Adolescence to Old Age Seeking Pleasure and Seeking Pain: Differences in Prohedonic and Contra-Hedonic Motivation From

Using a mobile-phone-based experience-sampling technology in a sample of 378 individuals ranging from 14 to 86 years of age, we investigated age differences in how people want to influence their feelings in their daily lives. Contra-hedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect were most prevalent in adolescence, whereas prohedonic motivations of wanting either to maintain, but not enhance, positive affect or to dampen negative affect were most prevalent in old age. This patternwasmirrored by an age-related increase in self-reported day-to-day emotional well-being. Analyses of the emotional experiences that accompanied prohedonic and contra-hedonic motivations are consistent with the notions that contra-hedonic motivations are more likely to serve utilitarian than hedonic functions, and that people are more likely to be motivated to maintain negative affect when it is accompanied by positive affect. Implications for understanding affective development are discussed. There are many occasions when people wish to, or should, control their feelings. Such affective self-regulation often aims at the enhancement of positive affect (e.g., elevating one’s happiness) and the dampening of negative affect (e.g., calming one’s anger). However, there may also be situations in which people seek the contrary. In the research we report here, we aimed to investigate age-related differences in the prevalence of such prohedonic and contra-hedonic motivations. We propose that one can better understand why individuals of different ages feel different in their day-to-day lives if one is aware of differences in how they want to feel. To investigate this idea, we used mobile phones to assess affective experiences and affect-regulation motivations as they occurred in the everyday lives of individuals ranging in age from adolescence to late adulthood. Affective experiences are not irresistible and overwhelming forces: They can be regulated to some extent. Research on the proactive aspect of affective experience has primarily focused on the strategies people use to influence their feelings, and on how effective and cognitively demanding these strategies are (Koole, 2009). Little attention has been paid to the fact that such self-regulatory behaviors are preceded, and fundamentally shaped, by motivational processes. Presumably, most investigators have assumed that the motivation driving affect regulation is always directed at maximizing the individual’s well-being (e.g., Larsen, 2000), and few researchers have acknowledged that there can be situations in which people want to maintain or enhance negative affect or dampen positive affect. Attempts to explain why such contra-hedonic motivations occur typically converge on one of two overarching themes. One explanatory theme is the idea that negative affect may occasionally be beneficial, or positive affect detrimental, for attaining one’s goals or for maintaining consistent views of oneself. Contra-hedonic motivation may hence serve utilitarian purposes (e.g., Parrott, 1993; Tamir, Chiu, &Gross, 2007; Tamir, Mitchell, & Gross, 2008; Wood, Heimpel, Manwell, & Whittington, 2009). For instance, negative affect may be socially appropriate or instrumental, such as when anger helps one in standing one’s ground during an interpersonal confrontation. Conversely, positive affect can be socially inappropriate or obstructive, as, for example, when joy distracts one’s concentration. The second explanatory theme is the idea that people may sometimes seek apparently negative affective experiences because, for them, these experiences also have a positive side. Address correspondence to Michaela Riediger, Max Planck Research Group ‘‘Affect Across the Lifespan,’’ Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany, e-mail: riediger@mpib-berlin.mpg. de. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 20—Number 12 1529 Copyright r 2009 Association for Psychological Science at Max Planck Institut on April 21, 2011 pss.sagepub. com Downloaded from Andrade and Cohen (2007), for instance, demonstrated that students who liked to expose themselves to horror movies were more likely to experience both fear and happiness while watching such movies, whereas those who usually avoided horror movies were more likely to experience only fear. Although a small number of investigations have shown that contra-hedonic motivation can indeed be induced in young adults in experimentally controlled (and therefore more or less artificial) situations (Erber, Wegner, & Therriault, 1996; Tamir et al., 2007, 2008), to the best of our knowledge, there has been no research on potential age-related differences in prohedonic and contra-hedonic motivations as they naturally occur in everyday life. There is, however, accumulating evidence that individuals of different ages differ in their day-to-day affective experiences. Adolescence, for example, is characterized by affective turmoil and a relatively high prevalence of negative emotionality (e.g., Larson, Moneta, Richards, & Wilson, 2002). Within adulthood, there are typical patterns of age-related differences: When repeatedly asked to report their momentary feelings, older adults report higher emotional well-being than younger adults (e.g., Carstensen, Pasupathi, Mayr, & Nesselroade, 2000), and this difference cannot be explained by agerelated differences in time use (Riediger & Freund, 2008). The psychological mechanisms underlying these age-related differences in daily-life affective experiences are not well understood. We propose that considering the proactive aspects of affective experience can provide new insights into such age differences. That is, we assume that age-related differences in everyday emotional well-being are brought about in part by differences in how individuals wish to influence their feelings. We hypothesized that age-related differences in everyday emotional well-being in a sample of individuals ranging from adolescence to old age would be mirrored by age-related differences in affect-regulation motivation. Specifically, we expected contra-hedonic motivation—the wish either to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect—to be most prevalent among adolescents. We based this hypothesis on the idea that exploring negative and nonconforming affective experiences is one way by which adolescents repudiate conventions in order to seek emotional autonomy from parents and other adults and to test their identities (Azmitia, Syed, & Radmacher, 2008; Thorne, 2004; see also Erikson, 1968). We also predicted that prohedonic motivation—the wish either to maintain or enhance positive affect or to dampen negative affect—would be most prevalent among older adults. This prediction is in line with the claim that the shrinking horizon of time to live shifts older adults’ motivations toward maximizing their emotional well-being in the here and now (Carstensen, Fung, & Charles, 2003). Furthermore, we expected contra-hedonic motivations, compared with prohedonic motivations, to be less strongly related to the individual’s affect at a given moment. This prediction built on the theme that contra-hedonic motivations are more likely to serve utilitarian than hedonic functions (e.g., Tamir et al., 2007, 2008). Building on research regarding mixed affective experiences and contra-hedonic motivation (e.g., Andrade & Cohen, 2007), we hypothesized that people would be more likely to be motivated to maintain negative affect when they simultaneously experienced intense positive and negative affect than when they experienced negative affect alone. We reasoned that in such situations, people may be more likely to consider negative affect as worth maintaining because it is accompanied by positive affect.