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Most people like to feel good, and positive emotions just plain feel good.

They don't necessarily need a reason or cause backside them for us to bask them; we just practise.

Experiencing emotions like happiness, excitement, joy, hope, and inspiration is vital for anyone who wants to lead a happy and salubrious life.

Luckily, you don't need to feel them all the time to reap the benefits of positive emotions. These often-fleeting moments can be the ones that brand all the hard work and struggling in life worth information technology, the spice that brings flavor to your life.

Before you lot proceed, we thought you lot might similar to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for costless. These science-based exercises will not only raise your ability to understand and work with your emotions merely will also give you the tools to foster the emotional intelligence of your clients, students, or employees.

What are Positive Emotions? A Definition

Before diving besides deep into positive emotions, we should offset by making sure nosotros're all on the same page about emotions—and positive emotions in detail.

Positive emotions are not simply "happy feelings" that we chase to feel momentary pleasure; like the more negative emotions, they play a significant role in everyday life.

There are many means to define "emotion," just they generally fall into i of two camps:

1. Emotions are a state or feeling that cannot be conjured up at will, or;
2. Emotions are attitudes or responses to a state of affairs or an object, like judgments (Zemach, 2001).

Most electric current scholars fall into the 2nd camp, viewing emotions every bit the outcome or result of something, provoked by activeness, or past being on the receiving end of an activeness.

The implications of embracing one view over the other are fascinating, only for the purposes of understanding positive emotions and their role in psychology, information technology'due south not necessary to cull between the ii camps; whether we can consciously choose our positive emotions or whether they are a direct result of some activeness or feel, it is mainly their furnishings that are of interest to the positive psychology practitioner.

Narrowing downwardly to positive emotions, there are two popular ways of defining them that loosely correspond to the two camps noted above. They have been divers as "multicomponent response tendencies" that concluding a short menses of time (Fredrickson, 2001), aligning roughly with the 2d view, and as mental experiences that are both intense and pleasurable (Cabanac, 2002), adhering more closely to the starting time view.

Whichever definition you think fits best, the most important things we demand to know about them are (a) which emotions they are, (b) what is their purpose or point, (c) how we tin can improve our experience of them, either in quantity or quality, and (d) what effects they accept on us.

Positive Emotion Words People Apply

Let's dive right into Point A: which emotions are positive.

The list of positive emotions that people feel is nearly countless. Non all of these words refer to emotions every bit scholars understand them, but they are the words most oftentimes used past people in describing their ain emotions, which gives usa a good foundation for positive emotions equally they are commonly experienced.

• Joy – a sense of elation, happiness, and maybe even exhilaration, often experienced equally a sudden spike due to something skilful happening.
• Gratitude – a feeling of thankfulness, for something specific or simply extensive, oft accompanied by humility and even reverence.
• Serenity – a calm and peaceful feeling of credence of oneself.
• Interest – a feeling of curiosity or fascination that demands and captures your attention.
• Promise – a feeling of optimism and apprehension about a positive future.
• Pride – a sense of blessing of oneself and pleasure in an accomplishment, skill, or personal aspect.
• Amusement – a feeling of lighthearted pleasance and enjoyment, often accompanied by smiles and easy laughter.
• Inspiration – feeling engaged, uplifted, and motivated by something y'all witnessed.
• Awe – an emotion that is evoked when you witness something grand, spectacular, or breathtaking, sparking a sense of overwhelming appreciation.
• Elevation – the feeling you get when you run into someone engaging in an act of kindness, generosity, or inner goodness, spurring you to aspire to like action.
• Altruism – unremarkably referred to as an act of selflessness and generosity towards others, but can besides describe the feeling you become from helping others.
• Satisfaction – a sense of pleasance and contentment you get from accomplishing something or fulfilling a demand.
• Relief – the feeling of happiness you experience when an uncertain situation turns out for the best, or a negative issue is avoided.
• Amore – an emotional zipper to someone or something, accompanied by a liking for them and a sense of pleasure in their visitor.
• Cheerfulness – a feeling of brightness, existence upbeat and noticeably happy or chipper; feeling like everything is going your way.
• Surprise (the good kind!) – a sense of delight when someone brings yous unexpected happiness or a situation goes fifty-fifty improve than you had hoped.
• Conviction – emotion involving a stiff sense of cocky-esteem and conventionalities in yourself; tin exist specific to a state of affairs or activity, or more universal.
• Admiration – a feeling of warm approving, respect, and appreciation for someone or something.
• Enthusiasm – a sense of excitement, accompanied by motivation and engagement.
• Eagerness – like a less intense course of enthusiasm; a feeling of readiness and excitement for something.
• Euphoria – intense and the all-encompassing sense of joy or happiness, often experienced when something extremely positive and exciting happens.
• Delectation – peaceful, comforting, and low-key sense of happiness and well-being.
• Enjoyment – a feeling of taking pleasure in what is going on around you, especially in situations like a leisure activity or social gathering.
• Optimism – positive and hopeful emotion that encourages you to look forward to a bright futurity, one in which you believe that things will mostly piece of work out.
• Happiness – a feeling of pleasure and contentment in the fashion things are going; a general sense of enjoyment of and enthusiasm for life.
• Beloved – perhaps the strongest of all positive emotions, dearest is a feeling of deep and enduring affection for someone, along with a willingness to put their needs ahead of your own; it can be directed towards an individual, a group of people, or even all humanity.

