This appraisal process may be either conscious or unconscious, and it triggers a cascade of response tendencies manifest across loosely coupled component systems, such as subjective experience, facial expression, cognitive processing, and physiological changes.Īffect, a more general concept, refers to consciously accessible feelings. Typically, an emotion begins with an individual's assessment of the personal meaning of some antecedent event. Emotions, according to this perspective, are best conceptualized as multicomponent response tendencies that unfold over relatively short time spans. Yet despite ongoing debate (e.g., Diener, 1999 Ekman & Davidson, 1994), consensus is emerging that emotions are but a subset of the broader class of affective phenomena. Working definitions of emotions and affect vary somewhat across researchers. The take-home message is that positive emotions are worth cultivating, not just as end states in themselves but also as a means to achieving psychological growth and improved well-being over time.Ī review of current perspectives on emotions, affect, and their respective functions provides an important backdrop. Moreover, they do so not simply within the present, pleasant moment but over the long term as well. But this is not the whole story: Positive emotions also produce flourishing.
According to these perspectives, positive emotions signal flourishing.
Building on this finding, Kahneman (1999) suggested that “objective happiness” can best be measured by tracking (and later aggregating) people's momentary experiences of good and bad feelings (but see Fredrickson, 2000c). Consistent with this intuition, the overall balance of people's positive and negative emotions has been shown to predict their judgments of subjective well-being ( Diener, Sandvik, & Pavot, 1991).
Certainly moments in people's lives characterized by experiences of positive emotions-such as joy, interest, contentment, love, and the like-are moments in which they are not plagued by negative emotions-such as anxiety, sadness, anger, and despair. What role do positive emotions play in this mission? On first consideration, the answer seems simple: Positive emotions serve as markers of flourishing, or optimal well-being. The mission of positive psychology is to understand and foster the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish ( Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).
0 kommentar(er)
