The Meaning in Life Questionnaire assesses presence of and search for meaning in life. Although the questionnaire has shown promising psychometric properties in samples from different countries, the scale’s measurement invariance across a large number of nations has yet to be assessed. This study is aimed at addressing this gap, providing insight into how meaning in life is constructed and experienced across countries and into the extent to which cross-country comparisons can be made. A total of 3867 adult participants from 17 countries, aged 30–60, balanced by gender, and with at least secondary education, completed the questionnaire as part of the Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation. Single sample confirmatory factor analysis, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, and alignment optimization were applied to investigate the scale’s performance across the samples. Good psychometric properties and high levels of approximate measurement invariance emerged for the Presence subscale after removal of item 9, the only reverse-phrased item. Performance of the Search subscale varied more across samples, suggesting caution in interpreting related results supporting approximate measurement invariance. The conceptualization of presence of meaning operationalized in the corresponding subscale (without item 9) appears consistent across countries, whereas search for meaning seems to be less universally homogenous and requires further exploration. Moreover, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire does not reflect the conceptual distinction between “purpose” and “meaning” currently acknowledged by researchers. This issue should be further explored in studies addressing the scale’s performance across cultures.

Emotional tears are uniquely human and play an essential role in the communication of distress in adults. Several studies have shown that individuals are more willing to offer emotional support and help a person in tears. Preliminary evidence suggests that this greater willingness to provide support is mediated via perceived warmth and helplessness. Moreover, tearful individuals are regarded as more reliable and honest. In the current study, we examined whether people can reliably distinguish genuine and fake crying, and what the consequences for the further evaluation of the crier are. A total of 202 participants (73 men, 129 women) were exposed to brief movie clips of genuine and fake crying adults and were asked to assess the criers. Results show that women were slightly better at identifying fake and genuine crying. How the crying was perceived subsequently seemed to have a strong influence on the further evaluation of the “crier.” Criers qualified as pretenders were perceived as significantly more manipulative, less reliable, less warm, and less competent. Further, the respondents felt less connected with the perceived pretenders, who also were less welcomed as friends, colleagues, neighbors, and babysitter. They were additionally qualified as significantly less fit for “reliable” professions (judge, teacher, police officer, scientist, and physician). In contrast, the ratings of their fitness for “unreliable” professions (banker, CEO, journalist, real estate salesman, and politician) yielded a significant difference in only one video clip (and contrary to expectations). Our findings thus indicate that the subjective labeling of crying as fake is associated with a significantly less positive perception of the “crying” person, regardless of whether the crying is actually fake or genuine. The qualification of tears as crocodile tears thus seems to affect the crier’s image strongly negatively.

This study aims to examine the effect of affect on satisfaction, both at the between- and the within-person level for momentary assessments. Affect is regarded as an important source of information for life satisfaction judgments. This affective effect on satisfaction is well established at the dispositional level, while at the within-person level it is heavily under-researched. This is true especially for momentary assessments. In this experience sampling study both mood and satisfaction scales were administered five times a day for 7 days via hand-held devices ( N = 74 with 2,122 assessments). Several hierarchical linear models were fitted to the data. Even though the amount of between-person variance was relatively low, both positive and negative affect had substantial effects on momentary satisfaction on the between- and the within-person level as well. The within-person effects of affect on satisfaction appear to be more pronounced than the between-person ones. At the momentary level, the amount of between-person variance is lower than in studies with longer time-frames. The affect-related effects on satisfaction possibly have a curvilinear relationship with the time-frame used, increasing in intensity up to a point and then decreasing again. Such a relationship suggests that, at the momentary level, satisfaction might behave in a more stochastic manner, allowing for transient events/data which are not necessarily affect-related to affect it.