Background: Previous research has shown that people’s experience of positive and negative affect can be used for affective personality profiling in order to analyze self-reported estimations of subjective health, optimism, stress, and life satisfaction. For example, self-fulfilling individuals (high in positive affect and low in negative affect) show a more psychologically healthy profile, pertaining to energy/stress and dispositional optimism than individuals manifesting a self-destructive type of affective personality (low in positive affect and high in negative affect). Recent analyses have focused upon the issue of cultural differences and affective states as well as health status. Cross-cultural surveys of subjective well-being have consistently shown that individuals in Eastern cultures report less frequent positive affect and lower levels of life satisfaction than those in a Western culture. Westerners rely on their rationality when evaluating their own life satisfaction, whereas Easterners depend on an awareness of harmony in interpersonal relationships. In addition, different cultural norms contribute to variations in expressions of affect, hence to cultural differences in positive and negative affect. This is in accordance with emotional complexity (the co-occurrence of positive and negative affect), which is more prevalent in East Asian than in Western cultures (Spencer-Rodgers et al., J Cross-Cult Psychol 41(1):109–115, 2020).

Aim: The aim of the current chapter, which combine four past studies carried out in Indonesia between 2013 and 2019, was to investigate the effect of affective profiles on self-reported health, life satisfaction, optimism, and energy–stress.

Method: Four different studies were performed in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, between 2013 and 2019 and have been merged into one composite data set. All four studies deal with affective profiles, three of them cover questions on self-reported health measure, and two studies include the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS). Study 1 also concerns Life Oriental Test (LOT) and Stress-Energy. There are 760 subjects in total with an average age of 28 years (sd = 9.5 years) of whom 355 were male and 385 were female. The median was calculated for positive and negative affect and combined these as high and low in order. Based upon this, each participant was assigned to one of the four affective profiles. One-way ANOVA was conducted with profiles as an independent variable, and health, life satisfaction, life orientation, stress, and energy as dependents.

Results: Most participants had a low affective profile followed by high affective, self-destructive, and self-fulfilled. Self-fulfilled individuals reported significantly better health, more life satisfaction, more optimism, higher energy, and less stress than the other profiles. High affective individuals showed the highest levels of stress. Differences for gender in affective profiles show that men were more often categorized as self-fulfilled than women, and women were more often categorized as self-destructive than men. Men self-reported better health and higher energy than women, while women self-reported more stress than men.

Conclusion: As expected, affectivity was related to subjective health, life satisfaction, optimism, energy, and stress. The differences between women and men can be understood with Hofstede’s collectivism and power distance where women are expected to conform to ideals of society and the in-groups to which they belong. Young women in education or who have a career are obliged to fulfill their roles as daughters and wives and may not have the same opportunity to gain fulfillment as young men have, which can lead to low energy and high stress.