Savoring

A New Model of Positive Experience

Fred B. Bryant, Joseph Veroff

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351550055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This book is about savoring life—the capacity to attend to the joys, pleasures, and other positive feelings that we experience in our lives. The authors enhance our understanding of what savoring is and the conditions under which it occurs. Savoring provides a new theoretical model for conceptualizing and understanding the psychology of enjoyment and the processes through which people manage positive emotions. The authors review their quantitative research on savoring, as well as the research of others, and provide measurement instruments with scoring instructions for assessing and studying savoring. Authors Bryant and Veroff outline the necessary preconditions that must exist for savoring to occur and distinguish savoring from related concepts such as coping, pleasure, positive affect, emotional intelligence, flow, and meditation. The book's lifespan perspective includes a conceptual analysis of the role of time in savoring. Savoring is also considered in relation to human concerns, such as love, friendship, physical and mental health, creativity, and spirituality. Strategies and hands-on exercises that people can use to enhance savoring in their lives are provided, along with a review of factors that enhance savoring. Savoring is intended for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in positive psychology from the fields of social, clinical, health, and personality psychology and related disciplines. The book may serve as a supplemental text in courses on positive psychology, emotion and motivation, and other related topics. The chapters on enhancing savoring will be especially attractive to clinicians and counselors interested in intervention strategies for positive psychological adjustment.

1

Concepts of Savoring: An Introduction

There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy.

—Robert Louis Stevenson (1881)

Who are the people who truly experience well-being in their lives? Those who have fulfilled basic needs for food, shelter, sex, family, work, and health, you might say. Yet, even if basic needs are fulfilled, that does not necessarily imply that people automatically feel good about their lives. The proportion of Americans who describe themselves as “happy” has not changed since the 1950s, even though average “real income” has more than doubled during that time (Easterbrook, 2003). Even with basic needs fulfilled, some people see possible stress and misfortune looming around every corner, and they remain anxious about their lives. And even if people have the ability to weather the storms about which they are anxious, this does not necessarily help them notice or appreciate the positive aspects of their lives.

Being able to handle adversity is vital in life, but having a capacity to cope seems not to be the same as having the capacity to enjoy life. In other words, just because people are not down, doesn’t mean they’re up. Considering only stress, coping, and distress omits from the picture positive experiences and personal capacities that comprise the central topics of the growing field of positive psychology. What about attaining authentic happiness (Seligman, 2002a), experiencing positive feelings like joy and pleasure (Fredrickson, 2001), flourishing (Keyes & Haidt, 2003), feeling hope (Snyder, 2002) or optimism (Segerstrom, 2001) toward the future, or having a sense of satisfaction in response to what one has done or accomplished (Diener & Diener, 1995)? Aren’t these critical emotional states that also feed into people’s overall well-being? Although this book is not directly about these emotional states, it features a major process by which people bring about, appreciate, and enhance these positive experiences. We call this process savoring.

Our Initial Notion of a Savoring Concept!

As we noted in the preface, our earlier work on subjective mental health (Bryant & Veroff, 1984) led us to conclude that something vital was missing from the literature on psychological well-being. In particular, the process of coping with stress had no positive counterpart. But if people make self-assessments of their ability to handle negative experiences in their lives, then surely they must also make self-assessments of their ability to enjoy positive experiences. We contend that savoring is this missing process—the positive counterpart of coping.

This book and the conceptual analysis and empirical research presented in it are meant to fill this gap in the literature. We posit that people have capacities to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in their lives. This is the basic conceptual definition of savoring we use throughout this book. We call those capacities, capacities to savor, and the processes underlying those capacities, savoring.

