Daily experiences and well-being: Do memories of events matter?

Abstract

Retrospective subjective well-being (SWB) refers to self-reported satisfaction and emotional experience over the past few weeks or months. Two studies investigated the mechanisms linking daily experiences to retrospective SWB. Participants reported events each day for 21 days (Study 1) or twice a week for two months (Study 2). The emotional intensity of each event was rated: (1) when it had recently occurred (proximal intensity); and (2) at the end of the event-reporting period (distal intensity). Both sets of ratings were then aggregated across events and used to predict retrospective SWB at the end of the study. Path analyses showed that proximal intensity predicted retrospective SWB whereas distal intensity did not. The effect remained even after controlling for trait happiness and neuroticism. These results suggest that daily experiences influence retrospective SWB primarily through abstract representations of the past few weeks or months (as measured by aggregated proximal intensity ratings) rather than the explicit recollection of individual events during the same period (as measured by aggregated distal intensity ratings). Retrospective SWB, in turn, mediated the effect of daily experiences on global SWB (i.e., self-reported satisfaction and emotional experiences in general).

Keywords:

• Well-being
• Emotion
• Satisfaction
• Episodic memory
• Events
• Daily diary

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by internal research grants 08-C242-SMU-020 and 09-C242-SMU-019 from the Office of Research at Singapore Management University.

I thank Evelyn Au, Serena Wee, and Christie Scollon for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper; and Ian Kwok, Isaac Chin, Jolene Tan, Euodia Chua, and Michelle Chen for assisting in data collection.

Notes

¹In Study 1, excluded participants scored lower on global domain satisfaction (Ms = 4.07 vs. 4.38), t(219) = −2.00, p=.05; and higher on distal ratings (Ms = 1.13 vs. 0.46), t(217) = 2.13, p=.03, compared with included participants. In Study 2, excluded and included participants did not differ significantly on any variables. Analyses conducted on all participants with available data yielded the same results with one exception. In Study 2, recall frequency significantly predicted immediate retrospective satisfaction and domain satisfaction in the full sample—even after controlling for proximal intensity.

²Regression models were also conducted predicting retrospective SWB measures from the four separate scores (proximal and distal ratings of positive and negative events), trait happiness, and neuroticism. In Study 1, proximal intensities of both positive and negative events were significant predictors for three of the four models. For retrospective negative emotions, only proximal negative ratings predicted. Distal intensities of positive and negative events were not significant in any model. In Study 2, there were a total of 16 regression models. For negative events, the effect of proximal intensity was significant (p<.05) in 15 models and marginal (p<.10) in one. For positive events, the effect of proximal intensity was significant in 10 models and marginal in two. Given the high correlation between proximal and distal ratings, it is important to note that multicollinearity increases when all four scores are entered as predictors. This inflates estimates of the standard errors involved in the significance tests. Thus, it may be worth noting that the beta was larger for proximal (vs. distal) intensity of positive events in four of six cases in which the effects were not significant. In contrast, distal intensities were not significant in any of the models tested in Study 2—although the number of recalled positive events significantly predicted greater immediate retrospective satisfaction (p=.04). In addition, across Studies 1 and 2, the adjusted R ² values were similar whether separate scores or balance scores were used (often differing by 1–3% only). When proximal intensities were significant, the effects were always in the expected direction: positive events were positively associated with satisfaction and positive emotions, and negatively associated with negative emotion; the reverse was true for negative events.

³All proportion of variance statistics reported were calculated via multiple regression due to the ambiguity of interpreting such statistics in path analysis and structural equation models (Hayduk, 1996).