Jordi Quoidbach

Increasing emotional competence improves psychological and physical well-being, social relationships, and employability

This study builds on earlier work showing that adult emotional competencies (EC) could be improved through a relatively brief training. In a set of 2 controlled experimental studies, the authors investigated whether developing EC could lead to improved emotional functioning; long-term personality changes; and important positive implications for physical, psychological, social, and work adjustment. Results of Study 1 showed that 18 hr of training with e-mail follow-up was sufficient to significantly improve emotion regulation, emotion understanding, and overall EC. These changes led in turn to long-term significant increases in extraversion and agreeableness as well as a decrease in neuroticism. Results of Study 2 showed that the development of EC brought about positive changes in psychological well-being, subjective health, quality of social relationships, and employability. The effect sizes were sufficiently large for the changes to be considered as meaningful in peoples lives.

Happiness Is Best Kept Stable: Positive Emotion Variability Is Associated With Poorer Psychological Health

Positive emotion has been shown to be associated with adaptive outcomes in a number of domains, including psychological health. However, research has largely focused on overall levels of positive emotion with less attention paid to how variable versus stable it is across time. We thus examined the psychological health correlates of positive emotion variability versus stability across 2 distinct studies, populations, and scientifically validated approaches for quantifying variability in emotion across time. Study 1 used a daily experience approach in a U.S. community sample (N = 244) to examine positive emotion variability across 2 weeks (macrolevel). Study 2 adopted a daily reconstruction method in a French adult sample (N = 2,391) to examine variability within 1 day (microlevel). Greater macro- and microlevel variability in positive emotion was associated with worse psychological health, including lower well-being and life satisfaction and greater depression and anxiety (Study 1), and lower daily satisfaction, life satisfaction, and happiness (Study 2). Taken together, these findings support the notion that positive emotion variability plays an important and incremental role in psychological health above and beyond overall levels of happiness, and that too much variability might be maladaptive.

Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness

This study provides the first evidence that money impairs people’s ability to savor everyday positive emotions and experiences. In a sample of working adults, wealthier individuals reported lower savoring ability (the ability to enhance and prolong positive emotional experience). Moreover, the negative impact of wealth on individuals’ ability to savor undermined the positive effects of money on their happiness. We experimentally exposed participants to a reminder of wealth and produced the same deleterious effect on their ability to savor as that produced by actual individual differences in wealth, a result supporting the theory that money has a causal effect on savoring. Moving beyond self-reports, we found that participants exposed to a reminder of wealth spent less time savoring a piece of chocolate and exhibited reduced enjoyment of it compared with participants not exposed to wealth. This article presents evidence supporting the widely held but previously untested belief that having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures.

Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety

The ability to project oneself into the future has previously been found to be related to happiness and anxiety. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the causal effect of deliberate mental time travel (MTT) on happiness and anxiety. More specifically, we address whether purposely engaging in positive, negative, or neutral future MTT would lead to different levels of happiness and anxiety. Results show a significant increase of happiness for subjects in the positive condition after 2 weeks but no changes in the negative or neutral condition. Additionally, while positive or negative MTT had no effect on anxiety, engaging in neutral MTT seems to significantly reduce stress over 15 days. These findings suggest that positive future MTT is not just a consequence of happiness and might be related to well-being in a causal fashion and provide a new approach in happiness boosting and stress-reducing activities.

Cortisol awakening response (CAR)’s flexibility leads to larger and more consistent associations with psychological factors than CAR magnitude

The cortisol awakening response (CAR) is increasingly recognized as a potential biological marker of psychological and physical health status. Yet, the CAR literature is replete with contradictory results: both supposedly protective and vulnerability psychosocial factors have been associated with both increased and decreased CAR. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the CAR flexibility would be a better indicator of psychological status than CAR magnitude. Forty-two men measures of happiness, perceived stress and neuroticism, and took saliva samples immediately on awakening, then at 15, 30, 45 and 60min post-awakening on three study days (i.e., Sunday, Monday and Tuesday). When considering the CAR magnitude, our effects perfectly reflect the inconsistencies previously observed in the literature (i.e., the main effects of the psychological predictors are not consistent with each other, and the effect of one predictor on a given day contradicts the effect of the same predictor on another day). However, considering the CAR flexibility leads to a fully consistent pattern: protective factors (i.e., high happiness, low stress, low neurotiscim) are associated with a flexible CAR (i.e., lower CAR during weekends compared to workdays) whereas vulnerability factors (i.e., low happiness, high stress, high neurotiscim) are associated with a stiff CAR (i.e., same magnitude during weekends and workdays). We conclude that considering the CAR flexibility (e.g., between weekends and workdays) rather than the traditional CAR magnitude might be a way to understand the apparent conflicts in the CAR literature.

