Life is a rollercoaster – it’s just how you ride it

Back to Research@SMU Issue 44

By Sim Shuzhen

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – How did your week go? Before you give the knee-jerk answer “Good!” or perhaps “Terrible!”, take a moment to really think about the details. Chances are that you cycled through a range of emotions over the course of the past seven days, running the gamut from negative to neutral to positive.

The vagaries of life mean that our moods can vary dramatically from one day to the next, and even within a day. Despite this, survey studies of happiness and satisfaction have traditionally looked at how people evaluate their lives overall.

While such studies are important, more needs to be done for us to really understand human well-being, says Associate Professor William Tov of the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Social Sciences.

“It’s important to look at well-being as a daily process. If you're a happy person, how did you get there in the first place? People don't just become happy overnight, there's no magic pill you can take,” he says.

“We have to live our lives from day to day, so it’s important to look at how we feel from day to day. How we feel about our lives as a whole should partly be shaped by our daily experiences.”

A penchant for the positives

To sample everyday emotions, Professor Tov carries out diary studies. Participants – SMU students in many cases – take online or smartphone surveys to report their daily emotions, as well as rate how satisfying and meaningful their day has been.

Following 200-300 students over several weeks can yield thousands of records for Professor Tov and his team to work with. “It’s very rich data, and we can learn a lot from it,” he says. 

One of Professor Tov’s recent findings challenges a popular model of well-being, known as affect balance. According to this model, positive and negative emotions cancel each other out, and experiencing an equal amount of each should leave one feeling neutral – neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.

Thus, an uneventful day on which nothing good or bad happened (on which you experienced low positive and low negative emotions, or low-low) should be equivalent to an emotional rollercoaster of a day, on which something fantastic and something terrible happened (high-high).

“It makes sense on the face of it,” says Professor Tov. “But researchers have not systematically compared these different situations, which occur naturally in everyday life.”

His study did just that. “We found that the high-high people were more satisfied than the low-low people, and the day for them was more meaningful. In a way, having lots of good and bad things happening is better than nothing happening,” he says. “This shows that we’re not like calculators or computers – we put more weight on positive experiences.”

This, he thinks, could help explain why we willingly do things that have unpleasant aspects. Taking care of young children, for example, can be extremely frustrating – changing diapers and dealing with tantrums is enough to put anyone in a bad mood.

“But there are a lot of positive moments as well – you can have a lot of fun,” says Professor Tov. “At the end of the day, what’s going to matter to me are the positives. I’m not going to put much weight on all the little negative things that may have reduced my mood in that moment.”

Finding meaning in the negatives

Professor Tov has also used diary studies to tease apart differences between satisfaction and meaning. In theory, he explains, satisfaction is an aspect of hedonic well-being, and should be closely related to feeling good; meaning, on the other hand, involves not just feeling good, but also doing good – living life with a sense of authenticity and purpose. While the two are closely intertwined, Professor Tov’s work also points to some distinctions.

For example, his team found that our emotions are more strongly correlated with satisfaction than with meaning. “If you have a day where you experienced a lot of positive emotions and very little negative emotions, your satisfaction will increase much more than your sense of meaning will,” he explains.

In addition, they also showed that certain extremely dissatisfying and unpleasant negative experiences – going through a breakup, for example – could still be meaningful. “It could be that when going through a breakup, some participants gained insights into themselves or into what they wanted out of a relationship, and derived a sense of meaning from that,” says Professor Tov.

Importantly, by asking participants to rate how much an event would affect their lives over the next few months, the researchers found that such unpleasant-yet-meaningful events tended to have bigger future impacts.

“A trivial negative event – spilling your coffee for example – does not enhance your sense of meaning. But going through a breakup or having a loved one pass away changes the way you think about your future, and people derive meaning from that,” explains Professor Tov.

Professor Tov and his colleagues published their findings in a 2016 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, titled ‘A Closer Look at the Hedonics of Everyday Meaning and Satisfaction’.

Taking the measure of meaning

Deriving meaning from negative experiences is difficult, says Professor Tov. Doing so requires one to step away from raw emotions and look more broadly at the big picture. Yet, some people are able to do this.

While a lot more research is needed, learning about how these people process emotions could help researchers design interventions to teach us how to deal with negative situations, says Professor Tov.   

Moving forward, Professor Tov wants to break down the multifaceted concept of meaning into specific components. “When people say their day or their life is meaningful, what does that really entail?” he asks.

To define these components and develop ways of measuring them, he plans to collect stories and anecdotes about meaningful experiences, and identify their key features and common themes.

“It’s important to develop a measure that has a basis in people’s actual experiences,” he explains. “Advancing our understanding of meaning as a daily process could be useful for developing interventions to help people find meaning in their lives.”

Back to Research@SMU Issue 44