Positive interventions are one of the building blocks for the application of positive psychology in our day-to-day lives. In this course taught by Dr. James Pawelski, we explore positive interventions through theory, research and practice. We provide learners the basic tools for using and measuring positive psychology in professional or personal contexts. Suggested prerequisite: Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science.
2.2 Are Positive Emotions Always Positive?
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Positive Psychology: Applications and Interventions
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University of Pennsylvania
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Cours 2 sur 5 dans Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology
À partir de la leçon
Understanding and Cultivating a Healthy Emotional Life
Rencontrer les enseignants
James Pawelski, Ph.D.Director of Education and Senior Scholar
Positive Psychology Center
So we've been focused on the cultivation of positive emotions.
Given the value of emotions, not just for feeling good but for
flourishing, this is an important endeavor.
Given our discussion in the last section, however,
of the comprehensive mode of positive psychology, we also want to make sure that
our approach to positive emotions supports our overall flourishing.
So I'm grateful that there are scientists who today have spent the day
studying vitamins.
They've been studying the effects of vitamins on human beings, and
they've looked at vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C.
And that's fantastic, it's really important to have this knowledge.
And yet, when I have lunch, I don't simply grab a giant scoop of vitamin A,
a giant scoop of vitamin B, and a giant, rather I look to have a balanced diet.
And that certainly includes vitamins in the right proportion, and
it also includes other things as well.
So it's important to focus on the things that
help us on the green side of the cape, but it's also important to acknowledge that we
want to have an overall perspective of what leads to our general flourishing.
So in that context, it's important to acknowledge that there are times
when positive emotions aren't appropriate.
Really?
Can you think of any time like that?
Let's pause right now to give you a chance to write down times when
positive emotions may not be appropriate.
Okay, so I'm curious to see what you've come up with.
Sometimes it's important for us to experience something unpleasant.
And one example of a time like that would be grieving.
So if someone who is close to us, a family member, a friend dies,
there can certainly be some positive emotions connected with that.
Like we might be grateful for this person's life, and we might be
inspired for what they stood for or what they accomplished in their life.
But there will also be many painful emotions that it's
important to experience as we adjust ourselves to that loss.
For Barbara Fredrickson's approach to positive emotions,
it's not just the level of positive emotions that's important, but
the ratio of positive to negative emotions.
We can improve this ratio by increasing positive emotions or
by decreasing negative emotions.
So it may be just as important to use the red side of our capes to decrease negative
emotions as it is to use the green side to increase positive emotions.
This is especially true, Barb suggests, if your positivity is seriously low,
or if you have high positivity, but it's matched by high negativity.
The goal here is not to eliminate all negative emotions from our lives but
to reduce inappropriate and unhelpful negativity.
I'll just mention here a couple of the ways Barb suggests for doing this.
So the first way Barb suggests is to dispute negative thinking.
So we all know what it's like to hear those voices in our heads that
tell us we're going to fail.
Perhaps we're working on an important project, and we face a setback.
And those voices tell us we'll never be able to finish the project on time, or
that it will never be good enough, or that we will never be good enough.
I'll just give you an example from my own life.
I was working on a writing task.
In fact, I was working with my colleague, D.J.
Moores, on a book we were co-editing called The Eudaimonic Turn,
Well-Being in Literary Studies, where we were examining connections between
flourishing and the discipline of literary studies.
And I was co-writing the introduction with Don,
and I was supposed to write the first part of that introduction.
And it was challenging, I was trying to work through ideas and
figure them out, and I just kept running into the road blocks.
And so I told my wife Suzie, she asked how things were going, and
I said, I don't know.
This is probably the hardest thing I've ever written.
I don't know if I'm ever going to get it figured out,
I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to complete this task.
And she very wisely said to me, James, can you tell me how you felt that
time when you were writing the chapter you had been invited to write for
the French anthology on positive psychology?
And I thought back, yeah,
I remember how I felt when I was trying to write that chapter.
It was hard writing, and I didn't know if I'd even get it done or
if it would ever be any good.
And she said, and when you got done with it, how did you feel about the writing?
And I said, it was great, it turned out to be good,
I was really happy with the article.
She said, okay, do you remember the time you were writing that chapter
on happiness and its opposites, for the Oxford Handbook of Happiness?
How did you feel when you were writing that chapter?
I said, it was tough.
That was really a hard chapter to write.
I was working through these ideas, and I wasn't sure if they'd ever come together,
if I'd ever get the chapter done in time.
And she said, and how did you feel when you got the chapter done?
