Self, Health & Emotion Lab

Much of the research conducted in the lab examines the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of subjective well-being. Below, I describe some of the studies most closely tied to the this topic. Those interested in this line of research may also be interested in some of the ongoing research in self-construal abstractness, mindfulness & emotion, and stress, growth & meaning.

Motivation and subjective well-being. A theme that cuts across much of the research in the lab is the role of approach and avoidance motivations in regulating cognition and behavior. Although prior research has shown subjective well-being to be strongly tied to personality, little research has looked at how dispositional approach/avoidance motivations influence how people process emotional experiences in ways that are relevant to subjective well-being. Updegraff, Gable & Taylor (2004) used complementary methodologies (laboratory and experience sampling) to show how dispositional motivations shape the "weights" that people give to various kinds of emotional experiences. In brief, this study showed that approach/avoidance motivations influence well-being via two processes: 1) by shaping the experience of emotion over time, and 2) by shaping how people weight those experiences in broader judgments of satisfaction.

Recent data collected in the lab also examines how motivation shapes the information that people use to judge their well-being. Giovanni Garofalo's masters project examined how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are tied to the differential use of social comparison information. Previous research has documented the pitfalls of pursuing goals for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reasons, but little research has examined how basic cognitive processes may account for these findings. Two complementary methodologies (analog and scenario) showed that people are much more sensitive to social comparison information when pursuing extrinsic vs. intrinsic goals, suggesting a possible social-cognitive mechanism for findings in the literature (Updegraff & Garofalo, in prep).

Culture, self-construal and subjective well-being. In collaboration with Eunkook Suh of Yonsei University (S. Korea), the role of cultural factors such as allocentric v. idiocentric self-construal in moderating the use of affective and social information in life satisfaction judgments was examined across two studies (Suh, Diener & Updegraff, in press). It was hypothesized that internal emotions would serve as a prominent source of information when the individuality of the self is salient, whereas social appraisal (i.e., others' view of one's life) information was expected to play an important role on global self-evaluation when the fundamental relatedness of the self to others is salient. These predictions were confirmed between personality types in Study 1 (allocentrics versus idiocentrics) and between priming conditions in Study 2 (relational-self versus unique-self). It appears that whether due to chronic (e.g., culture, personality) or momentary (priming) influences, self-construal determines the relative use of affective and social information in a similar manner.