Positive Emotions

12 Key excerpts on "Positive Emotions"

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  Positive Art Therapy Theory and Practice

  Integrating Positive Psychology with Art Therapy

  • Rebecca Ann Wilkinson, Gioia Chilton(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This contributes to the capacity to cope with and bounce back from negative experience. Building and strengthening coping resources and the ability to manage stressors promotes greater resilience, which leads naturally to more positive experiences and emotions. This cycle generates the upward spiral of Positive Emotions, a reversal of the downward spiral that commonly manifests in depression, hopelessness, and pessimistic thinking (Garland et al., 2010). p.67 The beneficial impact of Positive Emotions on resilience appears most pronounced when we are able to find positive meaning in the difficulties we encounter. This process of positive reappraisal does not mean that we minimize our losses but that we are able to extract something positive from what we have experienced (Sears, Stanton, & Danoff-Burg, 2003). The relationship between finding positive meaning in challenges, also called benefit-finding (Helgeson, Reynolds, & Tomich, 2006), and Positive Emotions appears to be reciprocal as well—finding positive meaning induces more Positive Emotions, which in turn broadens thinking and inspires more positive perception of events. We will explore this critical dynamic more fully in Chapter 11 on meaning making and perception. What Are Emotions? Before we continue discussing Positive Emotions, we might step back and take a moment to consider what emotions are in general. The etymology of the word “emotion” traces back to old French and Latin terms meaning “to move” and even “to dance”! This makes sense because most of us experience our emotions in the body—from the heart-pounding sensation of fear, to the bounce in our step from joy, the tear-jerking pull of grief and sadness, and the serene exhale of contentment and peace. This also makes sense because our emotions often move us into action, spurring us on to do things. Emotions also move on by, like the weather, quickly changing

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  Primer on Posttraumatic Growth

  An Introduction and Guide

  • Mary Beth Werdel, Robert J. Wicks(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  This form of broadening compounds over time and builds physical, intellectual, social, and psychological resources. In doing so, Positive Emotions are not merely markers of psychological flourishing, though they are this as well. Positive Emotions are also capable of producing psychological flourishing (Fredrickson, 2001). In one of Fredrickson's many studies, Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, and Finkel (2008) examined the effects of Positive Emotions induced through loving-kindness meditation and their abilities to build an individual's personal resources. In a randomized study of 139 adults, half of the participants practiced six 60-minute group meditation exercises over a period of 7 weeks while the other half did not. The meditation focused on directing love and compassion toward the self and others. Results in the study were important for our purpose here because they found that participants in the meditation group experienced increases in daily experiences of Positive Emotions, which led to increases in positive personal resources such as mindfulness, purpose in life, and social support. Increases in personal resources were in turn predictive of increased satisfaction with life and decreased depressive symptoms. Additionally, increased positive personal resources led to decreases in indicators of illness. Together, the results provide evidence for the beneficial relationships among Positive Emotions, positive psychological resources, and indicators of well-being. Along with these relationships, also of crucial importance to understanding the power of Positive Emotions relative to posttraumatic growth is the idea that the benefits of Positive Emotions are not momentary. Rather, the benefits have long-lasting implications for well-being that are experienced long after the positive emotion has been experienced. Positive Emotions serve as a lasting personal resource that can be called on at a later time, in different emotional states, as needed (Fredrickson, 2000)

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  The Science and Application of Positive Psychology

