12. dagur- Positive emotions and why some people are happier

broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions

By Fredrickson · holds that positive emotions broaden people's momentary thought-action capabilities and lead to actions that build enduring personal resources over time. · In other words, positive emotions lead to broadened and more flexible response tendencies than negative emotions, widening the array of thoughts and actions that come to mind · Example: Joy creates the urge to play, whether physically, socially, or intellectually. · Example: Interest creates the urge to explore, take in new information and experiences, and expand the self in the process. · Example: Love creates urges to play with, learn about, and savor our loved ones.

Lyubomirsky et al. (2006)

· tested whether systematically analyzing one's thoughts and feelings associated with the happiest moments in life would reduce some of the inherent joy associated with such experiences, whereas savoring such moments (without attempting to organize or find meaning in them) would preserve positive emotions and generally increase happiness. · First study: participants who thought privately about their happiest life event reported higher life satisfaction than those who talked or wrote about the event. · Second study: participants wrote or thought about their happiest day by either systematically analyzing or repetitively replaying it. Participants who repetitively replayed their happiest day while thinking about it showed increases in positive emotions 4 weeks after the study was over, compared with the other groups. · Strategies that involve systematic integration and structuring of one's happiest moments may diminish positive emotions. · A successful happiness-increasing strategy involves replaying past positive life events as though watching a video again.

Sin et al (2011)

·mildly depressed individuals benefited more from a neutral activity than from writing a letter of gratitude, perhaps because the gratitude letter was too demanding and guilt-inducing for depressed individuals.

Motivation & Effort in Becoming Happier

Can someone who doesn't wish to become happier become happier anyway by practicing the habits of dispositionally happy people? · Lyubomirsky et al. (2011): hypothesized that positive activities would be most beneficial among individuals who demonstrated an explicit desire to become happier. · Two studies: one advertised as a happiness intervention (i.e., indicating high motivation to become happier) and the other advertised as a generic cognitive exercise (i.e., indicating low motivation to become happier). · Regardless of the study they selected, participants then completed either a gratitude, best possible self, or control activity. · At the conclusion of the 8-week intervention period, participants who had self-selected into a study on happiness reported greater boosts in well-being from the positive activities than participants who self-selected into a generic study. Only individuals who were initially motivated to increase their happiness received the · Several studies have shown that the amount of effort that people muster when engaging in happiness interventions is positively associated with the amount of benefit they receive from the interventions. · Cohn & Fredrickson (2010): those who continued performing a meditation activity 15 months after the meditation intervention ended reported greater well-being than individuals who stopped performing the activity. · Sheldon & Lyubomirsky (2006): In study that prompted students to either express gratitude or visualize their ideal futures, the best predictor of positive affect 4 weeks later was continued performance of the intervention activity. · Benefits of positive activities are most pronounced among those who put effort into the activity above and beyond what they were instructed to do. · Subsequent research has found that the effort individuals exert when performing positive activities, whether that effort is self-reported or indirectly assessed is associated with greater gains in well-being.

Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener (2005)

In hundreds of well-controlled studies, positive emotions and experiences have also been shown to predict or contribute to valuable life, including greater satisfaction and success at work, improved immune function, and even longer lifespan.

Positive Emotions & Health

People who experience high levels of positive emotions tend to: 1. experience less pain and disability related to chronic health conditions 2. fight off illness and disease more successfull 3. live longer These findings may be explained by the ability of positive emotions to lift people out of stressed, narrowed states.

Catalino & Fredrickson (2011)

Persons who are able to derive large boosts in positivity from pleasant events in their daily lives, e.g., from helping or interacting with another person or from engaging in a hobby, show higher levels of well-being and less depression than individuals who did not get a boost from pleasant events. · These effects appear to extend to evaluations of others as well.

Lyubomirsky & Tucker (1998)

When individuals were asked to evaluate hypothetical situations, dispositionally happy people rated the situations more positively than their less happy peers, even after their current mood was taken into account.

King, and Diener (2005)

found that positive emotions lead to outcomes ranging from satisfaction at work and in relationships, to physical health and effective problem-solving.

Lyuombirsky (2001)

has proposed that happy and unhappy individuals differ considerably in their subjective experience and construal of the world: happy people are inclined to perceive and interpret their environment differently from their less happy peers. · This construal theory prompts us to explore how people's thoughts, behaviors, and motivations can explain their happiness over and above the mere objective circumstances of their lives. · A growing body of research suggests that happy people successfully enhance and maintain their happiness through the use of multiple adaptive strategies vis-à-vis construal of themselves and others, social comparison, decision making, and self-reflection

Fredrickson & Joiner (2002)

longitudinal study of college students coping with ordinary life problems - found that positive emotional experiences are correlated with the use of creative and broadminded coping strategies.

Lyubomirsky & Tucker (1998)

students interacted with a female stranger in the lab and were then asked to evaluate her personality. Compared with unhappy students, happy students rated the stranger more positively and expressed a stronger interest in becoming friends with her. · Conclusion: happy people seem to enjoy more positive interpretations of their daily lives than less happy people.

Positive Emotions

· Are emotions that we typically find pleasurable to experience. · Go beyond subjective feelings to include attention, cognition, facial expressions, cardiovascular and hormonal changes, etc. · Subjectively resemble positive sensations, e.g., comfort, and are undifferentiated positive moods (meaning they stand on their own). · Positive emotions involve an appraisal of the situation, or specific motivational effects.

