Experiencing positive emotions can have many benefits on well-being, emotional coping, and even physical health. Research has found multiple reasons for the benefits of positive emotions like joy, gratitude, hope, awe, positive pride, inspiration, and others.
This clip discusses multiple beneficial effects of positive emotions and why they improve psychological health and help prevent things like depression and anxiety. Later episodes will discuss specific strategies to experience more positive emotions and experience their benefits.
For an in-depth look at scientific research, this good book describes positive emotions research and some helpful strategies. For good information on emotions in general, this good book describes a history of emotions research.
Hi, I’m Dr. Matt B and these are your Emotional Minutes. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about ways that we can boost our mental health and well-being. I began to focus on this because many people have experienced hardships. For example, as I am filming this, we are two years into the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of people have feelings of pandemic fatigue, decreased mood, anxiety, etc.
Thinking of ways to boost mental health can prepare us for when we might experience difficult things in our lives or in society. I found this to be a good topic to cover due to the research-based ways to boost positive feelings. What a lot of this looks at is not how to feel happy, but a whole range of positive emotions. There could be joy, gratitude, hope, awe, amusement, a positive sense of pride, etc.
The Undoing Effect
There are a lot of research findings on when people feel a lot of positive emotions. One thing is what we call the undoing effect of negative emotion. This is when people experience not only more positive emotions but also tend to experience fewer negative emotions.
For instance, you feel really tense or worked up or your heart rate is high when you are anxious. Experiencing positive emotions has actually been shown to get your body back to a sense of calm or homeostasis. Having a more neutral emotional state and engaging in positive emotion-increasing activities can make you feel more positive.
Activities that increase Positive Emotions
Another thing that they found is that doing activities that produce positive emotions shifts what we are focusing on to the positive or beneficial aspects. It can also focus our attention on things we appreciate in our lives as opposed to more negative possibilities. There is a ton of research finding that when we focus our attention on the negative, it can contribute to things like depressive symptoms, decreased enjoyable activities, and anxiety.
Broaden and Build Hypothesis
It can also do what they call the broaden and build hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that engaging in things that boost positive emotions opens up our attentional sphere and promotes creativity. In other words, things that produce positive emotions keep our brain open to many more possibilities in our day-to-day life and how we might respond to those things.
There can be times when we experience negative emotions and our attention is really focused on the negative. What can happen in those times is somewhat like the snowball effect, where ruminating on negative experiences or thoughts brings up or creates more negative things. This can snowball or spiral downward to where we are more and more engulfed by negativity.
What a lot of the strategies that we will go over have been shown to do is help people build a positive snowball that leads to doing a lot of enjoyable things on purpose. People start to feel a greater sense of positive emotions. As I said before, this opens up our attention to what we appreciate and things that are positive. We then begin to snowball in a positive direction. As time goes on, it builds more and more positivity, both in our feelings and emotions, as well as in our thoughts.
There is some evidence coming to light that being in a more positive state and engaging in positive things may have physical health benefits.
I hope this rundown of some of the strategies and research on positive emotions is helpful. I’m Dr. Matt B and these are your Emotional Minutes.
