Pleasure of leisure-pleasure of work: Personality makes the difference

Abstract

It seems natural to enjoy leisure more than work. However, time sampling studies on emotions in everyday life situations revealed large and consistent individual differences in the leisure/work discrepancy of mood. By reanalyzing data of 7 different studies ( N = 188) performed with the time sampling diary of Brandstätter (1977; Bericht über den 30. Kongreβder DGfPs in Regensburg 1976. Gottingen: Hogrefe), subjects high and low in leisure/work discrepancy of mood could be identified by the 16PF second order factors emotional stability and extraversion. For 16 (4 by 2 by 2) categories of situations, classified according to the presence of other persons, leisure-work, and at home-out of home, two indices of stimulation intensity were calculated. During leisure as well as during work only extraverts, and not introverts, felt much better in situations with high stimulation than in situations with low stimulation. Although, on average across types of situations and persons, leisure situations were not more activating than work situations, extraverts compared to introverts used the freedom of leisure time for choosing more often highly stimulating activities. Moreover, it could be shown (a) that leisure provides better opportunities for satisfying social motives than work, and (b) that extraverts have stronger social motives which can more easily be satisfied during leisure than during work. Thus, individual differences in the need for stimulation and in the strength of social motives on the one hand, and environmental differences in activation and in the opportunities for satisfying social motives are most likely the causes of the differences between introverts and extraverts in the leisure/work discrepancy of mood. As predicted and tested with a new data set, the connotative meaning of “leisure” and “work” is different for introverts and extraverts, and these differences on the valence and arousal dimension correspond to the differences found in the diary data.