Subjective well-being, social buffering and hedonic editing in the quotidian

Abstract

A previous study on the relationship between subjective well-being (SWB) and hedonic editing—the process of mentally integrating or segregating different events during decision-making—showed that happy individuals preferred the social-buffering strategy more than less happy individuals. The present study examined the relationship between SWB, social-buffering and hedonic outcomes in daily life. In Study 1, we used web-based diaries to measure the frequency with which individuals utilised social and non-social buffers as well as daily levels of happiness. Consistent with the previous finding, happy individuals utilised social buffers more frequently than less happy individuals. Interestingly, the utilisation of social buffers had a positive effect on daily happiness among all participants, regardless of individuals’ levels of SWB. In Study 2, we found that although the use of social buffers yielded similar effects across groups on online evaluations of events, happy individuals showed a positive bias in global evaluations of past events. This finding suggests that how one construes and remembers the outcomes of social buffering may shape the different hedonic editing preferences among happy and less happy individuals.

Keywords:

• Happiness
• Subjective well-being
• Social buffering
• Hedonic editing
• Decision-making

Acknowledgements

We thank Jong-An Choi, Taekyun Hur, Cheongtag Kim, Hoon-jin Lee and Eunkook M. Suh, for providing valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This research was supported by the Center for Happiness Studies at Seoul National University.

Supplementary material

Supplementary Table 1 is available via the ‘Supplementary’ tab on the article’s online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1048669).

Notes

¹ Note that we were not able to link specific negative events to specific positive events because it is very hard to tell which of the negative events are buffered by the subsequent positive events. For example, imagine that one day you got a speeding ticket in the morning, received a harsh negative review at work in the afternoon and hung out with close friends at your favourite bar in the evening. In this case, it is difficult to know whether hanging out with friends buffers the impact of the speeding ticket or that of the work review. This made it difficult for us to create LBIs for each loss domain, hence precluding the examination of the effect of social buffers in same-domain vs. cross-domain conditions. Therefore, unlike Sul et al. (2013), Study 1 does not test whether happy individuals seek out more positive social events than less happy individuals after a negative event in a specific domain (e.g., financial event). In addition, we were not able distinguish between events that were intentional but scheduled ahead of time and events that were scheduled after the negative events because we did not measure the exact time when participants scheduled each event. Despite this limitation, the LBI still reflects—probably not purely but partly—the participants’ intention to buffer negative experiences, especially when it is contrasted with the positive-to-negative ratio with unintentional events.

² In order to test this possibility, we conducted an additional experiment with another sample of participants (N = 31; 15 with SWB scores in the bottom 33% and 16 in the top 33%, among 47 undergraduates). We used another version of the retrospective hedonic editing paradigm similar to the task described above but in which the intervals between the two target events were set to two or five days, not one or four days. Additionally, each block was extended to span 10 hypothetical days instead of seven to avoid situations in which one of the target events was located at the beginning or end of a block (the four-day interval conditions). Participants were also asked to assume that the given events were happening in other people’s lives rather than their own lives. We found a marginally significant 2 (SWB: bottom 33% vs. top 33%) × 2 (interval: 2 vs. 5) interaction effect on retrospective evaluations in the mixed-loss condition (i.e., a large financial loss + a small social gain), F(1, 29) = 3.40, p = .075, = .11. Further analyses revealed that happy participants evaluated two-day interval blocks more favourably (M = 4.13) than their less happy counterparts (M = 3.81), whereas the opposite was the case for the five-day interval blocks (M = 4.44 and 3.73 for the low SWB and high SWB group, respectively), although the simple effects for these comparisons were not statistically significant, Fs < 1.89, ns. No interaction or main effect of SWB and interval was found in the social loss and financial gain pairs, all Fs < 2.46, ns. This suggests that the null finding in the mixed-loss condition in Study 2 was probably due to the less optimal selection of time intervals (one vs. four days).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Korea University and the Center for Happiness Studies at Seoul National University.