  • Jennifer S. Cheavens, David B. Feldman(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, as Positive Emotional Experiences CHAPTER 3 Source: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo Happiness personified. Joy, from Pixar’s Inside Out, represents one of the five basic emotions in the movie. Joy plays a role in developing core memories and, eventually, personality traits. Source: Allstar Picture Library Ltd. / Alamy Stock Photo 48 POSITIVE FEELINGS AND STATES Joy comes to find out, an emotional landscape that is solely populated by one emotion is not actually the life we would want to live. Without other emotional experiences, Joy becomes a less powerful emotional experience and Riley becomes a less complete and connected person. As we can see in this example, Positive Emotions influence our memories, our thoughts, our willingness to engage in particular behaviors, and, ultimately, our personalities and social relationships. Although the tendency might be to favor one emotion (or Positive Emotions) over more negative emotions, all play an important role for us. Why Do Positive Emotions Matter? First, it feels good to experience Positive Emotions. Thinking back to the last chapter, hedonism suggests that the pursuit of pleasure or the satisfaction of desires is the proper aim of life and is an ethical pursuit. Proponents of this theory would argue that the experience of Positive Emotions is a good thing, in and of itself. Second, pos- itive emotions reinforce other important thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a way that ultimately influences our personalities. When we experience a positive emotion while doing something, we are more likely to do it again in the future, and may very well become better able to do that thing. For example, if someone experiences curios- ity and excitement while reading, she may be more likely to reach for a book in the future. The more she reads, the more likely it is that she will become a better reader and develop mastery in reading.

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  Psychology Applied to Modern Life

  Adjustment in the 21st Century

  • Wayne Weiten, Dana Dunn, Elizabeth Hammer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Another reason that negative emotions receive so much attention is their sheer quantity; it is esti- mated that they outnumber Positive Emotions by about three to one (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988; Fredrickson, 1998), which may have contributed to the bias among psy- chologists to study them. But what about positive emo- tions—what value do they have? Some of the most intriguing answers to this question have come from Barbara Fred- rickson, a social and positive psycholo- gist who asserts that Positive Emotions play particular roles in people’s mental and physical lives (Sekerka, Vachar- kulksemsuk, & Fredrickson, 2012). Fredrickson (1998, 2007; Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005) developed the broaden-and-build model of Positive Emotions to explain how they benefit human beings. In contrast to negative emo- tions, positive ones spawn nonspecific action tendencies that nonetheless lead to adaptive responses. For example, when adults are experiencing Positive Emotions, they are much more likely to offer aid to people in need, engage others in social interaction, perform some creative activity, or try out some new experience (e.g., Fredrickson, 1998, 2002; see also, for example, Isen, 1987; 2004). Positive Emotions can also serve as beneficial counterweights to the dysphoric or fearful feelings associated with emotional dysfunction and psychopathology (Garland et al., 2010). Put simply, Positive Emotions open people up to a variety of new behavioral op- tions that promote and maintain psychosocial well-being. At the same time, Positive Emotions broaden people’s cognitive responses by promoting new and beneficial thought- action tendencies, in which established ways of positive thinking are associated with particular acts or behaviors. For example, when children are feeling joy, they become more playful and imaginative, often investigating their environments (Fredrickson, 1998; Frijda, 1986).

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  Promoting Positive Processes after Trauma

  • Elizabeth M. Altmaier(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  By creating awareness of positive experiences, new actions and new responses follow. These new actions and responses, in turn, create increased flexibility that over time results in additional personal resources. A study of midlife working adults (Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008), for example, revealed that people who received an intervention to help them cultivate self caring for both mind and body reported increases in nine distinct Positive Emotions (e.g., contentment, joy). These gains in Positive Emotions then increased their life satisfaction. Both positive and negative emotions appear to be self-perpetuating to some degree (see Burns et al., 2008), meaning that they influence cognitive, behavioral, and physical processes that maximize their recurrence. Negative emotions, such as sadness, can lead to rumination, which results in less cognitive flexibility and more tendency to see the world as negative, resulting in more loss and sadness, a situation that is a downward spiral. In contrast, Positive Emotions create exposure to positive situations, influence the occurrence of other positive concepts such as resilience, and accumulate in a positive way, an upward spiral. The broaden-and-build model should not be understood to suggest that “pursuing happiness” is a helpful goal by itself. In fact, research suggests the opposite. Mauss, Tamir, Anderson, and Savino (2011) studied community living adults regarding whether the degree to which they valued happiness was associated with their own happiness and well-being. In this study, a greater value placed on happiness was associated with less well-being and higher depression for participants who were under conditions of low life stress

