Critically discuss the evidence supporting the benefits of positive emotions
The adaptive value of positive emotions has baffled scientists for a long time (Fredrickson, 1998). While negative emotions urge humans and animals to fight or flee and consequently increase the likelihood of survival positive emotions do not lead to such clear-cut action tendencies (Fredrickson, 1998). Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory addressed this conundrum in an elegant manner by suggesting that positive emotions broaden our perspective in the present moment and build resources for the future. According to this theory the way to a flourishing life would be to engineer our emotional experiences in such a way that for every negative emotion three positive emotions are experienced. This would lead to an upward spiral (Fredrickson, 2005) where the broadened state of mind in the present creates resources which in turn help to deal with adversities which then would make the person feel good about how well they coped with the problem. While positive emotions were largely found to be beneficial across different experiments and situations it will be argued that to lead a flourishing life emotions are a vital but by no means the only part. Seligman proposed the PERMA model of flourishing which is a short hand for Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement (Seligman, 2011). While science is working hard to distinguish which psychological concepts have the biggest impact on human wellbeing it appears that the power of positive emotions and similar positive psychology concepts lie not in their separateness but in what happens when the accumulated findings are taken together. It will be argued that to reach the emotion management skills required to make a lasting change in our emotional life it is necessary to integrate it with other concepts and existing theories such as mindset or explanatory style.
Of course there are also researchers who question whether positive emotions can live up to the ‘hype’ and ask how come not more people have been swept up by the upward spirals. These issues will be addressed as well.
The domain of health will be used to explore evidence in detail and to unearth some of the issues, which are currently debated. Furthermore the findings in health illustrate that positive emotions are not just important because they feel good and build resources. Positive emotions affect mortality, health care costs and even how much pain is experienced. To access these wide ranging benefits however it is necessary to bring the accumulated knowledge together, expand theories and make a greater effort to create procedures so that the broad population can apply this knowledge in daily life.
In order to understand theories of emotion and the impact emotions have it is vital to define the terms. Fredrickson defines emotions as both ingredients and the results of processes that are part of life satisfaction (Fredrickson, 1999). Tiba and Szentagotai (2005) deepen the understanding of emotions by stating four aspects, which make up emotion: personal experience, behaviour, bodily responses and cognition. When Fredrickson initially proposed her theory (1998) she focused primarily on behaviour and cognition to support the notion of broadening. From a cognitive perspective what happens when the mind broadens under the influence of positive emotions is that the out attention span widens which makes it possible for people to attend to stimuli which under other circumstances are not attended to (Fredrickson, 1998). People see more global connections, generate more associations and more readily include concepts in certain predefined categories (Isen, 1987 in Fredrickson, 1998). In a more recent example Ong, Burrow and Fuller-Rowell (2012) showed that this cognitive broadening spilled over into social contexts when African-Americans were asked to think about Barack Obama shortly after he had won his first election in 2008 and then to write an expressive piece. The positive emotions felt after his election, particularly pride, were shown to result in more inclusive expressions of group membership (more us less they and them). This social broadening had been found in the past by Dovidio et al (1995) and Waugh & Fredrickson (2006). Social broadening is one of several different kinds of broadening effects that have been documented. Otake et al (2006) found positive emotions led to increased creativity and kindness. Dunn and Schweitzer (2005) observed that positive emotions led to increased levels of trust. Interestingly such effects have been found both for state (short-lived) and trait (enduring) positive emotions (Basso et al, 1996; Derryberry et al, 1992;Fredrickson and Branigan, 2005).
Furthermore they affect human physiology both in the short- and long term. So what short-term effects do positive emotions have on health? Steptoe, O'Donnell, Marmot & Wardle, (2008) found that minutes after inducing positive emotions the levels of the stress hormone cortisol were lower as measured in saliva samples administered before and after the experiment. Furthermore positive emotions lowered the heart rate and fibrinogen, which is the part responsible for clotting blood in a wound. High fibrinogen beneficial in the short specific situation but associated with cardiovascular disease if levels remain elevated (Lang T, Johanning K, Metzler H, Piepenbrock S, Solomon C, Rahe-Meyer N, Tanaka KA (March 2009). Marsland, Pressman and Cohen (2007) found higher immunoglobulin A levels which are linked to a healthy immune system.
Therefore in three of the four dimensions of emotions mentioned above by Tiba and Szentagotai (2005) empirical evidence was found that positive emotions have an immediate beneficial effect. The fourth dimension, personal experience, is a subjective one and therefore more difficult to measure objectively. However considering that cognition, bodily reactions and behaviours all are part of personal experience it is safe to say that the found effects also impact personal experience and therefore all emotional levels. However what evidence exists for the second part of the broaden and build theory?
