When the good may be stronger than the bad: Perceived influence of daily events on well-being

ABSTRACT

Each day for two weeks, participants described the events that happened to them. For at least four of these events (two positive and two negative), they described its valence, how much they thought the event affected their sense of self, how it influenced how they felt in general, and how important the event was for their future. Multilevel analyses found that people believed that compared to negative events, positive events had a greater influence on the self and feelings in general, and were seen as more important for the future. Such differences were larger on days on which more (vs. fewer) positive events occurred (overall), and they were larger on days on which fewer (vs. more) negative events occurred.. Such differences were larger for people higher in well-being than for those lower in well-being, primarily due to relationships between well-being and perceptions of negative events.

KEYWORDS:

• Daily events
• daily diary
• positive illusions
• perceived influence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Means of impact ratings are often referred to as composite scores in comparison to frequency counts, which are scores representing the number of events that occurred (had a rating of 1 or more). Impact scores were used because the variance estimates were more homogenous than the variance estimates of frequency scores. See Nezlek (2012, pp. 34–35) for a discussion. Also, analyses that distinguished social and achievement events did not provide any additional insight into the processes the present paper concerns, and in the interests of parsimony, the simpler analyses are presented.