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When Feeling Mixed Can Be Meaningful: The Relation Between Mixed Emotions and Eudaimonic Well-Being

DOI:10.1007/s10902-017-9849-y
Authors:
Raul Berrios at University of Santiago, Chile
Raul Berrios
Peter Totterdell at The University of Sheffield
Peter Totterdell
Stephen Kellett at The University of Sheffield
Stephen Kellett
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Abstract and Figures

Whilst positive emotions benefit well-being, the role of other more complex emotional experiences for well-being is less well understood. This research therefore investigated the relationship between mixed emotions and eudaimonic well-being. A cross-sectional study (Study 1; N = 429) first demonstrated (using structural equation modelling) that mixed emotions are related to the presence of goal conflict. Importantly, it was also found that mixed emotions are positively related to eudaimonic well-being, and that one potential mechanism linking mixed emotions and eudaimonic well-being is via the search for meaning in life. Study 2 (N = 52) implemented a quasi-experiment regarding a naturally occurring meaningful life event (i.e., graduation day) and again demonstrated that mixed emotions are associated with a greater level of eudaimonic well-being. Implications of these findings include the importance of mixed emotions in the search for meaning in life, and the role of mixed emotions in goal conflict resolution.
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RESEARCH PAPER
When Feeling Mixed Can Be Meaningful: The Relation
Between Mixed Emotions and Eudaimonic Well-Being
Raul Berrios
1
•Peter Totterdell
2
•Stephen Kellett
2
Published online: 28 January 2017
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract Whilst positive emotions benefit well-being, the role of other more complex
emotional experiences for well-being is less well understood. This research therefore
investigated the relationship between mixed emotions and eudaimonic well-being. A cross-
sectional study (Study 1; N =429) first demonstrated (using structural equation mod-
elling) that mixed emotions are related to the presence of goal conflict. Importantly, it was
also found that mixed emotions are positively related to eudaimonic well-being, and that
one potential mechanism linking mixed emotions and eudaimonic well-being is via the
search for meaning in life. Study 2 (N =52) implemented a quasi-experiment regarding a
naturally occurring meaningful life event (i.e., graduation day) and again demonstrated that
mixed emotions are associated with a greater level of eudaimonic well-being. Implications
of these findings include the importance of mixed emotions in the search for meaning in
life, and the role of mixed emotions in goal conflict resolution.
Keywords Mixed emotions Eudaimonic well-being Meaning in life Well-being
Emotional complexity
1 Introduction
Eudaimonic well-being refers to a person’s sense that his or her life has purpose or
meaning. Unlike hedonic well-being, which refers to a person’s sense of pleasure in life,
eudaimonic well-being is not defined by the presence of positive emotion and absence of
negative emotion. Indeed, experiencing a functional balance of positive and negative
emotions may be a hallmark of eudaimonic well-being (Fredrickson 2013). In this
&Raul Berrios
raul.berrios@usach.cl
1
Departamento de Administracio
´n, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
2
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
123
J Happiness Stud (2018) 19:841–861
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9849-y
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Indeed, theoretical models such as the dynamic model of affect (DMA; Reich et al., 2003) and the co-activation model of healthy coping (Larsen et al., 2003) predict that mixed emotions, either at moderate levels or otherwise, may exert adaptive effects on well-being primarily under conditions of adversity. Other studies that did not focus on adversity have nevertheless examined contextualized mixed emotions (Berrios et al., 2018a(Berrios et al., , 2018b, such as graduating from college, a primarily positive event that may elicit qualitatively different mixed emotions from those arising naturalistically in daily life. Finally, another study found links between mixed emotions and positive health outcomes (Hershfield et al., 2013) but mixed emotions in this study were operationalized using within-person correlations, which has been criticized as having questionable validity (Larsen et al., 2017). ...
... Specifically, the conflict hypothesis argues that mixed emotions in daily life may be conflicting and agonizing states that are unlikely to be beneficial for psychological well-being. Indeed, a recent study provided preliminary evidence that nostalgia-which has been widely conceptualized to be a mixed emotional state (Batcho, 2020;Sedikides & Wildschut, 2018;Vaccaro et al., 2020)-tended to have negative links with well-being when assessed naturalistically (Newman et al., 2020) as opposed to mixed emotions that have often been examined under specific contexts (e.g., Berrios et al., 2018a;. Nevertheless, as nostalgia is a very specific mixed emotional state, it remains unclear whether these findings would generalize to mixed emotions occurring more generally amidst daily life. ...
... Finally, we examined bidirectional relationships between an index of general emotional ambivalence and psychological well-being over approximately a decade (Study 3). Importantly, across all studies, we focused on examining naturalistic emotional experiences in daily life rather than contextualized mixed emotions in order to build upon previous single-valenced work that has used similar methodologies to examine emotions and well-being but without examining mixed emotions (e.g., Kuppens et al., 2008), as well as to build upon previous findings which have primarily examined contextualized rather than naturalistic mixed emotions (e.g., Berrios et al., 2018a). To further account for the potential overlap between measures of positive, negative, and mixed emotions, we also performed separate analyses with and without including positive and negative emotions to demonstrate that findings are not due to statistical artefacts resulting from this overlap. ...
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... Among studies that have examined antecedents of mixed emotions, the literature suggests two situations reliably elicit mixed emotions: goal conflict (Berrios et al., 2015(Berrios et al., , 2018 and meaningful endings (Ersner-Hershfield et al., 2008;Zhang et al., 2010). Still, it is unclear why these situations elicit mixed emotions. ...
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... Similarly, guilt can facilitate virtuous conduct. Furthermore, researchers (Berrios et al., 2018) have shown that mixed emotions -experiencing positive and negative emotions at the same timecan be positively correlated with eudaimonic WB. This is because mixed emotions are associated with complex goals that often contain conflicting elements. ...
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