Integrating positive emotions into theory, research, and practice: A new challenge for psychotherapy.

This article elaborates on the themes and directions that emerged from a dialogue on the potential usefulness of positive emotions in psychotherapy. In defining a positive emotion, the authors propose that there are two intersecting axes of interest. The axes are emotional experience--whether something feels good or bad to the client--and therapeutic value--how helpful the emotion is to the therapeutic process. Three of the four quadrants formed by the intersection of these axes potentially contain positive emotions. Special consideration is given to the quadrant of positive experience/positive value, which has been relatively neglected until now. In this quadrant, positive emotions generate change either in their facilitating role--often in the therapeutic relationship--or as central agents of the change process. The authors conclude by considering how positive and negative emotions interact and call for careful theorizing and research to clearly understand positive emotions in psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of positive emotion in the therapeutic process of family therapy.

Historically, the role of positive emotions has been somewhat obscured in family therapy by focus on relational processes, behavioral sequences, and interactional patterns. Despite increasing interest in the role of positive emotions in the field of psychology, little attention has been given to these issues in family therapy. As a result, the specific role of positive emotions is neither theoretically nor clinically well understood. The authors analyze the role of positive emotions in Functional Family Therapy, a model in which positive emotions serve as a key element in the proximal and distal outcomes of the phase-based systematic change process. The authors suggest that the important question is not if but how positive emotions are important. It is apparent that positive emotions play a vital role in family therapy. However, the authors are only beginning to uncover the abundant complexities tied to the therapeutic role of positive emotions within the relational patterns of families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive emotions in psychotherapy theory, research, and practice: New kid on the block?

This article introduces the Special Section, which explores the potential importance of positive emotions in our theory, research, and practice. The authors propose that the peripheral role that psychotherapy theory, research, and practice has allotted to the variable "positive emotion" can be understood in terms of the foundational axioms of our discipline. The authors argue that psychotherapy has implicitly adopted an attitude of caution and suspicion toward the potential therapeutic value of experiencing positive emotions, an all embracing attitude toward the therapeutic value of experiencing negative emotions, and an identity focused on healing psychological wounds at the expense of promoting psychological well-being. The authors trace the adoption of these axioms to Judeo-Christian ideas of human nature and to the identity formation process of psychotherapy, and the authors speculate on the sociopolitical forces that have promoted a shift in our theorizing in the last few decades. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are there positive emotions in short-term dynamic psychotherapy or is it all Freude-less?

Psychodynamic therapists are often suspicious of positive emotions and consider them to be nothing more than a form of denial or of another defense aiming to diminish painful or difficult affects. Positive emotions seem to exist only through the absence of negative emotions or as something that may happen outside of therapy. On the other hand, clinicians also agree that psychoanalytic work could not be successful without such positive emotions as interest, pleasure, surprise and creativity. Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and new research findings in the area of relationship regulation are likely to give positive emotions an increasingly prominent place in dynamically oriented therapies. With today's emphasis on the therapeutic relationship and intersubjectivity, the time appears right to integrate positive emotions more formally into psychodynamic clinical theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's emotions as organizers of their reactions to interadult anger: A functionalist perspective.

Children's emotions have been implicated as mediating their responses to interadult anger, but this proposition has not been directly tested. Sixty-four 4–8 year olds (32 boys and 32 girls) were induced to feel angry, sad, happy, or "just okay" before their exposure to interadult anger. Data were analyzed by means of (a) analyses of variance testing differences across conditions and (b) correlations between children's emotions during affect induction procedures and their reactions to interadult anger. Findings indicated that negative emotions increased children's distress and negative appraisals and expectations in reaction to interadult anger, whereas positive emotions reduced distress reactions and increased children's positive expectations about future interadult interactions. The results support a functionalist view that emotions can play a causal role in organizing and directing children's reactions to events and are consistent with research and theory highlighting the role of emotionality in children's coping with marital conflict. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In the name of Mussolini: Explaining the schism in an Italian right-wing political party.

