The relations between pleasurable emotions and motivations: a daily diary study

ABSTRACT

We examined how contentment, tranquility, and cheerfulness might be differentially associated with different types of motivation achievements (i.e. psychological need satisfaction and personal striving progress). Participants (n = 177) listed five personal strivings expected to be relevant the following week. Participants then provided daily reports for seven days of: (a) contentment, tranquility, and cheerfulness; (b) satisfaction with psychological needs (affiliation, competence, autonomy, predictability); and (c) personal striving progress. As expected, contentment was more strongly associated with competence satisfaction and striving progress than were tranquility and cheerfulness. As expected, tranquility was less strongly associated with striving progress and affiliation satisfaction than were contentment and cheerfulness. However, contrary to predictions, tranquility was not less strongly associated with the satisfaction of autonomy and predictability than were contentment and cheerfulness. As expected, cheerfulness was more strongly associated with affiliation satisfaction than were contentment and tranquility. Potential explanations for these patterns are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Pleasure
• motivation
• psychological needs
• personal strivings
• contentment
• tranquility
• cheerfulness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Geolocation information

The geolocation of the authors’ affiliation is at 603 E Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61,820.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2336929.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in “Emotion Need Daily Diary” at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/BWR2A.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible athttps://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2336929

Notes

1. The Berenbaum (2002) study that found that cheerfulness was more strongly associated with social activities than was contentment did not examine tranquility.

2. Participants also reported daily levels of sadness, fear, and anger. These measures are not discussed in the present paper which focuses exclusively on pleasurable emotions. Additional information regarding unpleasant emotions, including the results, are presented in the Supplementary Materials.

3. Perceived importance of psychological needs was measured at baseline (i.e. prior to daily diaries) but are not included in the present paper. Additional information regarding these measures, including the results, are presented in the Supplementary Materials.

4. We also measured the daily satisfaction of control and harm avoidance. We do not include these two needs in this paper because: (a) control and harm avoidance are primarily discussed in the context of ill-being (e.g. Foa et al., 1992; McManus et al., 2008); and (b) control and harm-avoidance were not considered to be central needs by Deci and Ryan (1985) and Dweck (2017). Additional information regarding these two needs, including the results, are presented in the Supplementary Materials.

5. We did not use weekly emotions to predict the Level 1 intercept due to multicollinearity (variance inflation factors [VIF] for weekly contentment were larger than 5).

6. Correlations between all variables (pleasurable emotions and motivation achievements) are presented in Table S1 in the Supplementary Materials.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.