Happiness and Psychological Development 1

Running Head: Happiness and Psychological Development

A Personality Approach to Happiness and Development: Emotional Responses to Success and Failure.

Lisa Vivoll Straume Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway

Joar Vittersø Department of Psychology University of Tromsø Norway

Paper presented at the 2nd Workshop on Capabilities and Happiness, University of Milano - Bicocca, Italy, 16 - 18 June, 2005.

Author note: Address correspondence to Lisa Vivoll Straume, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway. Email: [email protected] phone: +47 73 55 06 08

Happiness and Psychological Development 2 Abstract Capabilities, or the ability to do and to be, depend on both objective circumstances and on personality. Carol Dweck, for instance, argues that people's self-theories determine the degree to which they value effort, challenges, and persist in the face of obstacles. According to this perspective, learning oriented individuals lead a good life because they typically seek and enjoy learning opportunities, whereas performance oriented individuals lead a less favorable life because they avoid and dislike opportunities. From a utilitarian perspective, the good life is less dependent on doing and learning, but rather on life satisfaction defined as an evaluation of one's circumstances in terms of goodness and badness. The current study investigated the different approaches empirically. In a sample of 151 Norwegians, satisfied people reported more positive emotions in general and after a successful task, compared with less satisfied people. When reporting emotional responses following an unsuccessful task however, no differences between groups high and low on life satisfaction appeared. The opposite pattern was found for learning orientation versus performance orientation. Learning-oriented individuals did not differ from performance-oriented individuals on general emotions or on their emotional responses to a successful task. However, when reporting on their emotional responses to an unsuccessful task, learning orientation predicted higher levels, and performance orientation predicted lower levels of positive emotions. The results support a distinction between the utility approach and the capabilities approach to the good life.

(235 words)

Happiness and Psychological Development 3 A Personality Approach to Happiness and Development: Emotional Responses to Success and Failure.

Recently, Diener and Seligman (2004) proposed that human well-being may be defined as people's evaluations of their lives, including positive emotions, engagement, satisfaction and meaning. They further suggest that life satisfaction may reflect all these components. In the current paper we shall argue that the concept of life satisfaction do not cover all these elements. Rather, we suggest to separate life satisfaction from engagement. The distinction rests on a terminology in which satisfaction refers to a state oriented evaluation of goal fulfillment, and engagement refers to process oriented experiences such as interest, curiosity, involvement and exploration. To use a computer analogy, we think of satisfaction as the output of an activity, and engagement as the throughput. Another assumption in our argument is the idea of a link between engagement and learning motivation.

In separating engagement from life satisfaction, we also subscribe to some objections against the use of life satisfaction as a sufficient indicator of quality of life. For instance, Nussbaum (2003) argues that the paradigm of asking people how satisfied they are with their lives have proven inadequate to confront critical issues of human well-being. She suggests that the concept of capabilities provides a better basis for thinking about quality of life. We believe that the notion of capabilities, introduced by Amartya Sen and roughly referring to what people are able to do and be, has some interesting links to our way of thinking about engagement. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to lay out some ideas about the difference between life satisfaction and engagement, and to clarify some possible conceptual overlaps between engagement and capabilities. In making this argument, we shall draw on an

Happiness and Psychological Development 4 important distinction in cognitive and motivational psychology, namely the separation of goal structure from goal content (e.g., Grant & Dweck, 1999).

The goal structure approach attempts to formulate general principles that cut across all needs and goals. In the biological science, these mechanisms are termed homeostasis and contain comprehensive knowledge of how such processes are regulated (e.g., Cabanac, 1992). For psychological concepts such as goals and self-regulation, the understanding is less developed. Nevertheless, a mechanism similar to that of homeostasis is proposed to be operating upon these concepts as well (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 2001). Contrasting the work on goal structures, the goal content approach identifies particular types of goals, and specifies insights into motivational phenomenon and subjective states of experiences. Engagement is such a state. Although classifying goals into categories easily ends up in a situation with too many taxonomies including far too many goals, there is wisdom in Dweck's idea about a distinction between a few basic classes of goals that cut across domains of human behavior. Performance goals and learning goals are examples of this parsimonious kind of goal classification. In what follows, a description of how differences in goal content may influence achievement motivation and subjective experiences will be given.

