Abstract
Frequent observations showing that travel influences satisfaction with life suggest that transport policy making and planning would increase society’s welfare by taking this influence into account. To do this requires detailed knowledge of how travel influences satisfaction with life. Two routes of influence have been proposed and empirically confirmed, one through the facilitation of out-of-home activities that are important for satisfaction with life, and the other through reducing negative feelings caused by hassles associated with daily travel. The latter route is the focus of the chapter. A theoretical framework is proposed that makes quantitative predictions of the impacts of transient feelings (emotional responses) on enduring feelings (mood) with consequences for well-being during and after travel. Positive and negative emotional responses are assumed to be evoked by both transient critical incidents (e.g. disruptions) and non-transient factors (e.g. noise) during travel. Numerical experiments illustrate the quantitative predictions of changes in mood during and after travel for both types of evoking factors. It is also shown how emotion regulation may moderate effects of transient factors as well as how hedonic adaptation and desensitization associated with non-transient factors may affect mood after travel. The conclusion is that measurement of mood at different points in time should be a valuable complement to or sometimes a substitute for retrospective self-reports of satisfaction with travel that are likely to be more susceptible to systematic errors.
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Notes
- 1.
Several different methods have been used to measure core affects including self-reports, startle responses, peripheral physiology, face expressions assessed by automated picture recognition systems or electrical muscle potentials, and brain measures. A dimensional description of core affects is supported by these methods, although not all converge on the two orthogonal pleasure-displeasure and activation-deactivation dimensions (Mauss and Robinson 2009).
- 2.
Kahneman (1999) argues that this is the most important evaluative dimension (by him referred to as Good-Bad evaluations) although activation would augment or attenuate such evaluations. Västfjäll et al. (2001) showed how the pleasure-displeasure and activation-deactivation dimensions may be collapsed into a unidimensional dimension of positive versus negative feelings. See also the related discussion in Kuppens et al. (2013) of different conceptualizations of the relation between pleasure-displeasure and activation-deactivation.
- 3.
- 4.
For simplicity the effects on current mood are analyzed at the last time segment of the journey.
- 5.
- 6.
It may however be noted that cross-cultural research shows that worldwide people tend to be in a mild to moderate positive mood in the absence of important negative circumstances (Diener et al. 2015). Thus, the set-point is a positive rather than a neutral mood. Evolutionary arguments are invoked as an explanation, partly based on that a positive mood increases the likelihood of adaptive behaviors such as creativity, planning, mating, and sociality, partly based on the observation that a positive affect balance increases longevity and success in life (Diener and Chan 2011; Lyubomirski et al. 2005). This relationship may however be non-linear with the largest positive effects for a lower than the maximal affect balance.
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Acknowledgements
My co-authored research reported in this chapter has been financially supported by grant #2014-05335 from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems awarded to the SAMOT VINN Excellence Center in public transport at Karlstad University, Sweden. I thank the Editors for their research collaboration as well as comments on the chapter. I also thank Michael Ståhl for assisting me with the numerical experiments.
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Gärling, T. (2018). Travel and Feelings. In: Friman, M., Ettema, D., Olsson, L.E. (eds) Quality of Life and Daily Travel. Applying Quality of Life Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76623-2_3
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