Don’t Worry, Be Happy (Really)
Article by Dr. John E. Kello
The Benefits of Positive Emotions: Don’t Worry, Be Happy (Really)
I wrote a magazine column a couple of years back on an approach to organizational change known as “Appreciative Inquiry”. This approach is rooted in a broader movement known as “Positive Psychology,” which focuses on psychological health and wellness, on the positive aspects of living a full life. Positive Psychology is a (welcome) departure from much of traditional psychology, which has focused to a greater extent on “problems,” on pathology. While counterpoints to the “doom and gloom,” “person-as-victim” approach have been visible here and there in some research and guiding theory, traditional psychology could hardly be described as focusing on the positive, but with the sudden appearance of the Positive movement, that picture is changing dramatically.
Part of the focus of Positive Psychology is the positive emotions – joy, satisfaction, gratitude, enthusiasm, and the like. Psychologists have long argued that there is obvious adaptive value in negative emotions; in the same sense that pain has great adaptive value, the emotions of fear and anger, for example, can motivate actions that have obvious value in promoting survival. They can of course also easily get out of hand and become debilitating, but in general, such strong negative feelings impel us to action, and may have motivated our ancestors (and may now motivate us) to successfully run from danger or strike out at an adversary, and thus live to fight (or run) another day.
Much of the existing research on emotion has focused on these presumed survival-promoting activators of adaptive action. We walk in the woods, see a bear, feel fear, and run, hide, or take other action to escape harm. We were challenged as a student with a pop quiz, felt fear and anxiety, and we focused all our efforts on the task at hand. The connection between such emotion and stress is also thoroughly studied and well documented. As we feel the emotion, the internal resources of the body are activated. The autonomic nervous system ramps up, and we are physiologically as ready as we are capable of being to act – the so-called “fight or flight” reaction.
In short, when we psychologists talk about emotion we almost always automatically mean negative emotion. Even among non-psychologists, calling someone “emotional” or having an “emotional” reaction, is usually code for fear, anger, upset, anxiety – one of the negatives.
What Does Being Happy “Do” For Us?
Though abundant research on emotion has broadly neglected the positive emotions, Positive Psychologists remind us that feelings of joy, happiness, satisfaction and the like are clearly a part of our lives, and a highly desirable part at that! To state the obvious, feeling good beats the heck out of feeling bad, and chances are you didn’t need a psychologist to clear that up for you.
One might ask, as generations of philosophers interested in the “good life” have asked, “what is the adaptive value of positive emotion”? What does “feeling really happy” actually do for us? This is not a trivial question. If we accept that Mr. Darwin was on to something with his theory of evolution by natural selection, these powerful positive emotions, universal as they are (and researchers have determined that the same basic core emotions, positive as well as negative, are indeed found universally in all human cultures), must have some adaptive value. They must have promoted survival in our ancestors. But what do they impel us to do?
Within the realm of the new Positive Psychology movements, researchers have discovered some very interesting things about positive emotions and their value.
• Live longer. First, some people are just wired to be more optimistic, upbeat, and generally positive than others. And these people not only enjoy life more – they literally enjoy more life! People who score higher on various tests of positive emotion actually do, on average, significantly outlive those who score lower. One can speculate as to why, but the data are clear. Subjective happiness and longevity go together.
• Think more creatively. Second, cognitive neuroscientists, who are interested in understanding our thought processes, have performed highly-controlled laboratory studies on the effects of activating positive and negative emotion on those thought processes. Recent studies, again meeting all the criteria of scientific rigor which academia demands, show fairly conclusively that experiencing negative emotion results in a narrowing and focusing of the thought process. In some ways this clearly can be adaptive – filter out irrelevant distractions and home in on the immediate problem and the actions to solve it. In extreme form, however, this automatic sharpening and narrowing of focus can equate to tunnel vision, which is of course a problem in many accident scenarios.
The same studies have found that experiencing positive emotion is associated with a clearly opposite effect. When participants in these studies are put into situations which trigger a more positive emotional state, and then given tasks to work on, they show a broadening and an expansion of their focus. The positive emotions help us think outside the box and see new and more alternatives.
• Upward spiral. There is a third finding, one that should be of great interest to all of us, but especially safety professionals. The positive effects of positive emotion build upon each other. They grow. Work on teams and team-building years ago showed convincingly that the earliest stages of team formation are crucial. If things sputter at the start, and the experience is initially negative, it is hard to get the team-development effort back on track. The attitude is “we just can’t get there from here,” which becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. But if the team gets off to a positive start, that early success tends to help create an “upward spiral.” We are winning, so we put in extra effort, which helps us win, and so on. Nothing succeeds like success.
In the safety arena, it is easy to lapse into a negative, problem-driven approach to work. It is easy to get sucked into that downward spiral. But if you could generate that positive spin for yourself, your success and attitude could drive more positive results (including more creativity), which could create more positive emotion, and on and on.
Interestingly, the research shows that the best way to create and sustain positive emotions is not with some external stimulus unrelated to the tasks at hand. Getting people to laugh at a Saturday Night Live comedy bit has only fleeting effects. The best way to generate and sustain positive emotion is to get people to think specifically and concretely about their current situation, and to identify and think about the peak experiences, the best elements, the most positive things about their current reality – that is, to do what the Appreciative Inquiry approach requires, which is what incurable optimists and others with a “positive attitude” naturally do for themselves anyway! Lest we think this is all psycho-fluff, one final research result is worth mentioning.
• Quick recovery. There is good evidence that generating and sustaining positive emotion can reverse the deleterious effects of negative emotion. There is a so-called “undoing effect,” in which activating positive emotions helps one more quickly recover from fear, anxiety, depression, and so on. In their own way, the positive emotions turn out to be every bit as valuable to our survival and success as the negative ones! Oh, and they feel pretty good too.