From research on coping (see Compas, Connor, Osowiecki, & Welch, 1997; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), we know that people use a range of different types of coping strategies to handle stress. For example, people may use active problem solving, social support, prayer, cognitive reappraisal, formal help seeking, wishful thinking, escape-avoidance, denial, or substance abuse to help them cope with their problems. Some of these approaches to coping may even involve active attention to the good things in one’s life, what seems like savoring, but such mechanisms were seen in the coping literature as “breathers” or “sustainers,” or as ways to avoid stress, not as ways to heighten positive experiences for their own sake (Lazarus, Kanner, & Folkman, 1980). Within the mental health literature, theorists and researchers have been careful to distinguish the process of coping, that is, the thoughts and behaviors that people use to modify stressful circumstances and to minimize potential threat, from its outcome, that is, the consequences of coping. This important distinction has guided theory and research on stress management and adjustment, and it has been valuable in helping us better understand the processes involved in dealing with anxiety, depression, misfortune, and illness.

But when it comes to happiness, joy, elation, and delight; when it comes to satisfaction, gratification, meaning, and fulfillment; when it comes to pleasure, rapture, gratitude, and bliss, there is little knowledge about the processes through which these positive states come about. As a result, we know practically nothing about the processes through which people derive joy in their lives. Clearly, people actively engage in thoughts and behaviors before, during, and after positive experiences, and these thoughts and behaviors influence how strongly these experiences are felt, just as people’s thoughts and behaviors in response to stress influence their subsequent levels of distress. But there are no terms in the social science literature to denote these positive processes directly.

Just as in the literature on coping and distress, however, we must be careful to distinguish between the process of attending to joy and the joy itself. We needed a word to denote the positive counterpart of coping. This term had to refer to the processes rather than to the outcome of enjoyment, and it had to convey the dynamic, interactive, transactional nature of positive emotions. There were many words that came to mind, each of which captured a different flavor of the process. Some words were rich in meaning but narrow in scope, and were more specific to particular circumstances: rejoicing, reveling, delighting, basking, and luxuriating, for example. Other words were broader and more general, and seemed to convey more clearly the notion of a positive process: appreciating, cherishing, enjoying, relishing, and savoring, for instance.

We settled on the term savoring because for us it most vividly captures the active process of enjoyment, the ongoing interplay between person and environment. The word savoring also conveys metaphorically a search for the delectable, delicious, almost gustatory delights of the moment. Although the term fits more intuitively with attending to a sensory experience such as taste, we mean to extend it to attending to more complex cognitive associations. Our extension of the term savoring beyond mere sensation to include cognitive reflection is consistent with the etymology of the word “savor,” which comes from the Latin word sapere meaning “to taste,” “to have good taste,” or “to be wise.” Thus, we define the concept of savoring as going beyond the experience of pleasure to encompass a higher order awareness or reflective discernment on the part of the individual.

We would speak of savoring if people were attending to how much well-being they are deriving from their accomplishments or from their social connections. We would speak of savoring if people were attending to their pleasurable communion with nature or to their uplifting transcendence in God, taking pleasure from doing a difficult task, reflecting on the joy of watching their children grow up, or from countless other positive feelings. Indeed, the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary (Simpson & Weiner, 1989) also notes two major definitions of the verb “to savor (savour).” The first one is with regard to appreciating the enjoyment of the taste of food, but the second is with regard to appreciating the enjoyment of any experience. It is with that second meaning that we proceeded with our analysis of savoring.

Earlier References to Savoring-Like Processes

We are not the first social scientists to discuss concepts related to savoring. The earliest references to a savoring-like process that we can locate come from the literature on economics. In 1789, Bentham (1789/1948) included among the determinants of subjective utility the enjoyment currently derived from anticipating future gratification. Another early acknowledgement of people’s awareness of future joy is from Marshall (1891), who noted “the pleasures of expectation” (p. 178). In a similar vein, Jevons (1905) noted “three distinct ways . . . in which pleasurable or painful feelings are caused: (1) By memory of past events; (2) By the sensation of present events; (3) By anticipation of future events” (p. 3). Jevons (1905) termed the latter phenomenon anticipal pleasure, which he considered to be the most critical determinant of economic behavior.