Performance goals and learning goals Carol Dweck and her colleagues (e.g., Diener & Dweck, 1980; Dweck, 2000; Elliott & Dweck, 1988; Molden & Dweck, 2000) have suggested that primarily two different classes of goals are of importance in the content approach, namely performance goals and learning goals. Performance goals are characterized by a focus on ability, performance, and evaluation. Individuals pursuing performance goals often evaluate their performance in terms

Happiness and Psychological Development 5 of what others would think. Learning goals refer to a goal state in which the individual's purpose is to acquire new knowledge or skills. According to Dweck and her colleagues (e.g., Grant & Dweck, 2003), individuals who pursuits learning goals typically focuses on effort and challenge and thus, we would add, becomes engaged and interested in the task at hand. For example, Covington (2000) has found that learning goals favor deep level information processing and task involvement. Individuals who adopt performance goals, on the other hand, often avoid challenge and experience impaired problem solving (Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2000).

Considerable research implies that intrinsic interest, strategy use, and persistence, can be attributed to the content of the goals that individuals bring to the achievement context (Elliott & Dweck, 1988; Grant & Dweck, 2003). For instance, those with performance goals frequently demonstrate low self-confidence and attribute their failures to low ability. Often, they display helpless responses and marked deterioration in performance. Performance oriented individuals aim at documenting their ability, which means that they have a result-oriented focus on achievement. Learning goals on the other hand tend to exhibit solution-oriented self-instructions, sustained or even increased positive affect, and improved performance (Elliott & Dweck, 1988). This means that learning goals foster intrinsic interest that is driven by the desire to increase ability, to increase knowledge, and to learn from the situation.

The behavioral consequences of the different goal contents discussed above generate two strikingly different reactions to failure. Performance goals have shown to make individuals vulnerable to helplessness and debilitation after setbacks or negative feedback (Grant &

Happiness and Psychological Development 6 Dweck, 2003). This applies particularly for cases where abilities are perceived to be low. Accordingly, motivation and performance tend to suffer when the goal is to demonstrate ability and the individuals do not believe they can accomplish this (Grant & Dweck, 2003). Learning goals on the other hand, focuses on understanding and interest, and have proven to facilitate persistence even in situations where individuals appraise their current ability to be low.

Differences in goal content have also proven to influence cognitive and affective responses to both failure and success (Elliott & Dweck, 1988; Dweck, 2000). During difficulty, individuals with performance goals typically attribute obstacles to low ability, which in turn lead to loss of belief in the utility of effort. They also often worry about failure, and experiences negative affect such as anxiety or shame. These experiences can divert attention from the task, motivate escape attempts, and block intrinsic rewards from task involvement (Elliott & Dweck, 1988). Since learning oriented individuals attribute obstacles and failure to be characteristics of the task rather than their ability, their responses to failure are not upsetting. Learning goals are usually marked by positive affective outcomes such as mastery, confidence, and persistence (Elliot and Dweck, 1988).

Hypothesis (1) A series of empirical studies have shown low to moderate correlations between engagement and life satisfaction. Thus, if the concept of engagement reflects processes that are involved learning in goals, a non-significant correlation would be expected between life satisfaction and goal orientation.

Happiness and Psychological Development 7 (2) Learning oriented individuals will be more concerned with the throughput, and less concerned with the output. Hence, even with bad outcomes, a learning oriented individual may find interest and engagement in the activity itself. We hypothesize that in an unsuccessful situation, learning orientation will predict higher positive affect and lower negative affect, compared with performance orientation.

