Examining the within-person effect of affect on daily satisfaction

•State satisfaction measures assess short-term or “in-the-moment” appraisals of their current life circumstances.•The question of whether state satisfaction is “contaminated” by current affect is fundamentally a within-person one.•This “effect” is defined as the proportion of total variance in state satisfaction explained by changes in affect over time.•We found a substantial effect of current affect on state satisfaction.

Assessments of global life satisfaction capture beliefs about overall well-being; state satisfaction assessments focus on short-term or “in-the-moment” appraisals of current life circumstances. Prior research has examined how trait measures of life satisfaction and affect are related at between-person and within-person levels of analysis. At the state level, however, a lack of clarity exists about the nature and magnitude of the association between satisfaction and affect. In a diary study involving assessments of both affect and satisfaction at the daily level (N = 350 with 6024 assessments), we found a consequential effect of affect on state satisfaction due to greater within-person variance over time.