The authors present a study testing and refining the social psychological model of schism in groups (F. Sani, 2005) by applying it to the schism that occurred in Alleanza Nazionale--an Italian political party of the right--in 2003. The authors found that perceptions of identity subversion (a sense that the group essence has been undermined by a change made by the group majority) have negative effects on group identification and positive effects on aversive emotions (dejection, agitation, and anger). Perceived identity subversion also has a negative influence on perceived group entitativity, which in turn has positive effects on group identification. Finally, group identification has a negative impact, and aversive emotions have a positive impact, on schismatic intentions. The authors also found that the more those who oppose the change are seen as having the ability to voice their dissent, the less both the negative impact of group identification and the positive impact of aversive emotions on schismatic intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development and validation of a three-dimensional measure of drinking motives.

Despite consistent evidence that alcohol can be used to cope with negative emotions or to enhance positive emotions, research on drinking motives has focused primarily on coping and social motives. This article reports on the development of a 3-factor measure that also assesses enhancement motives. Using confirmatory factor analysis, the authors demonstrated that enhancement motives are empirically distinct from coping and social motives and that a correlated 3-factor model fits the data equally well across race and gender groups in a large representative sample. Each drinking motive was also shown to predict distinct aspects of alcohol use and abuse. Finally, interaction analyses suggested that coping and enhancement motives differ in the magnitude of their effects on drinking behavior across Blacks and Whites and that enhancement motives differ in their effects across men and women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context matters: The benefits and costs of expressing positive emotion among survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

Positive emotions promote adjustment to aversive life events. However, evolutionary theory and empirical research on trauma disclosure suggest that in the context of stigmatized events, expressing positive emotions might incur social costs. To test this thesis, the authors coded genuine (Duchenne) smiling and laughter and also non-Duchenne smiling from videotapes of late-adolescent and young adult women, approximately half with documented histories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), as they described the most distressing event of their lives. Consistent with previous studies, genuine positive emotional expression was generally associated with better social adjustment two years later. However, as anticipated, CSA survivors who expressed positive emotion in the context of describing a past CSA experience had poorer long-term social adjustment, whereas CSA survivors who expressed positive emotion while describing a nonabuse experience had improved social adjustment. These findings suggest that the benefits of positive emotional expression may often be context specific. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An open source approach to creating positive psychological practice: A comment on Wong's Strengths-centered Therapy.

Positive psychology research has attracted the attention of both scholars and clinicians and is being translated into change strategies that could bring about greater well-being and life meaning. These new therapeutic models could be developed and refined in isolation (within one lab or clinic) and then shared with fellow professionals or developed and subjected to examination and modification by mental health colleagues across the world as we create strengths-based therapies that work. The authors examine Wong's (see record 2006-07640-001) Strengths-centered Therapy and advocate for an open source approach to developing positive psychological practice techniques. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hope-focused practices during early psychotherapy sessions: Part I: Implicit approaches.

Hope is recognized as one of four key factors contributing to psychotherapeutic change across a variety theoretical approaches (Hubble, Duncan, & Miller, 1999), especially early in the psychotherapeutic sequence. To date little research has looked at how hope is translated into specific practices by psychotherapists during psychotherapy sessions. This case study employed basic interpretive inquiry (Merriam, 1998) to explore the hope-focused practices of five hope-educated psychotherapists with 11 clients early in the therapy sequence. Two categories characterize the overall findings, that is, implicit and explicit hope-focused practices. This first paper in a two-part research report focuses on implicit hope-focused interventions. Implicit hope-focused interventions were those practices identified by therapists as addressing client hope without employing the word hope explicitly. Implicit hope practices addressed two key aspects of therapy, (a) attending to therapeutic relationship, and (b) fostering client perspective change. The second paper in this series examines findings regarding explicit hope-focused interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion experience and expression across the adult life span: Insights from a multimodal assessment study.

