Ideal affect in daily life: implications for affective experience, health, and social behavior

•AVT distinguishes how people ideally want to feel from how they actually feel.•People want to feel more positive and less negative than they actually feel.•Across and within cultures, people differ in the states they ideally want to feel.•Ideal affect shapes people's responses to events, health outcomes, and social behavior. Over the last decade, researchers have increasingly demonstrated that ideal affect—the affective states that people value and ideally want to feel—shapes different aspects of daily life. Here I briefly review Affect Valuation Theory (AVT), which integrates ideal affect into existing models of affect and emotion by identifying the causes and consequences of variation in ideal affect. I then describe recent research that applies AVT to the valuation of negative states as well as more complex states, examines how ideal affect shapes momentary affective experience, suggests that ideal affect has both direct and indirect effects on health, and illustrates that people's ideal affect shapes how they judge and respond to others. Finally, I discuss the implications of cultural and individual differences in ideal affect for clinical, educational, work, and leisure settings.