Goal relevance and the affective experience of daily life: Ruling out situational explanations

The importance of goals to affect in daily life has begun to be established in research that shows, across the events of daily life, an association between the content of the goal an individual is working on and her or his affect while working on the goal (Cantor, Norem et al., 1991; Emmons, 1991). However, these studies have not considered that situational, interpersonal, and temporal contexts might explain this association because contexts may be responsible both for variation in the goals an individual is working on and for the affect an individual is experiencing. To firmly establish the importance of goals to affect, such third-variable explanations must be ruled out (West & Hepworth, 1991). In a 2-week experience-sampling study, we showed that goal relevance can vary while contexts are held constant, and that this variation remains associated with variation in affect while the context is held constant, thus ruling out context as an explanation of these associations. Additionally, the importance of a goal to an individual was related to this variation in goal pursuit within each context. It is discussed how contexts and goals interact to influence affective experience in daily life.The Coping with College study was an intensive semester-long study of college students' adjustment to college. This work was supported in part by grant BNS #87-18467 (Cantor & Norem) from the National Science Foundation and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship (Fleeson). Part of the work was completed while the first author was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. We would like to thank Randy Larsen, Hazel Markus, Joan Girgus, Rose Pacini, Eric Stone, Sabrina Zirkel, Bob Harlow, Michele Acker, Susan Jenkins, Steve Peck, Ursula Staudinger and Tim Ketelaar, for their comments on this line of work. We extend warm and grateful thanks to Carol Cook-Flannagan for her help in analysis and interpretation.