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  Education and Schmid's Art of Living

  Philosophical, Psychological and Educational Perspectives on Living a Good Life

  • Christoph Teschers(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Further, Seligman (2010, 62) mentions some other terms, which are not only relevant for happiness and positive psychology, but for an art of living as well. He distinguishes between several forms of Positive Emotions on the basis of their orientation in time, as discussed previously. Positive psychology has also identified techniques and factors that influence these emotions in all three time layers. For the art of living, however, emotions towards the past seem to be of more relevance to judge about one’s own art of living, and emotions towards the future are important to actively shape one’s self and one’s life to make it a good and beautiful one.

  4.3 Subjective well-being and Positive Emotions

  The research areas of subjective well-being and Positive Emotions are key fields of positive psychology. The main objective is to identify influencing factors and to develop techniques to increase one’s level of SWB and the experience of Positive Emotions. Questions to raise at this point might be: Why should one at all seek to increase Positive Emotions and one’s SWB? How relevant are these concepts to a good and beautiful life? The second question will be answered later on in Chapter 6 ; an answer to the first question is best given by research results that make a strong argument for Positive Emotions.

  The first point to make is that higher levels of Positive Emotions and SWB lead to better health and prolong life. Strong evidence has been found to support a causative relationship of this point and not only a correlative one (Danner, Snowdon, and Friesen 2001; Redelheimer and Singh 2001). To show the causation, researchers needed to find a group of people with very similar living circumstances to limit other influencing factors on the health situation of participants. Such a group could be found among nuns, whose life in a convent controlled most other factors such as sleeping and eating habits, workload and social interaction and limited or no consumption of alcohol and cigarettes (Seligman 2010, 3–4, 9–10). According to Seligman, a research study investigating general Positive Emotions and attitude among these nuns has shown that nuns who seemed to display a more positive attitude and more Positive Emotions throughout their lives lived longer on average than other nuns.

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  Positivity Workbook for Teens

  • Niemiec, Ryan M., Bocci, Goali Saedi(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Instant Help

    (Publisher)

  Part 1 Manifesting Positive Vibes Positive Emotions  Well-Being An important part of your well-being is recognizing and building Positive Emotions. It feels good to feel good! Your character strengths, such as humor, hope, and zest, can help you find the laughter, be optimistic with others, and approach life with energy and gusto. The activities in this part of the book will help you learn to create more experiences that build your Positive Emotions. 12 identifying Positive Emotions 1 The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be. —Alain de Botton for you to know How many times has a teacher in school asked you how you felt about a particular moment in history or political situation—or, better yet, asked you how you felt about your biology lab results or solving that proof in geometry? The truth of the matter is that there is often little room for feelings in the classroom or, for that matter, with many of the challenges you typically face. Whether you are perfecting your baseball pitch or learning a piece on the violin, there is little place for feelings. This can be highly problematic, as many teens can get accustomed to pushing away feelings in favor of thoughts. Many times you or your friends may experience panic, tears, or anxiety seemingly out of the blue, when in reality you may have become an expert at pushing feelings down far away, and panic, tears, or anxiety may erupt from deep within you. You can learn how to expand your emotional vocabulary to better attend to your feelings, and this is a key skill for all teens to have. Emotions can help guide important decisions that you might otherwise make just with your head, without any heart behind it. On the flip side, some teens are all too familiar with emotions and go from one high to a low and back again. This exercise will help you learn the nuances of your emotions to help you respond better in the moment.

