Individual differences in personality and positive emotion for wealth creation

This study identified evidence of a bidirectional causal relationship between positive emotions and net wealth using a random intercept cross-lagged panel model with three time points (2008, 2012, and 2016) within a sample of 10,898 Americans over age 50 from the Health and Retirement Study. The Great Recession might have contributed to net wealth's effect on positive emotions during this study. The results also suggest that positive emotions shape net wealth, providing evidence favoring the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and the potential effectiveness of positive psychological interventions for personal finance behaviors. Furthermore, a cross-level interaction of all Big-five personality traits with positive emotion and net wealth showed large cross-lag effects when positive emotion is a predictor of net wealth. Likewise, the interaction of positive emotion by the Big Five traits was a predictor of net wealth, indicating the need for further examination of the moderated effect of positive emotion in the context of personality traits and net wealth.