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SAGE Publications, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4(28), p. 437-445, 2002

DOI: 10.1177/0146167202287002

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Looking Up and Looking Down: Weighting Good and Bad Information in Life Satisfaction Judgments

Journal article published in 2002 by Ed Diener, Richard E. Lucas ORCID, Shigehiro Oishi, Eunkook M. Suh
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

In two large international studies, the authors examined whether happy and unhappy individuals weighted life domains differently when constructing life satisfaction judgments. In both studies, regression equations predicting life satisfaction showed that there were significant interactions between happiness and a person’s best domain and between happiness and a person’s worst domain, even after controlling for participants’ standing on all other domains. Happy participants weighted their best domains more heavily than did unhappy individuals, whereas unhappy individuals weighted their worst domains more heavily than did happy individuals. Thus, happy and unhappy people used different information when constructing satisfaction judgments.