In our last session, we looked at evidence that across the world when people have satisfaction for autonomy, competence and relatedness, they have higher well-being. This means that an individual who has more of the satisfactions in their life is going to have greater wellness than an individual who doesn't. But most of us are not really concerned with that in our daily lives. We don't care whether I'm happier than my neighbor or my neighbor happier than me. What's really important to us is what makes us happy on one day relative to a previous day? Most of us are concerned with what we call the within person variation in our wellness and our happiness. We are concerned about what makes us change in positive or negative directions. So, SDT researchers have done a lot of investigations at this within-person level of variability in well-being as a function of basic psychological needs. Across different days, we all have variations in wellness. I might have a day in which I'm at work and people are making a lot of demands on me that I don't really value or don't have interest in. In other words I have low autonomy on that day and that means on that day I'm probably going to have lower well-being than on other days when I'm pursuing the things that really are of interest to me and I do value. Or similarly on a day when I felt rejected or maybe pushed away by other people, my relatedness needs are going to be more frustrated and well-being is going to go down. So, on that day relative to other day's, well-being should change. SET makes a strong statement that, they'll be considerable within-person variability in wellness and it will be a function of the considerable variability that all of us have in the experience of our basic needs satisfactions. Let me show you an example of this from college students, because many of you who might be watching these films might be in college yourself, so you might resonate with this pattern of events. This is a study that was done by Reese and colleagues along with me at the University of Rochester. Here we were looking at students daily experience and how much positive affect or a negative experience they had in a day. If you look at this graph you see a particular pattern where you see that on Monday, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, there's generally just a moderate amount of positive affect occurring and a modest amount of negative affect occurring. But when we get to Fridays, we see some change in this, which is on Friday afternoons really into Friday evenings there's arise and positive affect and there's a decrease in negative affect. In fact, positive affect stays high across Saturday, across Sunday and then starts to plummet around Sunday evening, and negative affect shows the opposite pattern. What's going on here which is that during the weekday students don't seem to be having their most positive experiences on weekends they're having much more positive experiences. We call this the weekend effect and as psychologists we have no idea what's going on there. No, that's not true. We do know what's going on there. What's going on on the weekend effect is that on weekends, as we trace students need satisfaction we see that they have much higher relatedness on weekends and much more autonomy on weekends. Competence doesn't really change. What this means for our university students is that on weekends they're able to choose more of the activities they are engaged in. When they're studying they get to do it in their own way in their own place with the people that they would like to be with, they're more likely to be with people that they care for or love, so they're also experiencing more relatedness as well as autonomy. This is the reason that their well-being shoots up. It's not just because they're not working, it's because even when they're working, they're doing so with more choice and they're doing so with more connectedness. If this is true of students, is it really true of workers? Even more recently in 2010 with Jesse Bernstein and Kurt Brown, we did a study of a heterogeneous sample of American workers doing basically the same thing. Three times a day, we tap them to find out about their positive and negative experiences and satisfactions, and we also looked at their needs satisfaction at each of those points of the day. We found a similar weekend effect as we found in students. Which is across or on average in these heterogeneous samples of workers on weekends, people's well-being shot up. It had more positive affect, less than negative affect, more vitality, generally more symptoms of wellness. They even had fewer physical symptoms on weekends, less stomach aches, less headaches, less symptoms of stress, muscle aches etc. When we tried to account for this pattern of effects, it's clearly accounted for by what's going on for them at work. When we tap people at work, they tend to have low feelings of autonomy, low feelings of relatedness and this shows up in decreased vitality, decreased positive affect and increased physical symptoms. So, we see these symptoms of stress of course all the time in workers and we see again, why now people are often waiting for the weekends, because that's the time that they're really going to get their basic psychological needs more satisfied. Every worker shows that weekend effect. Some workers have high well-being during the week as well as on the weekends. Why is that? These are the workers who we identify as having high autonomy in their jobs. They feel a lot of agency and choice and what they're doing, what their work is something that they both find interest in and value and these are also the workers who are connected with their co-workers and colleagues. When you have those elements in your workplace, you don't have to have a weekend effect, because your well-being is maintained across the week. Many of our interventions for instance, in workplace from an SDT standpoint are how to make workplaces places that are more conducive to feeling relatedness and autonomy, so you don't have to have this kind of effect. Variations in our wellness are really a function of variations in our meet satisfaction on a day-to-day basis and of course you can think about this in your own life. If you've had a bad day today and hopefully it's not about watching this film, but if you've had a bad day today, it might be because you haven't really been able to experience the autonomy. You've been feeling pushed around or having things imposed on you or maybe you've been feeling not as connected to others in your life as you'd like to or maybe it's been a frustration of competence in some way. Almost always when we find bad days in people we can trace them back to these three basic psychological needs, being frustrated or when people are having especially positive days, they come back to these three basic satisfactions. Of course as we look across variability, we see that there's a lot of it for most of us and it is a function of these issues
