Happy for Good

How often do you get drawn to positivity compared to negativity? Try to imagine, when finding news, watching movies, and in your general social environment. Even in your thoughts, you are usually worried about what happened in the past or what may go wrong in the future. When I was first introduced to the field of Positive Psychology in 2004, this is one of the central themes of intellectual discussion at the time (Lazarus, 2003, Rand & Snyder, 2003). Apparently, there is good evolutionary, social, and psychological reasons for why we love negativity so much. However, in a life of maximum eight to ten decades, we sometimes have to wonder how we spend our time. One of the aims positive psychologists started with was to enable a good understanding and regulation of emotions in favor of maintaining psychological balance, to generally stay in the direction of life when amidst the storms, strains, and sorrows of life. Particularly when struck by lightning, figuratively speaking.

Negative emotions were particularly designed to save life in the here and now, and mainly in the face of physical threats due to our typical ancestral environments (Fredrickson, 1998).

Now, read the few statements ahead.

Sadness is romantically attractive and encourages personal reflection.

Anger leading to aggression in uncertainty seems decisive and denotes social power.

Disgust makes you see another day, pull away and still love your smelling infant.

Envy makes you seem socially aware, and jealousy helps reproduce your kind.

Hostility saves life when no other options exist.

Guilt keeps you integrated in the group and proves your understanding of social norms.

These aren't an oversimplification and are found in emotion literature in full bloom (for evidence, see Ben-Ze’ev, 1990, Case, Repacholi, & Stevenson, 2006, Griskevicius et al., 2009, Rosenstock & O'Connor, 2018, Khan, DePaoli, & Maimaran, 2019, Tobore, 2023). As you may imagine, a lot of this makes 'good' look almost stupid and an invitation to death — a notion I have wondered about several times in my life.

For a long time, the benefits of positivity remained dormant. Models that were better suited for understanding negative emotions were being used to gauge all types of emotions, despite having very different functions and routes for enabling life (Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998). With the emergence of the Broaden and Build Model and following research, the long-term utility of positive emotions became apparent (Fredrickson, 1998). Positivity prepares and repairs, a function much more crucial in our long life of different kinds of psychosocial threats, which is why positivity matters in its echoing reaffirmations of life (Mishra, 2009). Positive emotions don't shine glaringly in any threat-focused scenarios. The thought-to-behavior time-space of positive emotions is stretched to extend life in future, in diverse prosocial ways as situationally suited or for building coping mechanisms when healing psychologically (Fredrickson, 1998). This explains why immediately responding to a gift by returning something similar exact in value or intense expressions of love too early in a relationship generates a lull of awkward silences and cringing. Positive emotions either nudge us gently in the direction of slightly more diversified thinking in times of threat or help us keep our minds above sea level across the scale of healthy emotional functioning.

Unfortunately, some of the flawed ways in which positive emotions and related mindsets are first perceived keeps this serious space of life less noticeable and inaccessible to many of us. Some possible reasons for such thinking may be as follows:

Flawed deductive reasoning

Example: All babies and cuddly old women are good.

All babies and cuddly old women are vulnerable and weak.

Amy is good.

Reasoning based on the initial premise: Good Amy is vulnerable and weak.

Seeing negativity as a sign of intelligence due to the use of higher cognitive capacities

Try to find a manipulative bonobo or a dog that started war in a country. You won't. Human beings have the brain regions to conceive and implement war in ways not seen in any other mammal. Complex thinking also make us build beautiful cities and aspire for world peace. However, when assessing people and situations, being good generally seems like the riskier option, one generally not in favor of life, and hence stupid and secondary to our survival.