Analyzing the anticipation of a planned vacation, Jevons (1905) framed several interesting psychological hypotheses about temporal changes in the intensity of anticipal pleasure:

The intensity of the anticipation will be greater the longer the holiday; greater also, the more intensely one expects to enjoy it when the time comes. In other words the amount of pleasure expected is one factor determining the intensity of anticipal pleasure. Again, the nearer the date fixed for leaving home approaches, the greater does the intensity of anticipal pleasure become: at first when the holiday is still many weeks ahead, the intensity increases slowly; then, as the time grows closer, it increases faster and faster, until it culminates on the eve of departure. (p. 64)

In a more up-to-date economic analysis of pleasure, Loewenstein (1987) specifically used the term savouring to refer to “positive utility derived from anticipation of future consumption” (p. 667), and provided an elaborate mathematical model of the anticipation and valuation of delayed consumption. Extending Jevons’ (1905) and Lowenstein’s (1987) analyses, we use the term savoring to denote the process of deriving pleasure in any one of the three temporal orientations, although we focus on the positive feelings that savoring evokes in the here and now. There is a paradox here: Although savoring can occur only in the moment, it may focus on past or future moments.

Assumptive Framework for a Model of Savoring

Distinguishing Savoring From Pleasure

By the term savoring, we mean something different from mere pleasure, although savoring and pleasure are intimately connected concepts. When one savors, one is aware of pleasure and appreciates the positive feelings one is experiencing. But by experiencing pleasure, one does not necessarily savor. Attentive and appreciative awareness of the pleasure must also occur or we would not consider the experience to involve savoring. As we emphasize later in this chapter, some degree of mindfulness (Langer, 1989) and meta-awareness (Schooler, 2001; Schooler, Ariely, & Loewenstein, 2003) has to be attached to an experience for it to be savored, at least in our sense of the word.

In considering the concept of pleasure, Russell (2003) argued that “pleasure is the most neglected topic in psychology, at least in relation to claims about its importance” (p. 161). Although some theorists view pleasure as a unitary construct—for example, as global subjective “experience” utility in decision making (Kahneman, Wakker, & Sarin, 1997), or as the satisfaction of visceral drives in physiology (Cabanac, 1992)—other theorists have adopted a multidimensional perspective and have proposed a variety of different typologies of pleasure. For example, Duncker (1941) distinguished three basic types of pleasures: sensory pleasures derived from physical sensations (e.g., the taste of wine, the feel of a Jacuzzi); aesthetic pleasures derived from sensations expressive of reactions to natural or human-made phenomena (e.g., a panoramic vista, an orchestral symphony); and accomplishment pleasures derived from the attainment of something desirable (e.g., receiving an award, winning an athletic competition). Other writers have highlighted additional varieties of pleasure, including social pleasures derived from the company of others (Dube & Le Bel, 2003; Kubovy, 1999; Tiger, 1992), pleasures of the body versus pleasures of the mind (Kubovy, 1999; Tiger, 1992), pleasures of anticipation (Loewenstein, 1987), and pleasures of memory (Bentham, 1781/1970).

Clearly, however, we are not mindful of all our pleasures. As Brown and Ryan (2003) noted, one may be aware of stimuli without these stimuli being at the center of attention. Even eating can be pleasurable without savoring, if there is no conscious attention focused on the sensations of pleasure as they are being experienced. Savoring involves not just the awareness of pleasure, but also a conscious attention to the experience of pleasure.

It would thus be hard to speak of savoring for one of the most intense human pleasures, sexual orgasmic gratification, because in the immediacy of that sexual response, mindful elaborated attention to the experience is often relatively absent. Poets and novelists may sometimes be mindful of that fleeting elusive phenomenon, but for most people, the experience of physical release dominates awareness. Pleasure indeed, but usually not in the category of a savoring experience. In fact, mindfulness about sexual activity can interfere with continuing a pleasurable sexual response. Many men and women lose their arousal when they closely attend to what they are doing and experiencing. Much sexual savoring, however, can occur in the anticipatory buildup to sexual release and in the afterglow of sexual gratification. Indeed, sexual savoring often occurs in the sensuous enjoyment of one’s own body or in looking at the female or male body, or in touching or being touched in a sensuous way. Later we discuss such experiences as a form of savoring we term luxuriating. But rarely would we think of ongoing orgasm as eliciting sexual savoring.