Well, it actually turned out pretty well, I was happy with the chapter.
And then I got the point that she was trying to make.
She was pointing out to me that this was just par-for-the-course for how I operate.
When I'm working on a writing project, in the middle of it,
it can seem pretty tough, and I wonder if I'm going to get it done, but
it always does, because I keep working at it.
And I get to the point where I bust through, and I make it happen.
So Suzy helped me to dispute my negative thinking about the
Eudaimonic Turn chapter that I was writing, because she reminded me about
the kinds of patterns that I tend to get in when I'm working on writing projects.
And so that really helped, and I realized that my feelings about what I was writing
weren't accurate to what the likelihood of the outcome.
They were simply my way, my brains way of saying, this is hard work, and
I've got to keep working at it, which I did, and sure enough,
I was pleased with the way the writing turned out once again.
So in addition to disputing negative thinking, we can also, Barb says,
work to break the grip of rumination.
So let's say that you are walking down the hallway at work one day, and
your boss walks by and says something to you.
And you don't quite understand what it means.
And you're puzzling, turning it over in your head as you go back to your desk.
And for the rest of the afternoon, you're going over and over what the boss said.
Did the boss mean this byte?
Does that mean that your boss is not happy with the work that you're doing?
Do you think you're going to get in trouble?
Might this lead to some kind of disciplinary action?
Do you think you could lose your job?
And you think about it over and over and over again.
And you're trying to do your work, but
you're continuing to ruminate on this matter that you don't know what it means.
In that case, Barb suggests, it's time to look for a healthy distraction.
Maybe you should go for a walk.
Maybe you should go out and get some coffee.
Maybe you can talk with a colleague or a friend, or take up a project, or part of
a project that you're really interested in, just to get your mind off of that.
Because our minds can kind of get stuck in these ruminations that really
don't help us in the long run.
So we can work to increase our positive emotions when appropriate,
we can work to decrease our negative emotions when appropriate.
But sometimes, unpleasant emotions aren't things to be gotten rid of but a rather
negative processes that can lead toward something positive on the other side.
So there's a book that was published not too long ago called,
The Upside of Your Dark Side, written by Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener.
And they do a great job of making this point.
They examine various negative emotions and
talk about some of the upsides of experiencing those emotions.
So let's just take two or three of them as an example.
Think about anger, and anger may be one of those emotions that we think of
immediately as an unpleasant emotion, or a negative emotion, or an emotion that
can adversely affect our health, and it can in certain circumstances.
But imagine a world in which we don't have any anger.
Anger can actually be a strong motivator for justice.
So if someone does something to you, or maybe to a family member, or a friend,
that's just not right, sometimes feeling angry about that can motivate you
to take a stand and to make sure that that person is protected.
Or let's take another emotion that we often think of as negative, and
that's guilt.
Boy, who likes to experience guilt?
And yet imagine a society in which no one experienced guilt.
And people did things that were intentionally or
unintentionally mean to other people, and they never felt guilty about it.
I wouldn't necessarily want to live in that kind of a society.
So guilt can actually help make us more socially sensitive and caring.
And then finally, think about self-doubt.
And certainly, self-doubt can be debilitating, but if we have a smidgen of
concern about a performance that we're going to give, that may
motivate us to prepare for the performance so that we actually do well in it.
Another book that I think is excellent along these lines is called
Emotional Agility by Susan David.
And she points out similarly that emotions like sadness and
anger and guilt and fear can lead sometimes to positive consequences.
Sometimes they can help us form arguments by thinking in more detail and
more carefully.
Sometimes these emotions can actually improve our memory,
certain studies have found.
And they can encourage perseverance.
It seems that, actually, if you're going in to take an examination,
like an SAT exam, or a GRE exam, feeling cheerful might actually have
a negative effect on that performance, because you might not be as focused and
ready to persevere and dig in until you find the answer to the question.
So what can we conclude from these observations?
It would be dangerous to think that positive emotions are always positive and
negative emotions are always negative.
There are times when it's not healthy to experience positive emotions.
There are times when it is perfectly appropriate to feel negative emotions and
times when they can actually lead to positive outcomes.
But this doesn't mean that all negative emotions are beneficial, and
it certainly is easy to fall prey to unhelpful negative emotions.
On balance, it's still valuable to know how to cultivate positive emotions.
But we want to be aware of the context for any emotions in our lives and
use well our abilities to influence them.
In the next section, we'll talk about emotional intelligence and
various ways in which we can influence our emotions to lead to positive outcomes.
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