The many creative ways in which we exploit language

You'll also not find a passive-aggressive animal that easily, even if in the most desperate conditions. Yes, they flap their wings and can change colors once in a while but will never reveal the talent of speaking a simple sentence in ten different ways based on intention. Human beings do so every day. Why? Because we live in civilized societies in which we have to stay close and away simultaneously many times with people we like to hate and hate to like, in favor of long-term cooperative survival where fighting isn't always a productive outcome. For this reason, when we come across pure goodness in slightly higher dosages than expected, we may perceive this as either utter stupidity or a new form of deception.

Positivity is best expressed in daily actions, in mood or norm shifting mechanisms in difficult situations. This is when the above assumptions begin to fade away and you feel grateful for having a mindful pilot or train driver who saved lives and didn't freeze during a dangerous situation, or a mother who decided to sing a lullaby instead of screaming to make her child sleep peacefully while also raising her oxytocin levels to manage the stress better. This is not to deny the sheer hold of negativity on our lives. A remedy for this is how the frequency of positive emotions has to be much greater at the aftermath of negativity, which is when we are able to see its healing value, a consistent finding also in managing relationships (Gottman, 1994, Mishra, 2009).

Seen closely, the question of most relevance isn't whether positive or negative matter more than the other, a dichotomous approach most people tend to have in favor of clear identification and categorization. When and why different emotions become crucial, or become personally congruent to our situations, is of greater essence. For this reason, the approach-avoidance tendencies or differentiating between constructive versus destructive emotions are other alternative ways in which many people in this area of study think about emotions (Carver, Avivi, & Laurenceau, 2008, Ekman & Ekman, 2017, Richardson, 1992).

The famous proverb 'the good die young', isn't entirely false in foundation as reminded by poets and thinkers who knew 'actual life.' However, if you want to keep the major premise in mind that we all will die one day for sure and a good life, in which more was left, is what will matter in the end, the proverb may be better expressed as, 'The good may die young or later but will always be content about leaving a life well-lived.'

References

Ben-Ze’ev, A. (1990). Envy and jealousy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 20(4), 487–516.

Carver, C. S., Avivi, Y. E., & Laurenceau, J. P. (2008). Distinct Emotional Experience Approach, Avoidance, and Emotional Experiences. Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation, 385.

Case, T. I., Repacholi, B. M., & Stevenson, R. J. (2006). My baby doesn't smell as bad as yours: The plasticity of disgust. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(5), 357–365.

Davidson, R. J. (1992). Emotion and affective style: Hemispheric substrates. Psychological Science, 3(1), 39-43.

Ekman, P., & Ekman, E. (2017). Is global compassion achievable? The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, 1, 41-49.

Gottman, J. M. (1994). What predicts divorce? The relationship between marital processes and marital outcomes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 300-319.

Fredrickson B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. The American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226.

Fredrickson, B. L., & Levenson, R. W. (1998). Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 12(2), 191–220.

Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J.M., Gangestad, S.W., Perea, E.F., Shapiro, J.R., & Kenrick, D.T. (2009). Aggress to impress: Hostility as an evolved context-dependent strategy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96 (5), 980-994.

Khan, U., DePaoli, A., & Maimaran, M. (2019). The unique role of anger among negative emotions in goal-directed decision making. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 4(1), 65–76.

Lazarus, R. S. (2003). Author's response: the Lazarus manifesto for positive psychology and psychology in general. Psychological Inquiry, 14(2), 173-189.

Mishra, A. (2009). Positivity, by Barbara Fredrickson. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(6), 578–580.

Morriss, J., Goh, K., Hirsch, C. R., & Dodd, H. F. (2023). Intolerance of uncertainty heightens negative emotional states and dampens positive emotional states. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1147970.

Rand, K. L., & Snyder, C. R. (2003). A reply to Dr. Lazarus, the evocator emeritus. Psychological Inquiry, 14(2), 148-153.

Rosenstock, S., & O'Connor, C. (2018). When it's good to feel bad: An evolutionary model of guilt and apology. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5, 9.

Tobore, T. O. (2023). On the beauty of sadness: It’s okay to say, I am sad, thank you. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 16(1). 2211424.