Gratitude intersects with affect as a boundary condition for daily satisfaction: An affective dynamics perspective.

This study is based on the affective events theory to investigate the situational predictors for gratitude-related differences in daily affect and satisfaction. We tested a moderated mediation model in which daily microevents (daily hassles and uplifts) were related to satisfaction through affect, at the within-person level. We also tested the cross-level interaction of gratitude on this indirect relationship. A total of 195 participants participated in a 5-day diary study (195 * 5 = 975 measurement occasions). Multilevel modeling showed that, at the person-level of analysis, daily microevents were significantly related to daily affect and, in turn, to daily satisfaction. At the daily level of analysis, trait-based gratitude moderated the mediation of daily positive affect on the relationship between daily uplifts and daily satisfaction, such that it become stronger for individuals who scored lower on gratitude, but gratitude did not moderate the relationship between daily hassles, negative affect, and satisfaction. These findings make relevant theoretical contributions to understanding the power of gratitude for daily affective dynamics. These results also expand knowledge on within-person processes that explain daily affect and satisfaction, in addition to more traditional between-person factors. In sum, the present research demonstrates that "being grateful" may be associated with being happy and that individuals who are less grateful need to experience more daily uplifts and positive affect to feel satisfied.

Adapting to a New Country During an Expatriate Mission: The Vital Role of Events and Emotions.

The aim of this study was to identify the most relevant positive and negative events, and their consequent emotional experiences, occurring during the adaptation to a new country in an expatriate mission. We opted to train an artificial neural network to explore the relation between events and emotions since there is increasing evidence of the nonlinear patterns characterizing the adaptation to a new country as well as regarding the superior performance of nonlinear methods for understanding the experience of emotions. We surveyed 99 expatriate workers who reported a total of 221 events and 2,467 associated emotions. Three judges categorized the events, reducing them into 11 categories. The neural network architecture grouped the events into 3 hidden layers, two of them leading to positive emotions and the other one leading exclusively to negative emotions. We found that events related to self-realization and recognition and to overall well-being were the most relevant to the experience of positive emotions while those related to security were the most important predictors of negative emotions. This study addresses a major gap in the expatriates' literature by relating specific occurrences with the phenomenological emotional experience. Practical implications are further discussed.