Daily Happiness in Contexts: Associations of Activities, Social Companions, and Humor Use across Two 2-Month Experience Sampling Studies

Abstract

Abstract Everyday happiness can be described more informatively by considering both the situations surrounding happiness reports and how people engage with and respond to everyday experience over the relevant assessment interval. The present research examined activity–companion contexts and humor repertoire breadth as two complementary sources of information about everyday experience and their associations with happiness across two 60-day experience-sampling studies conducted in naturalistic settings. In Study 1, daytime reports assessed momentary happiness together with activity and social context, whereas end-of-day reports assessed daily happiness and humor use across the day. Momentary happiness varied across activity–companion contexts, and broader daily humor repertoire breadth was positively associated with daily happiness. In Study 2, a separate sample completed momentary reports assessing current activity, social context (including perceived intimacy with companions), recent humor use, and momentary happiness. As in Study 1, activity–companion contexts were associated with happiness, and broader humor repertoire breadth over the preceding 15 min was positively associated with momentary happiness. Taken together, these findings indicate that situational information and information about engagement with everyday experience provide two complementary ways of characterizing everyday happiness across daily and momentary timescales.