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  Virtues and Vices in Positive Psychology

  A Philosophical Critique

  • Kristján Kristjánsson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  But are they perhaps, as positive psychologists suggest, focusing their attention on a less important goal rather than exploring what is the key goal of all education and of life in general? Third, in the last few years educational psychology has seen an unprec- edented upsurge of interest in emotions as intimately involved in virtually every aspect of the teaching and learning process. As becomes evident in following chapters, positive psychology foregrounds emotions at two lev- els of engagement: moral emotions as part of the virtues that contribute to human happiness (with obvious implications for moral education), and Positive Emotions that more generally broaden and build personal resources for learning well and living well. Those theorists interested in the relation- ship between emotions and education will ignore the message of positive psychology at their peril, whether or not they eventually agree with it. So far, however, emotion theorists among educational psychologists have not explicitly and systematically considered the possible contributions of posi- tive psychology to their work. I offer some comparisons of the two litera- tures in Section 8.4. These three reasons for heeding the educational implications of positive psychology are insufficient to show that it constitutes a theory of educational psychology – at least not a new and original theory. For that, positive psycholo- gists must present novel, independent and empirically testable programmes – programmes grounded in the theoretical framework of positive psychology that have been or are to be implemented in schools. Indeed, Seligman and his colleagues (2009) have made claims for such programmes.

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  Positive Psychology

  A Critical Introduction

  • Giovanni Moneta(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  2 Positive Emotions and Well-Being

  When people who know each other meet in the street, in the bus or at work for the first time in an ordinary day, they greet each other using such expressions as ‘how are you today?’, ‘how do you feel?’, or ‘are you OK?’. This social ritual emphasizes the importance that human beings across all cultures attribute to Positive Emotions in the here and now. The key indicator of such stable positivity is happiness, which is the key concern of the hedonic approach to subjective well-being. When people support a friend who is about to face a challenge, such as an upcoming exam or a job interview, they use expressions such as ‘good luck’, ‘break a leg’, or ‘veni, vidi, vici’ (which in Latin means ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’). This ritual emphasizes the importance that all cultures attribute to preparedness, adaptiveness, and resilience when facing challenges. The key indicator of such dynamic positivity is optimal functioning, which is the key concern of the eudaimonic approach to psychological well-being.

  Emotions play a crucial role in both the hedonic and the eudaimonic approaches to well-being, although the two approaches treat emotions differently. The hedonic and eudaimonic approaches have generated definitional models of well-being, which normatively state what is the ‘better’ for human beings. As such, emotions, the model of hedonic well-being, and the model of eudaimonic well-being constitute the core constructs of positive psychology. This chapter tackles these constructs, and hence is the foundation of the whole book. Each of the following chapters will refer to the concepts presented here in two different ways. First, each chapter will review studies that identified antecedents of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being as defined in this chapter. Second, each chapter will review studies that identified antecedents of facets of well-being that are not yet included – and perhaps will never be – in the hedonic and eudaimonic models of well-being. In either case, understanding the hedonic and eudaimonic definitional models of well-being is paramount for understanding any research endeavour and application in the field of positive psychology.

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  Positive Psychology

  Exploring the Best in People [4 volumes]

  • Shane J. Lopez(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  STUDY OF POSITIVE EMOTION AS AN EMERGING FIELD An explanation of how positive emotion can improve health and add years to one’s life is relatively simple. Negative emotion, stress, and anxiety elevate cardiovascular activity and reduce immune responses. Positive emo- tion hastens the return to baseline for these functions. An appreciation of the historical perspective on the study of emotion is helpful in understand- ing why the study of positive emotion is now emerging and allows recom- mendations to be made as to where future study in the field is needed. The study of basic emotions had virtually disappeared from social scien- ces by the early 1940s. Darwin (1872) had proposed that the facial expres- sion of basic emotions had evolved from functional facial actions which, in modern man, served to provide information about inner states of emotion. Those who first tested this theory assumed that facial expressions had evolved and that the link between elicitor and expression was innately wired, occurred automatically, and would be difficult or impossible to mod- ify or suppress. Further, they assumed that since the facial expressions of anger, fear, disgust, and sadness occurred spontaneously, they would be duplicated when performed deliberately or when a past emotional event was relived. Likewise, they assumed that observers would see universal facial expressions of emotion when a basic emotion was aroused. When these investigators failed to find uniformity between performed target emotional expressions and judgments of the intended emotional facial expressions, they concluded that there were neither universal facial expressions of emo- tion nor innate emotions. While the study of basic emotions virtually disappeared during this time, studies of non-specific negative emotional arousal continued by researchers in psychosomatic medicine.