(3) In the successful episode, we did not expect to find differences in affective responses between learning orientation and performance orientation. This is because the engagement dimension is less sensitive to the output of an activity.

(4) We assume that life satisfaction is basically a response to goal fulfillment (output). From this assumption we can deduce the following hypothesis: Highly satisfied individuals will report higher positive and lower negative affect in successful episodes, as compared with individuals low on life satisfaction.

(5) We do not expect the domain of life satisfaction to be sensitive to the process of an activity (throughput), and hypothesize that for the unsuccessful episode, no affective difference will be observed between groups high and low on life satisfaction.

Method Participants The data for this study were extracted from a questionnaire distributed to a convenience sample of 295 Norwegian travelers. We received 151 returned surveys with usable data, resulting in an overall return rate of 51%. Respondents were 54% males and had

Happiness and Psychological Development 8 a mean age of 33 years, ranging from 17 to 70 with a standard deviation of 12 years (3 missing values). Procedure Travelers departing from Troms0 airport, or passengers on coastal steamers in Northern Norway were approached by a research assistant. The travelers were asked to participate as volunteers in a survey conducted by researchers from the University of Troms0. Those who agreed to participate were handed an envelope containing an information leaflet, an eight page questionnaire, a prepaid return envelope, and three pieces of toffee caramels as a small reward. The questionnaire had a total of 124 items, only a small subset of which will be included in the present study. Materials Affect. Participants were asked about their affective experiences during the last week as indicated by the five items showing the highest factor loadings on the positive factor of the PANAS (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), and the five items showing the highest factor loadings on the negative factor. Respondents gave their ratings on a 0 to 6 point scale (6 = high score) for each of following items. Positive affect items: Enthusiastic, Interested, Determined, Excited, and Inspired, The internal consistency for these items was acceptable (Cronbach=s alpha (a) = .72. The five negative affect items were: Scared, Afraid, Upset, Distressed and Jittery (a = .79). Next, participants were asked to form a mental image of their affective responses to a task in which they succeed, and then to a task in which they did not succeed. For each of the two situations, they were asked to describe their affective responses on the same ten items as were used to rate their affect during the last week. Cronbach' s alphas for the scales in the

Happiness and Psychological Development 9 successful situation were .69 for positive affect and .83 for negative affect. In the failure situation a = .78 for positive affect, and a = .81 for negative affect. Goal orientation. Based on the recommendation by Dweck (2000), a forced choice question separated the participants into a Performance-oriented group and a Learning-oriented group. The wording of this item was: In your opinion, what is the most important; To appear to have a good character in the eyes of others, or To learn something new. Participants were asked to choose only one of these options, with the former including them in the performanceorientation group and the latter including them in the learning-orientation group. Satisfaction with life. The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS - Pavot & Diener, 1993) consists of five items (e.g., 'I am satisfied with my life'), measured on a rating scale ranging from one ('strongly disagree') to seven ('strongly agree'). The SWLS revealed a Cronbach' s alpha of .84. To make the SWLS comparable with the learning measure, a high satisfaction group and a low satisfaction group were extracted based on a median split of participants= sum scores across the five SWLS items.

Results The sample mean for self-reported positive affect during the last week was 3.4 (SD = 1.0) and the mean negative affect was 1.5 (SD - 1.1). In the imagined, successful situation, the positive affect mean was 4.2 (SD =1.1) and the negative affect mean was 0.9 (SD = 1.2). In the imagined, unsuccessful situation, the positive affect mean was 2.2 (SD = 1.3) and the negative affect mean was 2.2 (SD = 1.4). As one would expect, a paired-sample t-tests showed that positive affect was significantly higher in the successful situation compared with the unsuccessful situation, t(148) = 16.8, p < .001). Similarly negative affect was more

