Well‐being and motivational person‐environment fit: A time‐sampling study of emotions

Abstract

The report is based on the data of seven studies (altogether 188 persons varying in gender, age, and education level) with the author's time‐sampling diary, by which the subjects record their momentary mood, the behaviour setting, other persons present, activities, causal attributions of experienced emotions, and affected motives about four times a day for a period of 30 days. For each pattern of four 16PF second‐order factors (median split), the relative frequencies of references to six classes of motives (i.e. the personal motive profiles) and for each of 16 behaviour settings, the relative frequencies by which each of those motives was satisfied in the whole sample of persons (environmental motive profiles) were derived from the diary data. The degree of motivational person–environment fit (P–E fit; correlation of personal and environmental motive profiles) was calculated for each combination of personality structure and behaviour setting. As predicted, a person's well‐being in a behaviour setting clearly depends on the motivational P–E fit which explains the intra‐individual variance of well‐being (across situations) and the intra‐situational variance (across persons) in addition to the variance explained by emotional stability and extraversion.