Is a Happy Day Filled with Happy Moments?

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It is common to ask people, “How are you doing today?” or “How was your day?” And it is a straightforward question for people to answer.

But, what goes into the answer to that question?

At any given moment, you are experiencing a certain degree of good and bad feeling (or what psychologists call positive and negative affect). When you look back over the day, though, you are not being asked just about how you’re doing right now, but also about your memory for the recent past. You are giving a retrospective report. How much does the specific degree of good and bad feeling that you had during the day affect that retrospective report?

To answer this question, it is important to catch people during the day and get their momentary sense of their current positive and negative affect and then to compare those judgments to what people say at the end of the day when asked to reflect on back on it.

Two studies using this method are reported in a July 2020 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Andreas Neubauer, Stacey Scott, Martin Sliwinski, and Joshua Smyth. They examined over 400 participants across these studies. The participants did a daily diary study in which they were interrupted by a device several times a day and asked how much positive and negative feelings they were experiencing in that moment. The specific questions asked about particular positive feelings (like happiness and joy) and particular negative feelings (like anxiety, frustration, and sadness).

With a study like this, there are several questions that researchers can answer.

The first is whether people remember their day accurately. That is, are the ratings people give of their positive and negative affect at the end of the day roughly the average of the ratings they gave during the day? What they found was that the ratings for positive affect were generally pretty accurate, but that the ratings for negative affect were more extreme. That is, you tend to remember the day as having been worse than the average of the negative feelings you experienced, though this tendency diminished with age so that older adults (in their 60s and 70s) were more likely to be accurate in their judgments of negative affect than younger adults.

The second question is how people combine information about their feelings during the day to come up with that retrospective judgment. There is a lot of research suggesting that people may use a “peak-end rule” to make judgments about an experience. That is, the goodness or badness of the event is based on a combination of the most powerful good or bad experience you had as well as what you experienced recently.

These data allowed the researchers to test this peak-end rule. They could look at whether the rating someone gave at the end of the day was well predicted by the strongest positive or negative experience and whether it was affected by the positive and negative experiences at the end of the day.

For negative affect, the peak-end rule applied. The rating at the end of the day was influenced significantly both by the strongest negative feeling of the day as well as by how people felt toward the end of the day. For positive affect, there was no strong evidence that either the peak or the end of the day had a big influence on the rating at the end of the day. Instead, the overall average of positive feelings seemed to be the best predictor of how positive they thought the day was.

What does this mean overall?

A good day is one in which you experience a lot of positive feelings over the course of the day. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a particularly joyful moment. Instead, you just want to feel good for most of the day.

A bad day, though, can be created by a strongly negative experience during the day. Overall, we tend to remember days as being worse than the average of our negative experiences, because we are strongly influenced by the worst experience of the day as well as how we’re doing toward the end of the day.

The bias to give a lot of weight to the most negative event of the day is reasonable. The worst event of the day may signal something that you need to be careful about in the future or even something you need to change about yourself. So, it is worth overemphasizing it in memory. However, we also need to recognize that life may not be nearly as bad as it seems. So, when you have a series of bad days, you may want to see whether a few bad interactions are counteracting the influence of a lot of smaller positive ones.

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