This investigation examined the influence of emotional attributions on the relevance of current feelings to judgments of personal satisfaction. In the first three studies, subjects were led to make different attributions for their naturally occurring feelings and then asked to judge their personal satisfaction. Satisfaction was higher after situational and specific attributions than after general and self-referential attributions, but only in domains that were unrelated to the causes to which subjects attributed their feelings. Study 4 tested whether affective states such as emotions with clearly defined causes are less relevant to judgments of life satisfaction than more diffuse states such as moods. Satisfaction was elevated after a laboratory mood induction only when subjects were led to focus on their moods in ways characteristic of emotional states (by articulating specific causes and labels for their feelings). These studies illuminate the role of emotional attribution in judgments of personal satisfaction.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.