Does happiness function like a motivational state?

Abstract

According to Brehm's intensity of emotion theory, if an emotion has motivational properties, its intensity should be non-monotonically affected by factors similar to those determining the intensity of motivational states. These factors are called deterrents. In the case of emotion, one category of deterrents consists of factors that can potentially interfere with feeling the emotion, such as reasons for not feeling the emotion. Two experiments were carried out to examine whether happiness is a motivational state and, thus, if its intensity is non-monotonically determined by the importance of reasons for not feeling happy. We expected happiness to be reduced by a low importance reason for not feeling happy, to remain high in the presence of a moderately important reason, and to be reduced or eliminated by a very important reason. Both experiments supported the cubic function that results from these expectations, and when the results of the two studies were combined, each of the individual legs of the cubic function was found to be reliable along with the cubic function itself. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.

The development of the theory and some of the research reported here were supported by a Senior Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to the third author.

The development of the theory and some of the research reported here were supported by a Senior Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to the third author.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dan Batson, Kathy Fuegen, Tobias Gschwendner, and Jakob Hakansson for their constructive feedback on an early draft of this paper.

Notes

The development of the theory and some of the research reported here were supported by a Senior Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to the third author.

¹The intensity of men's guilt was found to be a non-monotonic function of the difficulty of making reparations for gender inequality (i.e., how many signatures men had to collect on a petition to make the campus safer for women) (Schmitt, Branscombe, & Brehm, 2004).

²The second author collected the data for both studies.

³Two participants (one in the weak deterrent and the other in the moderate deterrent condition) were excluded because they both scored high (6 on an 11-point scale) on anger as well as on all other five negative emotions. An inspection of the debriefing sheets of these two participants revealed that one did not believe that the lottery was real and reported that she was not happy about “winning” a gift certificate. The other participant said that she did not care about the increase in the credit requirements. It is possible that these two participants were simply reluctant to participate in research.

⁴Of the two possible forms of a cubic trend among four means, only the one that conforms to the theory makes sense. If the opposing cubic form were found, we would consider the data meaningless. Since the cubic trend was significant in the direction we predicted (decrease from gift only condition to low, increase from low to moderate, and decrease from moderate to high deterrence), all the reported p values for the polynomial contrasts are 1-tailed, unless otherwise specified.