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  Well-Being

  Individual, Community and Social Perspectives

  • J. Haworth, G. Hart, J. Haworth, G. Hart(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Deiner, E. (1984) ‘Subjective Well-Being’, Psychological Bulletin, 235: 542–75. Deiner, E. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2002) ‘Very Happy People’, Psychological Science, 13, 1: 81–4. Delle Fave, A. and Massimini, F. (2004) ‘Bringing Subjectivity into Focus: Optimal Experiences, Life Themes and Person-Centered Rehabilitation’, in P. A. Linley and S. Joseph (eds), Positive Psychology in Practice. London: Wiley. Fordyce, M. W. (1983) ‘A Program to Increase Happiness: Further Studies’, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 30: 483–98. Fredrikson, B. (2002) ‘Positive Emotions’, in C. R. Synder and S. J. Lopez (eds), Handbook of Positive Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 120-34. Harker, L. and Kaltner, D. (2001) ‘Expressions of Positive Emotion in Women’s College Year Book Photos and their Relationship to Personality and Life Outcomes across Adulthood’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80: 112–24. Haworth, J. (2004) ‘Work, Leisure and Well-Being’, in J. T. Haworth and A. J. Veal (eds), Work and Leisure. London: Routledge. Henry, J. (2001) Creativity and Perception in Management. London: Sage. Henry, J. (2006) ‘Strategies for Achieving Well-Being’, in M. Csikszentmihalyi and I. S. Csikszentmihalyi (eds), A Life Worth Living: Contributions to Positive Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Positive Psychology and Well-Being 39 Jahoda, M. (1982) Employment and Unemployment: a Social Psychological Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kabat-Zhin, J. (1996) ‘Mindfulness Meditation: What It Is and What It Isn’t’, in Y. Haruki., Y. Ishii and M. Suzuki (eds), Comparative and Psychological Study in Mediation. Netherlands: Eburon, 161–70. Kahneman, E., Diener, E. and Schwartz, N. (eds) (1999) Well-Being: the Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. New York: Russell Sage. Kaufmann, K. (2003) ‘Expanding the Mood Creativity Equation’, Creativity Research Journal, 15, 2 and 3: 131–5.

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  Stress, Health and Well-Being

  Thriving in the 21st Century

  • Rick Harrington(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. PART 1 | S TRESS , H EALTH , AND P OSITIVE P SYCHOLOGY 38 In support of the broaden hypothesis , Cohn and Fredrickson (2009) point to visual attention studies that show that negative emotions are generally related to attention to details (a more narrowed focus), whereas Positive Emotions gen-erally lead to a preference for viewing more global shapes (a broader focus). Fredrickson and Branigan (2005) also found that when they induced posi-tive, negative, or no emotions in experimental participants and asked them what they felt like doing right now, their positive-emotion participants listed more things they felt like doing (i.e., potential actions) than their neutral group, and their positive-emotion group’s listing of things its participants felt like doing was more varied (a more broad focus). As predicted, the negative- emotion group participants listed fewer potential actions they were interested in doing than the neutral group. In testing the build hypothesis, Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, and Finkel (2008) randomly assigned participants to either an experimental group or a waiting list control group (i.e., a group of participants who would later receive the experimental treatment who were placed on a waiting list). The ex-perimental group participants were trained to experience daily positive emo-tions by engaging in loving-kindness meditation (see Chapter 14). The results indicated that the experience of daily Positive Emotions led the participants to improve their resources (e.g., more social support, increased purpose in life), which in turn led to greater life satisfaction.

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