Personality and mental time travel: A differential approach to autonoetic consciousness

Recent research on autonoetic consciousness indicates that the ability to remember the past and the ability to project oneself into the future are closely related. The purpose of the present study was to confirm this proposition by examining whether the relationship observed between personality and episodic memory could be extended to episodic future thinking and, more generally, to investigate the influence of personality traits on self-information processing in the past and in the future. Results show that Neuroticism and Harm Avoidance predict more negative past memories and future projections. Other personality dimensions exhibit a more limited influence on mental time travel (MTT). Therefore, our study provide an additional evidence to the idea that MTT into the past and into the future rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used to envision the future.

Prosocial Bonuses Increase Employee Satisfaction and Team Performance

In three field studies, we explore the impact of providing employees and teammates with prosocial bonuses, a novel type of bonus spent on others rather than on oneself. In Experiment 1, we show that prosocial bonuses in the form of donations to charity lead to happier and more satisfied employees at an Australian bank. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we show that prosocial bonuses in the form of expenditures on teammates lead to better performance in both sports teams in Canada and pharmaceutical sales teams in Belgium. These results suggest that a minor adjustment to employee bonuses – shifting the focus from the self to others – can produce measurable benefits for employees and organizations.

Personality Neglect The Unforeseen Impact of Personal Dispositions on Emotional Life

The present research provides the first evidence that people neglect their own personalities when they envision their future emotional lives. In Study 1, students ignored the impact of their dispositional happiness in predicting how they would feel 2 weeks after receiving grades. Yet dispositional happiness played an important role in shaping actual emotional experiences. Similarly, exhibiting personality neglect, participants in Study 2 overlooked their trait levels of neuroticism and optimism when forecasting their reaction to Barack Obama’s election, though these personality dimensions were related to their actual emotional reactions. Because they overlooked the influence of their own dispositions, individuals incorrectly predicted their future feelings. Ironically, as a result of this personality neglect, more optimistic individuals were less likely to see their emotional future in an overly rosy light, whereas more neurotic individuals were more likely to overestimate the pleasure that the future would bring.

Give It Up A Strategy for Combating Hedonic Adaptation

The present research provides the first evidence that temporarily giving up something pleasurable may provide an effective route to happiness. Participants were asked to eat a piece of chocolate during two lab sessions, held 1week apart. During the intervening week, we randomly assigned them to abstain from chocolate or to eat as much of it as possible, while a control group received no special instructions related to their chocolate consumption. At the second lab session, participants who had temporarily given up chocolate savored it significantly more and experienced more positive moods after eating it, compared to those in either of the other two conditions. Many cultural and religious practices entail temporarily giving up something pleasurable, and our research suggests that such self-denial may carry ironic benefits for well-being by combating hedonic adaptation.

The dark side of going abroad: How broad foreign experiences increase immoral behavior.

Because of the unprecedented pace of globalization, foreign experiences are increasingly common and valued. Past research has focused on the benefits of foreign experiences, including enhanced creativity and reduced intergroup bias. In contrast, the present work uncovers a potential dark side of foreign experiences: increased immoral behavior. We propose that broad foreign experiences (i.e., experiences in multiple foreign countries) foster not only cognitive flexibility but also moral flexibility. Using multiple methods (longitudinal, correlational, and experimental), 8 studies (N > 2,200) establish that broad foreign experiences can lead to immoral behavior by increasing moral relativism—the belief that morality is relative rather than absolute. The relationship between broad foreign experiences and immoral behavior was robust across a variety of cultural populations (anglophone, francophone), life stages (high school students, university students, MBA students, middle-aged adults), and 7 different measures of immorality. As individuals are exposed to diverse cultures, their moral compass may lose some of its precision.