Most theories of motivation have highlighted that human behavior is guided by the hedonic principle, according to which our choices of daily activities aim to minimize negative affect and maximize positive affect. However, it is not clear how to reconcile this idea with the fact that people routinely engage in unpleasant yet necessary activities. To address this issue, we monitored in real time...

Abstract The paradox of hedonism is the idea that intrinsically desiring nothing other than pleasure can prevent one from obtaining pleasure. In this article, I show how be used as basis for an objection against about well-being, and more defensible has been commonly recognized. Moreover, argue challenge presented by to target not only but also desire satisfactionism hybrid theory. However, cer...

A person can be better or worse off. Lives can go better or worse. How does this happen? The obvious and natural suggestion is that lives vary in terms of how much good they contain, and how much bad. That is to say, the overall level of one’s well-being is a function of both the good contained within the life and the bad contained within it. Somewhat more precisely, there are elements which th...

John Stuart Mill’s hedonism is notoriously ambiguous. The most important ambiguity concerns his reliance on an axiologically significant notion of quality of pleasure. (Hereafter: “quality”.) His resulting “higher pleasures doctrine” has given rise to a number of interpretive disputes concerning, for instance, the nature of quality, the relative value of higher pleasures in comparison to lower ...

In this paper, we present a study on personalized emphasis framing which can be used to tailor the content of a message to enhance its appeal to different individuals. With this framework, we directly model content selection decisions based on a set of psychologically-motivated domainindependent personal traits including personality (e.g., extraversion and conscientiousness) and basic human val...

Imaginative pleasure through daydreaming has been theorized to be important in understanding the experience of desire and as a factor escalating consumption. However, there is risk this underplays range potentially immersive intense experiences daydreaming, prior independent purchase or use marketplace commodities. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant diaries projective techniques, study...