Jingle All the Way? Pleasant and Energized Positive Affect Show Differential Longitudinal Relationships with Life Satisfaction

Despite converging evidence on the relationship between positive affect (PA) and subjective wellbeing (SWB), PA is operationalized differently across studies. This leaves an open question of whether different kinds of PA operationalization relate to SWB similarly over time. The present study tested this assumption by examining whether pleasant versus energized feelings show comparable longitudinal associations with life satisfaction (LS). Although classic SWB theory views PA and LS as SWB components, which raises concerns about circularity (i.e., testing how SWB components relate to SWB components), empirical findings suggest that their association may reflect processes beyond only shared variance from a latent factor. Therefore, we treated PA and LS as two separate constructs. We used random-intercept cross-lagged panel models across nine waves from two national longitudinal datasets, PAIRFAM (N = 12,520) and LISS (N = 17,532), and compared different types of PAs in their associations with LS and personality traits. Both pleasant and energized feelings showed consistent bidirectional associations with LS overtime. However, these relationships were stronger for pleasant feelings. Both cross-lagged effects and time-specific residual correlations were approximately twice as large for pleasant as those for energized feelings, and correlations between random intercepts of pleasant feelings and LS were even stronger than that of energized feelings. They also differed in their associations with extraversion and neuroticism. Together, these findings suggest that pleasant feeling is more tightly and persistently coupled with LS than energized feelings, suggesting that they have unique contributions to SWB over time.