Smith and Baum (2003) see the strength of positive emotions in that they pave the way for restorative behaviours such as resting, working out, sleeping, going on vacation and spending more time in nature. Steptoe, O'Donnell, Marmot & Wardle(2008) also found that both duration and quality of sleep could was associated with increased positive emotions. Each of these activities induce positive emotions and this translates into resources such as experiencing less stress, not perceiving challenges as stress and having a less intense stress response. Zautra, Johnson & Davis (2005) and Zautra, Smith, Affleck and Tennen (2001) showed both that women who experienced frequent positive emotion who suffered from arthritic conditions reported less pain than their less upbeat peers. Steptoe, O’Donnell and Badrick (2008) found that markers of good immunity called c-reactive protein and interleukin-6 were higher in women but not men who were rated higher on positive emotions. These findings post the intriguing question of why these effects are more often found in women than men. This in turn illustrates that instead of generalizing the findings it is necessary to test theoretical predictions with different samples. If men and women differ it is also conceivable, that people from different cultures, able-bodied and disabled, sexual orientations, mentally ill, languishing and flourishing, students and senior citizens might display marked differences in how positive emotions affect their health and other domains in life. Ostir, Ottenbacher & Markides (2004) report that elderly people living outside a senior home are 3% less likely to suffer from frailty. In a similar vein Pressman & Cohen (2005) found that people were less likely to return to hospital for heart problems if they scored high on positive affect. Finally emotions predict less strokes and infarcts (Pressman & Cohen, 2005) and there’s also a decreased likelihood of catching an illness of the respiratory system after being infected (Cohen, Alper, Doyle & Treanor, 2006).
Nickerson (2002) pointed out that lots of such studies do not really discuss the broaden and build theory at all because of their between-participants design. To really know whether people’s positive emotions build resources it is necessary to follow up the same people (within participants design).
Anotherissue with these findings is that while they seem to support the prediction that positive emotions build resources in most cases resources were not measured at the beginning of these studies. That means that it is possible that resourceful people generally felt happier because of their wealth of resources and this allowed them later to deal better with whatever they had to cope with.
Furthermore emotions were measured usually at two points: before and after the intervention. However the accuracy of measurement increases if emotions are measured at regular intervals such as daily or weekly.
Cohn and Fredrickson (2010) addressed these three problems in their “Open-Heart-study” where people were taught loving-kindness meditation techniques. The researchers gathered daily emotion ratings, assessed resources at the beginning and after the intervention and followed a within-participants design. Then they did a follow up study 15 months after completion of the first study. They found that those people who had continued meditation had the most resources but that even those who stopped showed increased resources compared to their pre-intervention data. To resolve issues stated above however more studies are needed with pre-intervention resource assessment, frequent emotion rating and long-term follow-up.
Evidence that positive emotions have beneficial effects is strong. However there are a few issues which need to be addressed to get a balanced point of view. The next section will address the problem of comparing apples and oranges, one-size-fits-it-all-thinking, over-reliance on successful measuring tools and excluding the co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions.
One important issue is that researchers often use mood, affect and emotions interchangeably (Snyder and Lopez, 2011). Fredrickson and Losada (2005) distinguish mood from emotion by stating that mood has often a less clearly identified source, is often present for a longer time and can be present without taking active note of it. Affective styles on the other hand differ from person to person in terms of the following criteria: a) what boundaries must be traversed for a reaction, b) intensity of response c) onset to peak time d) duration until response evaporates and e) how long the whole process takes (Davidson, 2003). These are clearly different constructs but are often grouped together.
These varying definitions may lead to comparing apples with oranges. This is important because depending on how narrowly one desires to define positive emotion one could argue either that there’s a plethora of evidence supporting the beneficial effects of positive emotions (including all studies with positive affect, emotion and mood) or just enough to justify additional research (for those who conceptually distinguish emotions from affect or mood). For example Pressmann and Cohen (2005) included a study of Stones et al (1989) in their summary of positive affect and mortality findings however Stones assessed state and trait happiness and not positive emotions in particular. In the same summary other positive affective measures included life satisfaction, optimism and a PANAS study. While the PANAS (positive affect negative affect, check researcher and date) is a self-report tool that is widely used to measure emotions the other concepts are more related to positive psychological concepts in general. Lyubomirsky, Diener and King (2005) define happiness as a result of experiencing positive emotions often. Fredrickson circumvented this problem by using the term positivity (Fredrickson, 2009). Considering how difficult it is and how unclear the rewards would be for disentangling emotion, affect and mood studies it seems like a practical solution, one that makes sense in the light of existing research and the definitions and tools used therein.
