Can you take a break if you have work to do? Momentary emotional wellbeing and prospective hedonic judgments of leisure

We examined whether the perceived hedonic advantage of a ‟post-work” vacation is moderated by people‘s emotional well-being at the time of judgment. The first study was a preregistered direct replication of Study 1d in O‘Brien and Roney (2017). We hypothesised that late vacations would be judged more favourably than early vacations. We also wanted to explore whether this effect could be moderated by momentary emotional well-being. The final sample (n = 264) mean age was 31.74 years (SD = 13.15) and included 128 females, 114 males, and 22 who preferred not to specify their gender. We observed a significant interaction effect as momentary emotional well-being moderated the effect on the vacation timing on prospective hedonic judgments. Specifically, the timing of vacation only impacted the prospective hedonic judgments of individuals who reported lower scores of momentary emotional well-being. Prospective hedonic judgments of happier respondents were unaffected by the vacation timing manipulation. In a second pre-registered follow-up study, we aimed to replicate the moderating effect of momentary emotional well-being and explored the possible moderating impact of individuals‘ propensity to commit the planning fallacy.