The Undoing Effects of Positive Emotions
Happiness, joy, love, excitement are all positive emotions and there is no arguing that these emotions contribute in large to how we act, how we think, and what we do. In contrast there are also negative feelings such as sadness that can lead us to act in certain ways that may not necessarily be good. Studies have been performed that have shown that positive emotions can be used to "correct" or "undo" the effects of negative emotions. Barbara Fredrickson and Robert Levenson have come up with the undoing hypothesis. In essence what the hypothesis states is that people might hold in the effects of their positive emotions to counterbalance the effects of their negative emotions. Overall positive emotions help lower the potentially health-damaging cardiovascular reactivity that lingers following negative emotions. This effect may be especially important for those most at risk for developing coronary heart disease. (Fredickson, Mancuso, Tugade, The Undergoing Effect of Positive Emotions)
Read more about this topic: Undoing (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the words effects, positive and/or emotions:
“Virtues are not emotions. Emotions are movements of appetite, virtues dispositions of appetite towards movement. Moreover emotions can be good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable; whereas virtues dispose us only to good. Emotions arise in the appetite and are brought into conformity with reason; virtues are effects of reason achieving themselves in reasonable movements of the appetites. Balanced emotions are virtue’s effect, not its substance.”
—Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274)
“As for the terms good and bad, they indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things with one another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him who mourns; for him who is deaf, it is neither good nor bad.”
—Baruch (Benedict)
“In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)