In addition to their role in much of sexuality, the five senses give us many pleasures and at the same time easily lend themselves to savoring. Ackerman (1990), in The Natural History of the Senses, strives to do exactly what we wish to do in this book: make people more systematically aware of the joys of the senses, to become more mindful of them and how they operate in our experience. Ackerman (1990) presents the case of a woman who lost her capacity to smell, a sensory experience to which we generally pay little attention. When this woman recovered her sense of smell through medication, she found herself intoxicated with the smells of her everyday life, including the scent of her husband, smells of which she was unaware or that she had taken fully for granted. All of us can imagine being without one of our senses in this way, and this heightened awareness can then make us more fully conscious of the pleasurable things we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. The process of appreciating this “missing sense” exemplifies what we mean by the term savoring.

Domains of Savoring

Just as the domains of pleasure are infinite, so too are the domains of savoring infinite. The domains to which we direct our attention when we savor know few bounds. Bearing this out is a study by Lowe (2002) in which people were asked to describe what gave them pleasure. Lowe (2002) used the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, in which a panel of several thousand volunteers had been recruited to respond to particular directives several times a year to write about various aspects of British life. A directive in 1993 asked these recruits about “all the nice things that happen to them and to report on ten things that gave them pleasure, from simple occasions to extravagant treats—and to describe them in detail.” This directive instructed respondents to attend to what gives them pleasure, close to what we mean by savoring. An admittedly biased sample of only 387 responded. Those who did respond were mostly middle-aged or older, with only 13% under age 40. More women than men responded.

Despite the sample’s lack of representativeness, the diversity of the types of things written about as sources of pleasure is startling. Men’s top-ranked category was “Food and Drink,” closely followed by “Music,” “Reading,” “Family/ Children.” For women, additional top-ranked sources of pleasurable experiences were “Entertainment,” “Home/Garden,” “Nature/Scenery.” But although many of the responses can be categorized into a simple set, that set would not begin to cover what most people wrote about. A short list of some of the responses also includes: “Love/Sex,” “Exercise/Sport,” “Friends,” all of which were mentioned relatively often, and “Memories,” “Art,” “Spiritual/Religious,” “Smells,” “Sounds,” and “Humor,” all of which were mentioned relatively infrequently.

If you look even more closely at what people wrote, a more diverse picture of people’s “pleasures” emerges. Under food and drink, one person spoke of her “afternoon tea”; another of “fresh brown bread with cheddar cheese”; many spoke of chocolate. Here is what one respondent said about enjoying good wines:

Good wine can make me feel orgasmic. The nose, taste and glow one gets can be overwhelming. I have occasionally had wine so delicious it has almost brought tears to my eyes. The ability to taste different spices, fruits, flowers, herbs within one glass of wine differentiates good wines to bad wines for me and a good wine requires time and thought to be fully enjoyed.

Notice how this response directly implicates savoring processes in its emphasis on a deliberate, conscious awareness of the pleasures of taste.

Some responses are not at all easily categorized. One respondent derived pleasure from taking a break:

In later life I had a friend in the scrap metal business. Some Sunday afternoons, when he was free of account books and ledgers, he would call at my door and ask if I wanted to “go lean on a gate.” He would drive in his car a few miles into the country before he found a quiet lane, and then he would stop, and leave the car and quite literally “lean on a gate.” Most often we found ourselves looking across a field of sheep or cows against a dark backcloth of trees, and we would smoke and stare and talk a little. My friend called this simple pleasure “taking the creases out.”

That response would be hard to categorize with most of the others, but could perhaps be viewed as “Stress Reduction,” “Nature/Scenery,” or “Camaraderie.” In other words, the types of domains for savoring can vary enormously. Individuals are highly idios...