A longitudinal follow-up study of happiness and meaning-making

Abstract

The long-term outcomes associated with happiness and meaning-making were examined by following up on participants in previous studies on experiential learning an average of 2.5 years later. Measures of happiness and meaning-making were extracted by analyzing the participants’ journals using a computerized text-analysis program. Happiness as assessed by a composite measure of positive emotionality showed weak associations with the measures of adaptive functioning, and was negatively correlated with optimism, as well as positively correlated with emotion suppression. By contrast, meaning-making as assessed by composite measures of cognitive processing and self-distancing was robustly positively correlated with almost all measures of adaptive functioning. Regression analyses revealed that the two measures of meaning and their interaction term accounted for 20–24% of the variance in predicting the outcome measures. This study revealed that there may be at times a trade-off between happiness and meaning-making as well as a reversal in their patterns of long-term outcomes.

Keywords:

• happiness
• meaning-making
• self-distancing
• longitudinal
• text-analysis
• LIWC

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Given that the participants in this study consisted of a subset of the participants in two previous studies on experiential learning, the correlations between the emotion and cognitive variables with the supervisors’ ratings were recomputed for this sample. Positive emotion words were positively correlated with professional behavior/demeanor, use of supervision and feedback, organizational ability, and overall impression of student (rs = .33 to .25, ps < .004–.04, one-tailed) and insight words were positively correlated with overall impression of student (r = .19, p < .05). Negative emotion words and causation words were not correlated with any of the supervisors’ rating items. Furthermore, the composite measures of positive emotionality and cognitive processing also were not correlated with any of the supervisor ratings items. The site supervisors’ ratings of the students’ performance were made without any knowledge of the content of students’ journals, thus these results could not be attributed to ‘halo effects.’

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported in part by a CSU Research Grant.