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The following image map shows some of the topics associated with positive emotion and serves as a guide into related Positive Psychology News Daily (PPND) articles. The larger the font, the more often our authors have written about the topic. We’ll probably update the sizes every quarter or so, as articles continue to be posted.

Each topic name in the picture is a link to a brief description of the topic, relevant PPND articles, and other major resources. Click on a word in the image for more information about the topic..

Positive Emotion in General

Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build theory is one of the cornerstones of positive psychology. Her theory aims to explain the contributions of positive emotions to human well-being. Negative emotions, such as fear, anger, and disgust, lead to narrow responses focused on avoiding or confronting threat. Positive emotions, on the other hand, lead to cognitive flexibility and a broad range of behavioral tendencies. Emotions tend to be fleeting, but the behaviors that follow from broadened behavioral tendencies lead to durable resources, such as social ties and expanded skills. The list below shows some examples of behavioral tendencies associated with positive emotions.

• Joy → Play
• Interest → Explore
• Contentment → Savor & integrate
• Pride → Dream big
• Gratitude → Creative giving
• Elevation → Become better
• Love → All of the above

The broaden-and-build theory is probably in the mind of each PPND author as he or she writes about positive emotions.

According to Ed Diener, subjective well-being is affected by three quantities: amount of positive affect (another word for emotion), amount of negative affect, and overall satisfaction with life. He argues that positive affect and negative affect vary independently, rather than as two ends of the same scale. It is possible to have positive affect and negative both be high or both be low at the same time. Life satisfaction is a longer term evaluation of one’s general life situation. The PANAS instrument is based on this way of characterizing subjective well-being, and is available for free on registration at the Authentic Happiness site.

Positive to Negative Ratio

Researchers have shown that the positive to negative ratio (PNR) is strongly related to outcomes in different contexts, including marriage and business teams. For example, flourishing marriages tend to have high ratios between positive and negative exchanges (according to Gottman, greater than 5 to 1), while failing marriages tend to have low ratios (less than 1 to 1). The Losada line shown below and named after Marcial Losada, is a line based on various sets of outcome data indicating the boundary between flourishing and languishing outcomes (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005). While it is hard to imagine a marriage or business team having a scorekeeper to keep track of the PNR, an awareness that a high PNR is helpful can help people work toward more effective exchanges.

Savoring

According to Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff (2007), savoring involves noticing and appreciating the positive aspects of life — the positive counterpart to coping. Savoring is more than pleasure — it also involves mindfulness and “conscious attention to the experience of pleasure” (p. 5). You can savor vicariously, enjoying another person’s pleasure.

There are numerous savoring processes that regulate other positive experiences (p. 14): to name a few:

• Marveling regulates awe.
• Thanksgiving regulates gratitude.
• Basking regulates pride.
• Luxuriating regulates physical pleasure

Love

Love is regarded as one of the positive emotions by theorists such as Fredrickson and Branigan (2001) and Vaillant (2008). The capacity to love and be loved is one of the 24 VIA character strengths that could bring us gratification and authentic happiness (Seligman, 2002). According to Fredrickson and Branigan (2001), love experiences are made up of many positive emotions such as interest, joy and contentment. Not only does love trigger these positive emotions, “it also broadens the momentary thought-action repertoire as people explore, savor, and play with the people they love.”(p.132). Love as a positive emotion builds and solidifies our social resources.

When we talk about love we often immediately think of romantic love. Yet our love is not limited to our partners. We can love our families, friends, and mankind in general. All kinds of love can bring us positive emotions.

Chris Peterson says, “Other people matter,” perhaps one of the core principles of positive psychology. Indeed relationships are central to most people, deserving direct study as fundamental part of The Life Worth Living, not as an indirect contributor. We are working on another image map for Positive Relationships, but for the time being, we include Love here as an important component of positive emotion.

Sharing Good News (Capitalizing & ACR)

Capitalizing refers to sharing positive news out loud with trusted others. Gable et al have found that people remember good news more, it is more salient in their thinking, and it has a greater impact on their general sense of well-being.

Active constructive responding refers to one of 4 ways that others can respond, as shown in the figure below. Active Constructive Responding means partnering with the other person to help them Capitalize — by asking questions that make them think of more to say about the positive event. All other ways of responding tend to have negative impacts, even passive constructive responding because it takes the wind out of the person’s sails.

Hope and Optimism

According to Snyder’s Hope Theory, hope is a process of goal-directed thought that reflects both the belief that one can find pathways to the goal and motivation based on one’s perceived capabilities, or agency thinking.

Optimism is strongly influenced by explanatory style, that is, how one habitually explains both positive and negative events. Sandra Schneider defines realistic optimism as the tendency to select positive interpretations when one has interpretational latitude.

Hope and optimism are both part of our cognitive, emotional, and motivational stances toward the future, indicating a belief that future good events will outweigh bad events (Peterson & Seligman, 2004, p. 572). Hope and optimism are also considered one of the VIA character strengths.

Optimism is one of the qualities that meet the criteria for inclusion in the Luthans, Youssef, and Avolio psychological capital model. See Dave Shearon’s book review for more.

Managing mood

While positive emotions are short-lived, the moods that they affect can last for long periods of time. Books on becoming happier often include positive interventions that are geared toward curtailing negative moods and extending positive moods.

Triggers and Priming

One good way to manage moods is to be aware of the triggers that elicit either positive or negative emotions. With awareness, one can avoid situations that elicit negative emotions, understand and manage the negative emotions better when they occur, and seek out situations that elicit positive emotions.

Humor

According to Peterson and Seligman, humor includes playful recognition and enjoyment of incongruity, a cheerful view of the light side of adversity, and the ability to make others smile and laugh. The VIA includes humor and playfulness as one of the 24 character strengths.

Gratitude & Forgiveness

Gratitude is complex. It’s a positive emotion that can be cultivated with intentional activity. It’s a character strength measured by the VIA test. It’s the foundation of a number of positive interventions that have been found to enhance happiness. Gratitude involves both acknowledging good things that happen – being mindful of present benefits — and recognizing that the sources of goodness are outside us.

Forgiveness is the flip side of gratitude. It involves responding positively to transgressions by offering mercy instead of vengeance. Like gratitude, it is outward directed and intentional and recognized as a VIA character strength.

The two are merged here both because of the qualities they share and because forgiveness has not received enough attention from PPND authors to be a category on its own yet.

Awe and Elevation

Awe and elevation are self-transcendent emotions, possibly triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue and often giving people the desire to improve themselves and work toward the greater good.

Joy

According to George Vaillant, joy tends to be on everyone’s list of positive emotions, and yet is the one least studied (2008, p. 119). Joy is different from happiness and different from pleasure (p. 131). He mentions work by the psychologist, Sylvan Tomkins, who connects joy to suffering removed. There is joy in being freed from captivity, in regaining what was thought lost. There is also joy in observing the small but ordinary miracles of life, such as watching one’s child take a first step.

We haven’t written much about joy in PPND yet, except as a member of the list of positive emotions. Barbara Fredrickson links joy to play. George Vaillant links it to listening to Beethoven’s 9th symphony, written when the composer was stone-deaf.