This investigation represents a multimodal study of age-related differences in experienced and expressed affect and in emotion regulatory skills in a sample of young, middle-aged, and older adults (N = 96), testing formulations derived from differential emotions theory. The experimental session consisted of a 10-min anger induction and a 10-min sadness induction using a relived emotion task; participants were also randomly assigned to an inhibition or noninhibition condition. In addition to subjective ratings of emotional experience provided by participants, their facial behavior was coded using an objective facial affect coding system; a content analysis also was applied to the emotion narratives. Separate repeated measures analyses of variance applied to each emotion domain indicated age differences in the co-occurrence of negative emotions and co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions across domains, thus extending the finding of emotion heterogeneity or complexity in emotion experience to facial behavior and verbal narratives. The authors also found that the inhibition condition resulted in a different pattern of results in the older versus middle-aged and younger adults. The intensity and frequency of discrete emotions were similar across age groups, with a few exceptions. Overall, the findings were generally consistent with differential emotions theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conflict across organizational boundaries: Managed care organizations versus health care providers.

This research examined conflicts that occur across organizational boundaries, specifically between managed care organizations and health care providers. Using boundary spanning theory as a framework, the authors identified 3 factors in the 1st study (30 interviews) that influence this conflict: (a) organizational power, (b) personal status differences of the individuals handling the conflict, and (c) their previous interactions. These factors affected the individuals' behavioral responses or emotions, specifically anger. After developing hypotheses, the authors tested them in a 2nd study using 109 conflict incidents drawn from 9 different managed care organizations. The results revealed that organizational power affects behavioral responses, whereas status differences and previous negative interactions affect emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in early parent-child conversations about negative versus positive emotions: Implications for the development of psychological understanding.

The authors examined whether the quality and content of everyday parent-child conversations about negative emotions are the same or different from everyday talk about positive emotions. Extensive longitudinal speech samples of 6 children and their parents were analyzed for several critical features when the children were between 2 and 5 years of age. Results showed that children and parents talked about past emotions, the causes of emotions, and connections between emotions and other mental states at higher rates during conversations about negative emotions than during conversations about positive emotions. Discourse about negative emotions also included a larger emotion vocabulary, more openended questions, and more talk about other people. These differences appeared before the children's 3rd birthdays and remained consistent through the preschool years. The findings strengthen and clarify current understanding of young children's articulation and knowledge about people's minds, lives, and emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychological resilience, positive emotions, and successful adaptation to stress in later life.

In 3 studies, the authors investigated the functional role of psychological resilience and positive emotions in the stress process. Studies 1a and 1b explored naturally occurring daily stressors. Study 2 examined data from a sample of recently bereaved widows. Across studies, multilevel random coefficient modeling analyses revealed that the occurrence of daily positive emotions serves to moderate stress reactivity and mediate stress recovery. Findings also indicated that differences in psychological resilience accounted for meaningful variation in daily emotional responses to stress. Higher levels of trait resilience predicted a weaker association between positive and negative emotions, particularly on days characterized by heightened stress. Finally, findings indicated that over time, the experience of positive emotions functions to assist high-resilient individuals in their ability to recover effectively from daily stress. Implications for research into protective factors that serve to inhibit the scope, severity, and diffusion of daily stressors in later adulthood are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cultural affordances and emotional experience: Socially engaging and disengaging emotions in Japan and the United States.

The authors hypothesized that whereas Japanese culture encourages socially engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt), North American culture fosters socially disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger). In two cross-cultural studies, the authors measured engaging and disengaging emotions repeatedly over different social situations and found support for this hypothesis. As predicted, Japanese showed a pervasive tendency to reportedly experience engaging emotions more strongly than they experienced disengaging emotions, but Americans showed a reversed tendency. Moreover, as also predicted, Japanese subjective well-being (i.e., the experience of general positive feelings) was more closely associated with the experience of engaging positive emotions than with that of disengaging emotions. Americans tended to show the reversed pattern. The established cultural differences in the patterns of emotion suggest the consistent and systematic cultural shaping of emotion over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imagined positive emotions and inhibitory control: The differentiated effect of pride versus happiness.

