WELL-BEING AND MOTIVATIONAL PERSON-ENVIRONMENT FIT - A TIME-SAMPLING STUDY OF EMOTIONS

The report is based on the data of seven studies (altogether 188 perso ns varying in gender, age, and education level) with the author's time -sampling diary, by which the subjects record their momentary mood, th e behaviour setting, other persons present, activities, causal attribu tions of experienced emotions, and affected motives about four times a day for a period of 30 days. For each pattern of four 16PF second-ord er factors (median split), the relative frequencies of references to s ix classes of motives (i.e. the personal motive profiles) and for each of 16 behaviour settings, the relative frequencies by which each of t hose motives was satisfied in the whole sample of persons (environment al motive profiles) were derived from the diary data. The degree of mo tivational person-environment fit (P-E fit; correlation of personal an d environmental motive profiles) was calculated for each combination o f personality structure and behaviour setting. As predicted, a person' s well-being in a behaviour setting clearly depends on the motivationa l 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 extr aversion.