Abstract

We investigated the connections of the emotional experiences in everyday life to subjective well-being, health perception and physical illness through a survey research. We also examined the relative predictive power of emotion dimension approach(ie, positive or negative emotions) and emotion category approach(discrete emotions) to those relationships. Participants in this survey were 1309 students(344 male college students, 324 female college students, 304 male high school students, 346 female high school students) from three regional areas in Korea. The results obtained from multiple regression analysis and step-wise regression showed that both of the dimension model and the discrete category model were validated to predict subjective well-being, health perception and physical illness, provided appropriate and frequently used emotion terms were chosen. The results of this research also showed that different discrete emotions were connected to cardiovascular, respiratory, skin and digestive diseases. The implications and limitations of this study were discussed in terms of the previous studies and suggestions for further study were added.