You Shall Go Forth With Joy: Religion and Aspirational Judgments About Emotion

People who are religious report more effective coping with negative events and greater satisfaction with life. These emotion judgments may reflect how religious people actually feel in the wake of negative events, or they may be aspirational and self-enhancing, reflecting how religious people hope or expect to feel as a member of their faith. To test this, in two studies, undergraduates reported their forecast and experienced emotional response to receiving an exam grade that was lower than expected. They also reported their satisfaction with life. In Study 2, we varied whether religious identity was primed before participants reported their emotional experience, and assessed self-enhancement. More religious participants forecast that they would feel happier about receiving a lower exam grade than expected, but did not actually experience greater happiness, even when their religious identity was primed. More religious participants also reported greater satisfaction with life, and this association was fully mediated by self-enhancement. These findings suggest that reports of effective coping and life satisfaction among religious people stem partly from aspirational expectations about how they will or should feel, rather than from how they actually do feel, following negative events.