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From affect to action: How pleasure shapes everyday decisions in Japan and the U.S.

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Abstract

How do affective considerations shape people’s everyday decisions around the world? To address this question, we asked 245 Japanese and 229 American adults to report what they did and how they felt on the previous day using the Day Reconstruction Method. We then examined how affective valence at a given time (time t) related to the types of activities people engaged in at a later time (time t + 1). While we found some cultural variation in the types of daily activities Japanese and American participants experienced as pleasant or unpleasant, time-lagged multilevel logistic regressions revealed that both groups displayed a remarkably similar propensity to engage in pleasure-enhancing activities when they felt bad and in less-pleasant activities that might promise longer-term payoff when they felt good. These results provide cross-cultural support for the hedonic flexibility principle of human motivation, according to which affective states help people prioritize between short- and longer-term well-being goals in their everyday life.

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Notes

  1. Note that extreme forms of negative affective states such as in the context of unipolar major depressive disorder actually tend to cause a loss of motivation in seeking pleasurable activities (i.e., decisional anhedonia; Dichter 2010; Hershenberg et al. 2016).

  2. We originally collected an additional measure of arousal on a similar affective slider. However, as detailed in Supplementary Materials (Note #2), it appears that this measure has been largely misinterpreted by participants and, therefore, we have not included it in the primary report.

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Funding

The study was funded by Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Gobierno de España (Grant No. RYC-2016-21020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESADE Business School, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Quoidbach

  2. Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

    Yoko Sugitani

  3. Stanford University, Stanford, USA

    James J. Gross

  4. Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Boston, USA

    Maxime Taquet

  5. Hitotsubashi University Business School, Tokyo, Japan

    Satoshi Akutsu

Authors
  1. Jordi Quoidbach
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  2. Yoko Sugitani
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  3. James J. Gross
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  4. Maxime Taquet
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  5. Satoshi Akutsu
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Correspondence to Jordi Quoidbach.

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Quoidbach, J., Sugitani, Y., Gross, J.J. et al. From affect to action: How pleasure shapes everyday decisions in Japan and the U.S.. Motiv Emot 43, 948–955 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09785-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09785-7

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