Connecting Culture and Happiness, With Jeanne Tsai, PhD Bradley Cannon Psi Chi Central Office BRADLEY: Culture has been found to influence the way you want to feel. In this interview, Dr. Jeanne Tsai from Stanford University describes the many ways that culture can influence someone’s ideal affect—which is sort of like the ideal state that people want to feel. Dr. Tsai was Psi Chi’s Distinguished Lecturer at the 2019 Association for Psychological Science convention. Among her many accomplishments, she has received funding for her work from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Aging, and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. Her 40
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work has been featured in popular media outlets. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust—there are a lot of emotions out there. But I’m sure they’re all exciting to talk about, especially with Dr. Tsai! So, let’s find out what she has to say, starting with her own definition of what ideal affect really is, and how your ideal affect (i.e., the way you want to feel) is different from your actually feel. JEANNE: Ideal affect refers to the emotions and feelings that people value and ideally want to feel. Sometimes people are aware of their ideal affect, but many times they are not. They behave in lots of
ways and make lots of decisions and do things that are a function of how they want to feel. Sometimes they know that, and sometimes they don’t. BRADLEY: And what are some different ideal affects that have been influenced by culture? JEANNE: Most of our research has really focused on the ideal positive states that people have—the degree to which people want to feel different positive states. We focus primarily on how much people want to feel excited, enthusiastic, energetic (we call these high arousal positive states) as well as the degree to which people want
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