Happiness and Psychological Development 10 typical for the unsuccessful situation, compared with the successful situation t(148) = -11.9, p < .001). With respect to the Goal orientation variable, 31 participants were primarily concerned about their Performance and 118 participants categorized themselves as Learning-oriented. The two groups did not differ with respect to gender or age. Moreover, the Goal orientation variable was uncorrelated with Life satisfaction (r = -.03, n.s.). The mean SWLS value was 22.6 (SD = 5.7). For the Goal orientation variable, no differences in affect were found for the last week or for the successful situation (Table 1). For the unsuccessful situation, on the other hand, Learningoriented participants had a significantly higher level of anticipated positive affect than did Performance-oriented participants. For the two SWLS groups, the results showed an opposite tendency. In the last week and in the successful situation, individuals with a high score on satisfaction with life also scored high on positive affect. In the unsuccessful situation, however, no difference was observed between the high and low life satisfaction groups.

Table 1

Discussion The present study assumed that life satisfaction and engagement are different concepts. It also addressed the questions of how satisfaction and engagement relates to affective responses to successful and unsuccessful episodes. We found that life satisfaction is uncorrelated with engagement (H1), and that engaged individuals (operationalized as learning orientation)

Happiness and Psychological Development 11 reported higher degrees of positive affect in unsuccessful situations than did performanceoriented individuals (H2). However, the two goal-orientation groups reported similar levels of positive and negative affect regarding life in general and in successful situations (H3). Turning to the dimension of life satisfaction, those with high scores on this variable reported more positive affect in a successful episode, compared with those scoring low (H4). These results thus confirm and replicate a number of studies in which learning and performance orientation were manipulated experimentally (Dweck, 2000; Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995; Mueller & Dweck, 1998).

A potential shortcoming of the study is that only two dimensions of goal content have been investigated in the present study, i.e. performance goals and learning goals. In a recent study, Grant and Dweck (2003) gained evidence for a distinction between four types of goals instead of two types. These were learning goals, outcome goals (wanting to do well), ability-linked performance goals, and normative performance goals. They especially point out the importance of distinguishing between normative performance goals (i.e. wanting to perform better than others) and nonnormative performance goals (e.g. using an absolute standard such as a perfect score, or tying absolute performance to self-worth). Most studies do not make this distinction. Further, it is a challenge that the content of goals has been interpreted to contain different information although the labels have been the same. Some researches see the presence of normative comparison as the essence of a performance goal, whereas others see that as a nonessential aspect of a performance goal (Grant & Dweck, 2003).

Although we did not distinguish between the goal content in terms of performance approach or performance avoidance, we did distinguish between the content of the situation. The

Happiness and Psychological Development 12 performance approach where the focus is on attaining success resembles the successful situation we measured, and the performance avoidance goal where the focus is on the avoidance of failure resembles the unsuccessful situation we measured. However, in future studies it would be interesting to separate the measure of performance approach in terms of normative versus nonnormative output goals. According to Grant and Dweck (2003) it is "the avoidance form of performance goals that predict lower intrinsic motivation and performance, with approach goals often relating positively to performance" (p 542).

Life satisfaction was unrelated to both positive and negative affect in the unsuccessful situation. In terms of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, these results indicate that people high on the hedonic happiness trait generally consider their emotional life to be more pleasant compared with less satisfied individuals. They also have favorable affective reactions when their goals are achieved (successful situations). However, when the outcome of a situation is unsuccessful, hedonic traits do not appear to help in terms of enhancing positive affect.

In conclusion, the present paper has shown how our understanding of well-being may be enriched by distinguishing between differences in goal content. People differ in their evaluation of failure and success, which in turn influences affective responses to different situations. It is particularly interesting that goal orientation does not affect life in general and in successful situations, yet produces such different affective responses to failure situations. It is equally interesting to observe that commonly used measure of life satisfaction seems insensitive to capture emotional processes that occur during a challenging task. If the concept of well-being is supposed to cover both successful and unsuccessful aspects of life, this insight should be integrated into a general theory of human well-being.

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