self-evaluations and action tendencies oriented toward hiding from others’ evaluations, and is associated with dispositions such as shame, low self-esteem, and submissiveness. Together, these findings provide a systematic and empirically grounded understanding of humility.

The Unsung Benefits of Material Things Material Purchases Provide More Frequent Momentary Happiness Than Experiential Purchases

Although research suggests that people derive more happiness from buying life experiences than material objects, almost no studies have examined how people actually feel while consuming real-world experiential and material purchases. In the present research, we provided the first examination of people’s momentary happiness while consuming these purchases. Participants were randomly assigned to spend C

The assessment of social status: A review of measures and experimental manipulations

20 on a material versus experiential purchase (Study 1) or to report a material versus experiential gift they received at Christmas (Study 2); participants in both studies reported their momentary happiness regarding these purchases over 2 weeks, using daily-diary (Study 1) and experience-sampling (Study 2) methodologies. Results suggest that material and experiential purchases deliver happiness in two distinct flavors: Material purchases provide more frequent momentary happiness over time, whereas experiential purchases provide more intense momentary happiness on individual occasions.

How to Study the Structure of Emotions? A Welcome Call to Action and a Pragmatic Proposal

This chapter provides an overview of measures and experimental manipulations developed and used in research on social status. Our goal is to provide researchers with a resource for identifying and selecting appropriate self-report and other-report scales, behavioral measures, and experimental manipulation tools for their future empirical work on status. We provide a brief summary of each tool and how it was developed, noting, where relevant, its original source, reliability, validity, and frequency of use. We conclude with recommendations for how researchers might select among the reviewed measures and manipulations.

Compensatory internet use among individuals higher in social anxiety and its implications for well-being.

The field of affective science is fraught with conflicting views on the question of how emotions should be conceptualized. In her target article, Agnes Moors (this issue) reviews much of the ongoing debate by summarizing the extensive literature on various models of emotion, including affect program (or basic emotion) theory, appraisal theory (both discrete and dimensional variants), and psychological constructionism. The roots of this debate, about how emotions should be conceptualized, run deep; many of the central ideas behind what Moors refers to as “classical” theories, such as the understanding that emotions are discrete universal states that are evolutionarily prepared to serve adaptive functions, can be traced to Darwin (1872). These ideas became entrenched in the emotions literature decades ago, through pioneering work supporting the contention that certain basic emotions come in distinct packages that manifest similarly across cultures (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Izard, 1971; Tomkins, 1962). Yet, despite accumulating evidence supporting this claim, to this day affective scientists continue to debate whether classical theories do, in fact, offer the best way to conceptualize emotions; only 3 years ago, an issue of Emotion Review was dedicated to outlining the tenets of several competing conceptualizations, including classical theories (Tracy, 2014) and what Moors refers to as “skeptical” theories—those that, in stark contrast, attempt to explain emotions as emergent experiences that are constructed from a variety of lower level components, rather than as discrete, functional packages (Barrett, 2014; Moors, 2014). Moors’s review reminds us that psychological scientists continue to conceptualize emotions from contradictory perspectives. Fortunately though, where debate persists, the opportunity for theoretical advancement emerges. In our view, Moors’s article usefully alerts the field at-large to this ongoing area of debate, and therefore has the potential to stimulate research aiming to adjudicate between the classical and skeptical theories of emotion. In this commentary we focus on one line of research that could prove fruitful toward this end: studies that seek to test the validity of one primary tenet of the classical theories that Moors describes, namely, that certain components are intrinsic to each emotion and occur with some regularity across a representative sample of episodes of that emotion. For example, classical theorists contend that, across a representative sample of fear episodes, a certain set of experiential components (i.e., certain cognitions, subjective feelings, somatic sensations, and desires to act) reliably and consistently occur. Importantly, this proposition represents a critical point of divergence between classical and skeptical theories; as Moors points out, whereas classical theories such as affect program theory assume beyond-chance, probabilistic co-occurrence of specific components for each emotion (e.g., Roseman, 2011; Tracy, 2014), skeptical theories such as psychological constructionism do not (e.g., Barrett, 2014; Russell, 2003). Although pinpointing the relative coherence of specific components within an emotional episode is therefore crucial to adjudicating between classical and skeptical theories of the structure of emotion, Moors notes that almost no studies have empirically tested the extent to which various emotional components co-occur within emotional episodes. As a result, “there is currently no consensus about the exact number of components to include in the emotion” (Moors, this issue, p. 2). In what follows, we offer a proposal for how future studies might empirically test the validity of the classical theoretical stance regarding the structure of emotions—focusing primarily on subjective, experiential components—and we describe the kinds of results that might support this account and challenge competing accounts offered by skeptical theorists.