The studies listed in meta-analyses on emotion such as Lyubomirsky, King and Diener’s (2005) paper on happiness and success or Pressman and Cohen’s (2005) often generalize emotions according to their valence. Happiness, life satisfaction or simply positive/negative items are with the exception of the PANAS scale the most frequently used methods to investigate emotions. However not all positive emotions are alike and neither are the negative ones. Fredrickson, Mancuso, Branigan & Tugade (2000) found that participants who were shown negative video clips returned faster to their baseline blood pressure and heart rate if they were afterwards exposed to a positive clip. Fredrickson termed this the undoing effect which means basically that positivity can neutralize the damage caused by negative emotions. Ong & Allaire (2005) replicated these results measuring blood pressure. Brummett, Boyle, Kuhn, Siegler & Williams (2009) replicated the undoing effect when sadness was induced but it did not work with participants who had experienced anger.Williams and DeSteno (2008) showed that pride led to greater perseverance and that this effect was independent from generalised positive affect. These examples show that generalizing emotions according to their valence is not precise enough. It is vital to research how each emotion fits in with the predictions of affective theories.
In the domain of health questionnaires are used in the majority of cases to assess emotions (Pressmann & Cohen, 2005). While Sandvik, Diener and Seidlitz (1993) found that emotion scale ratings converge with other methods of emotion research there’s a danger that the weaknesses of popular tools such as the PANAS might impact emotion research disproportionally due to their popularity. Low activation emotions, which are not measured in the PANAS might suddenly be omitted by a majority of the research community. Another example of over-reliance of methodological research comes from emotion induction. According to Westermann, Spies, Sthul & Hesse (1996) video clips are the most effective way of inducing emotions. Pressman & Cohen (2005) found in their review that remembering true, self-relevant situations from a participants life induced the desired emotions more frequently. Considering that others relied on Westermann et al findings, this illustrates how only one study or measure could influence the lots of the findings of the field.
Miyamoto and Uchida (2010) studied situations in which people have both positive and negative emotions. Situations described included moving to college, getting better grades than someone close like a sibling or a friend or underage drinking. They found that both American and Japanese students experienced negative and positive (dialectical) emotions at the same time but that the interpretation of the context leading to such feelings often differed. The notion of dialectical emotions has been supported by various studies (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994; Diener & Iran-Nejad, 1986; Larsen et al, 2004). This contradicts Fredrickson’s theory as she states that the positive drives out the negative and vice versa (Fredrickson, 2009). This introduces the importance of context which is an issue largely ignored by the broaden and build theory. While it might be true that positive emotions can undo negative emotions this is not always the case. Similarly while negativity can expel all feelings of positivity this doesn’t need to be the case across all situations. What separates the mentally ill manic patient from a healthy person is often the context (Tiba and Szentagotai, 2005) and not the emotion experienced. Bonanno et al (2007) investigated the benefits and costs of positive emotion among victims disclosing sexual abuse. Overall people who expressed more positive emotions were better adjusted however those who expressed positive emotions whilst recalling the act of abuse were poorly adjusted. One could mention that these cases are exceptions. However context is also important in terms of the universality of the theory and findings. The overwhelming majority of studies discussed were conducted by American researchers with predominantly Western participants.
Apart from these methodological problems some researchers also doubted the potency of positive emotions. After all of the positive findings some researchers were left asking why there is no continuous upward spiral. As events such as 9/11, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti or the ongoing Middle-Eastern conflict show bad things happen which have a deep impact on people’s lives and subsequently their emotions. While it’s correct that people recover to baseline emotions after about two years (Fredrickson, 2003) negative emotions can take over following such an event. However Fredrickson showed (2003) that people who scored higher on positive emotions before the event occurred did feel sad, angry and depressed but they felt more positive emotions and could also reduce the impact of the negative emotions better than their less happy counterparts. Fredrickson considered this to be evidence that the positive emotions experienced before-hand produced the superior coping resources. One problem with this idea is that people with many psychological and emotional resources might experience more positive emotions. In this case the emotions would not be what caused the resources but the other way around. Fredrickson (2010) addressed this problem in another study measuring the impact of loving kindness meditation one year after the intervention. Resources had been measured before, right after and a year after the studies. No differences were found in resources at the outset, which means that it wasn’t the increased resources from the start which led to increased baseline positive emotion. While this supports the build aspect of Fredrickson’s main theory the fact that most of the studies on positive emotions are correlational or experimental without initial measuring of resources, makes it more difficult to support than the broaden aspect. However this does not mean that broaden and build is incorrect. It means that before the theory existed it had understandibly not occurred to people to measure resources and link them to emotions. Furthermore investigating resources means that a researcher has to follow up with participants which is both time consuming and expensive. Future research will have to adopt the same methodology described above employed by Fredrickson (2010) if the hypothesis that positive emotions build lasting resources is to be seriously investigated.