1 C and D, although mood at time t significantly predicted people’s propensity to engage in five unpleasant activities at time t + 1 (i.e., commuting, working, housework, sleeping, and waiting), these activities were more strongly predicted by the day of the week or the time of the day (as measured by the proportion of deviance explained by each degree of freedom of the corresponding variable). The effects of mood on people’s choice of activities were stronger for pleasant than unpleasant activities. 1 A), a finding that is inconsistent with the hedonic opportunism hypothesis. First, people’s daily decisions to engage in one activity rather than another are related to how they currently feel: participants’ mood at time t significantly predicted what they would be doing at time t + 1 for 15 out of 25 activities (posterior probability < 0.005 color bars in Fig. The results of our analyses are depicted in Fig.
This approach allowed us to compute whether one’s current mood changes the odds of subsequently engaging in each of the 25 activities (i.e., what people decide to do) and how engaging in each of the 25 activities changes one’s future mood (i.e., how people feel as a result). Using a Bayesian regression model and selecting participants who answered two consecutive questionnaires or more within a range of 12 h ( N participants = 28,212 M age = 28.1, SD age = 9.0 66 % women N questionnaires = 245,006), we examined simultaneously how people’s current mood (mood t) related to the type of activity they would be engaging in a few hours later (activity t + 1) and the relationship between that activity and their subsequent mood (mood t + 1), controlling for what people were previously doing (activity t), time of the day, day of the week, and amount of time elapsed between the two measurement times. Participants were presented with questionnaires at random times throughout the day and asked to rate their current mood on a scale from 0 (very unhappy) to 100 (very happy) and to report what they were doing from a standard list of 25 non-mutually exclusive choices ( 1). To test which specification of the hedonic principle is best able to explain choices of everyday activities, we conducted a large experience-sampling study, monitoring in real time the activities and moods of over 60,000 people across an average of 27 d using a multiplatform smartphone application ( totaling over half a million samples. According to this “hedonic flexibility hypothesis,” whereas negative affect may drive people to seek solace in short-term rewards, positive affect should lead people to shift their priorities toward less pleasant activities that might be important for their longer-term goals ( 21). A third possibility-suggested by Herbert Simon ( 20) half a century ago-is that people have multiple simultaneous goals, from seeking short-term rewards (e.g., increasing one’s mood state) to pursuing longer-term rewards (e.g., working hard toward a promotion), and affective states help to prioritize among these goals. According to this “hedonic salience hypothesis,” we are concerned with maximizing our mood when we feel very bad or very good, and we undertake less pleasurable-yet necessary-activities when we are in a more neutral affective state. A second possibility is that the hedonic principle applies mainly when people’s affective states are salient ( 19). In the face of these constraints, the “hedonic opportunism hypothesis” suggests that we try to maximize our mood whenever an opportunity arises. One possibility is that our choice of activities is mostly determined by the demands and constraints of everyday life.
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