Culture & Happiness

· Different cultures approach happiness in different ways, and thus activities to increase happiness may not be equally effective for members of all cultures. -Research has found that those of European or American descent benefited more from practicing optimism or writing letters of gratitude than did individuals of Asian descent

Positive Emotions & Relationships

· Evidence for the importance of positive emotions for interpersonal consequences comes from studies examining the associations among the experiences of affect and relationship quality. · Research has demonstrated that people who generally report greater positive affect are better at social interactions and have interactions of higher quality. · Berry et al. (2000): daily diary study on friendship dyads · Found that high positive affect was related to feelings of closeness, whereas high negative affect was related to feelings of irritation and occurrences of conflict in the relationship. Why might positive emotions be central to close relationships? · Positive emotions may be primary signals of affiliation and cooperation; people may also be particularly attuned to others' positive emotions, e.g., in side by side photos of faces showing positive and negative emotion simultaneously, happiness is detected more quickly and accurately than anger or fear. · Campos et al. (2015): found, during series of interactions on different topics on lab, that people were better at tracking their romantic partners' positive emotions than their negative emotions.

Happiness Interventions

· Fordyce (1977, 1983): one of the first researchers to teach volitional happiness-boosting strategies (e.g., socializing, practicing optimism, being present-oriented, reducing negativity, and not worrying) to different classrooms of students. · Across 7 studies, students who were taught the happiness-increasing strategies demonstrated increases in happiness compared with students who received no training. · Fordyce's pioneering studies provided preliminary evidence that people can increase their short-term happiness through "training" programs. · Our course has been filled with other interventions that have proven themselves effective!

Happy People & Event Timing

· Happiness has been found to be associated with preferences for the timing of positive and negative experiences. · Sul et al., 2013: When happy people experienced an unpleasant event, such as the loss of a substantial amount of money, they preferred to experience a pleasant event quickly thereafter (within a day), perhaps to buffer themselves against the negative feelings stemming from the loss. · Less happy people preferred to experience a pleasant event several days after an initial loss, when the pleasantness could no longer buffer against the loss. · Decision-making processes may reinforce happiness and unhappiness.

Happy People & Decision-Making

· Happy and unhappy people differ in how they make decisions in the face of many options. · Happy people are likelier to "satisfice", to be satisfied with an option that is merely "good enough," without concern for alternative, potentially better options. · Unhappy people, in contrast, are more likely to "maximize", to strive to make the absolutely best choice regardless of time and effort. · Although maximizers' decisions may ultimately produce objectively superior results (e.g., a higher paying job), maximizers experience greater regret about their choices and diminished well-being relative to "satisficers". · This finding has been replicated across cultures.

Lyubomirsky & Ross (1999)

· Happy and unhappy people show distinctly different responses when making decisions about both inconsequential matters, like picking a dessert, and momentous ones, selecting a college · Happy people tend to be more satisfied with all of their available options (including the option they eventually choose) and only express dissatisfaction when their sense of self is threatened. · Example: when self-reported happy students were asked to rate the attractiveness of several desserts before and after learning which dessert they would get to keep, they increased their liking for the dessert they got and did not change their liking for the dessert they could not get. In contrast, unhappy students found the option they were given to be minimally acceptable (derogating that dessert after learning they could keep it), and the forgone options to be even worse.

Chancellor et al (2015)

· In a study involving Japanese in the workplace, happiness improved for employees who put effort into recounting 3 positive work-related events for 6 weeks, relative to employees who completed a neutral control task.

Happiness & Self-Reflection

· Unhappy people are much more likely than their happier peers to excessively self-reflect and dwell, which can lead to detrimental outcomes. · Lyubomirsky et al. (2011): unhappy students led to believe that they had failed an anagram-solving task showed diminished concentration, which impaired the students' subsequent performance on an intellectually demanding and consequential test. · Lyubomirsky & Ross (1999): Demonstrated that manipulating a person's focus of attention could eliminate the differences between the cognitive strategies used by happy and unhappy individuals. · These findings hint at a critical mechanism underlying differences between happy and unhappy people, namely, that one could make happy people look unhappy by prompting them to ruminate about themselves. Conversely, one could make unhappy people look happy by directing attention away from themselves.

Cohn et al. (2009)

· further support for the ways in which positive emotions can build psychological resources. · Investigated by measuring positive emotional experiences among a sample of college students over 1 month. · Life satisfaction and trait resilience were assessed as two psychological resources, both at baseline and at the one-month follow-up. · Found that daily experiences of positive emotion predicted increases in both life satisfaction and trait resilience.

Fredrickson et al. (2008)

· randomly assigned working adults to experience enhanced daily positive emotions through a loving-kindness meditation (LKM), which focuses on deliberately generating the positive emotions of compassion and love. · After 3 weeks of practice, meditators began reporting higher daily levels of various positive emotions compared to those in the waitlist control group. · After 8 weeks, meditators showed increases in a number of personal resources, including physical wellness, agency for achieving important goals, ability to savor positive experiences, and quality of close relationships. · Improved resources led those in the mediation group to judge their lives as more satisfying and fulfilling.

September 11th

· resilient participants were not devoid of negative emotions; they felt fear and grief much like their less resilient peers, but this co-occurred with positive emotional experiences that seemed to alleviate some of the negative effects of a prolonged narrowed mindset.

Kok and Fredrickson (2009)

· revealed that experiences of positive emotions and feelings of social connectedness were associated with increases in VT over a nine-week period. · Provides support for an upward spiral effect, in that positive emotions and VT appear to have a reciprocal effect on each other—in that greater VT predicts greater positive emotion experiences, and greater positive emotion experiences predict increased VT.