Inhibitory control is a cognitive mechanism that contributes to successful self-control (i.e., adherence to a long-term goal in the face of an interfering short-term goal). This research explored the effect of imagined positive emotional events on inhibition. The authors proposed that the influence of imagined emotions on inhibition depends on whether the considered emotion corresponds to the attainment of a long-term goal (i.e., pride) or a short-term goal (i.e., happiness). The authors predicted that in an antisaccade task that requires inhibition of a distractor, imagining a happiness-eliciting event is likely to harm inhibitory processes compared with imagining a pride-eliciting event, because the former but not the latter primes interfering short-term goals. The results showed that imagining a happiness-eliciting event decreased inhibition relative to imagining a pride-eliciting event. The results suggest a possible mechanism underlying the role of imagined positive emotions in pursuit of goals that require self-control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intensity and frequency: Dimensions underlying positive and negative affect.

Research on emotions and several happiness scales suggests that positive and negative affect are strongly inversely correlated. However, work on subjective well-being indicates that over time, positive and negative affect are independent across persons. To reconcile this inconsistency, 2 dimensions are proposed for personal affective structure: the frequency of positive vs negative affect and the intensity of affect. In 3 studies, 68 undergraduates and 34 33–85 yr old community residents completed daily and momentary reports on their moods. In support of the intensity dimension, the correlations between positive and negative intensity were strong and positive in all 3 studies. The intensities of specific emotions across Ss were also highly correlated. Across the 3 studies the frequency and intensity of affect varied independently. Although average levels of positive and negative affect showed low correlations, this relation became strongly inverse when intensity was partialed out. Thus, the intensity dimension helps explain the relative independence of positive and negative affect. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stressful life events, gender, and substance use: An application of tobit regression.

Extended research on stressful life events (SLEs) and substance use by examining gender differences in the relationship between SLEs and the use of 4 substances, determining whether SLEs were uniquely related to each type of substance use, and using tobit regression analysis to increase statistical conclusion validity. Data were obtained from 606 men and 1,001 women (all Ss aged 19–65 yrs) who were interviewed and responded to a questionnaire. Analyses revealed that the magnitude of the positive relationship between SLEs and cigarette use did not differ across men and women, whereas SLEs were unrelated to illicit drug use among both men and women. In contrast, SLEs were more strongly related to alcohol use among men, whereas they were more strongly related to psychotherapeutic drug use among women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attachment and treatment response among adults in inpatient treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder.

In this study, the authors investigated changes in attachment orientation after treatment in an inpatient program for adults with posttraumatic stress disorder. The authors also examined the association between these changes and symptom reduction. Results indicated that secure attachment increased significantly over treatment in comparison to a wait list group, and this change was maintained over the 6 months after discharge. Positive changes were also noted in the underlying attachment dimensions of anxiety and avoidance. Furthermore, positive changes in attachment were found to be associated with symptom reduction during treatment and maintenance of these reductions after discharge. These results have potential implications for the goals of psychotherapeutic intervention in general and for the utility of specialized inpatient trauma treatment specifically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of different positive emotions on persuasion processing: A functional evolutionary approach.

Much research has found that positive affect facilitates increased reliance on heuristics in cognition. However, theories proposing distinct evolutionary fitness-enhancing functions for specific positive emotions also predict important differences among the consequences of different positive emotion states. Two experiments investigated how six positive emotions influenced the processing of persuasive messages. Using different methods to induce emotions and assess processing, we showed that the positive emotions of anticipatory enthusiasm, amusement, and attachment love tended to facilitate greater acceptance of weak persuasive messages (consistent with previous research), whereas the positive emotions of awe and nurturant love reduced persuasion by weak messages. In addition, a series of mediation analyses suggested that the effects distinguishing different positive emotions from a neutral control condition were best accounted for by different mediators rather than by one common mediator. These findings build upon approaches that link affective valence to certain types of processing, documenting emotion-specific effects on cognition that are consistent with functional evolutionary accounts of discrete positive emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)