This list captures a good deal of the positive emotions nosotros experience, but it'southward certainly not an exhaustive list—I'm sure you can think of at least 1 or two more!

Now that we have an idea of the kinds of emotions we're talking about, we can move on to some other of import question: what's the indicate?

Why do Nosotros Need Positive Emotions? What Good are They?

Aside from simply feeling good, positive emotions are also an important piece of the happiness puzzle.

While yous volition probably not achieve lasting happiness and well-being based on temporary, hedonic pleasance alone, positive emotions often provide the foundation for those fleeting simply meaningful moments that make life worth living; for example, the joy of saying "I do" to your meaning other, the love that overwhelms you upon holding your newborn for the beginning fourth dimension, or the immense satisfaction you become from achieving something smashing in your career.

Although positive emotions may seem to have little purpose also making u.s. "feel good," they really do a few very important jobs.

The Part of Positive Emotions in Psychology

The "point" of positive emotions depends on who you ask; you lot will likely get a dissimilar reply from experts in different fields.

An evolutionary psychologist might reply "to enhance homo beings' chances of survival and reproduction."

A social psychologist might say "to form the bonds that connect united states of america to others."

A positive psychologist may say "to make life worth living."

Or, she might say "to broaden our sensation and build our inner resource." That is the gist of Barbara Fredrickson's groundbreaking "Augment-and-Build Theory" of positive emotions. Read on to learn more about this theory.

A Curt Summary of Fredrickson's Broaden-and-Build Theory

Fredrickson introduced the Augment-and-Build Theory of positive emotions in 1998. The theory provides a disarming explanation of the "point" of positive emotions: to open up our minds, broaden and aggrandize our awareness, and facilitate the building and evolution of resources, including knowledge, skills, abilities, and relationships.

In the words of Fredrickson herself:

"…these positive emotions broaden an private's momentary thought-action repertoire: joy sparks the urge to play, interest sparks the urge to explore, contentment sparks the urge to bask and integrate, and dear sparks a recurring cycle of each of these urges within rubber, close relationships."

(2004, p. 1367).

The effects of these emotions are in sharp contrast to the effects of negative emotions, or those experienced in a dangerous state of affairs (e.thousand., fear, terror, anxiety), which usually take the effect of narrowing our focus and limiting our myriad options to the i or 2 best suited for survival.

In such situations, these automatic responses are vital for ensuring that we make it out alive; however, in situations that are not life-threatening, nosotros don't need such a narrow perspective or limiting of options.

This is where positive emotions are more advantageous—instead of limiting our scope, they aggrandize information technology to allow for artistic thought and activeness. Instead of narrowing our focus to one or two responses, they expand our awareness to take in the much wider array of responses we tin choose from.

This broadening of our horizons allows u.s.a. to play, to acquire, and to acquire lasting knowledge and skills that nosotros can carry with the states throughout our lives. These resource may be concrete, emotional, psychological, social, and even mental, simply no thing what kind of resources nosotros acquire through this broadening, they are enduring.

These resources caused and developed through experiencing positive emotions have been shown to result in many benefits throughout the several domains of life.

In the all-encompassing domain of physical and psychological health, positive emotions can have fantastic effects.

The Health Benefits of Positive Emotions

Amongst the many health benefits of positive emotions is a reduction in stress and a boost to general well-being. Positive emotions can really act every bit a buffer between you and stressful events in your life, allowing you to cope more finer and preserve your mental health (Tugade, Fredrickson, & Barrett, 2004).

In addition, in 2006 researchers confirmed that experiencing positive emotions helps you attune your reaction to stress and allows you to recover from the negative effects of stress more quickly (Ong, Bergeman, Bisconti, & Wallace).

Positive emotions may also protect you from the sniffles! Students who were randomly assigned to writing about intense, positive experiences for iii days, xx minutes a day, made significantly fewer visits to the student health center for symptoms of illness, compared to students who wrote about a neutral topic (Burton & King, 2004).

Experiencing positive emotions may likewise encourage individuals to make healthier decisions, indirectly contributing to better health. Herzenstein (2008) constitute that several positive emotions pb to a diversity of health benefits, including:

• Happiness resulted in increased hazard- and multifariousness-seeking and gain-focused behavior and,
• Delectation resulted in increased risk avoidance and loss-focused beliefs.

Positive emotions can too facilitate more effective coping, which boosts health past providing a buffer against symptoms of depression (Dolphin, Steinhardt, & Cance, 2015). In improver, being mindful and taking the time to enjoy positive emotions tin can provide an extra buffer against symptoms of depression while boosting psychological well-being and life satisfaction (Kiken, Lundberg, & Fredrickson, 2017).

Another health do good of positive emotions is that they may issue in a stronger centre; Kok and colleagues (2013) plant a connection between a healthy center rate and the experience of positive social emotions. Similarly, a meta-analysis of several studies found that well-beingness was significantly related to good cardiovascular functioning, general health, and longevity overall (Howell, Kern, & Lyubomirsky, 2007).

How Positive Emotions Foster Resilience and Improve Memory

In addition to promoting adept physical and psychological health, positive emotions have been constitute to chronicle to both resilience and memory.

A study from Peng and colleagues (2014) plant that positive emotions and resilience are positively correlated, indicating that i leads to the other or they share a bi-directional relationship.

We also know that resilience is significantly related to emotional regulation, suggesting that the experience of many positive emotions (and the direction of negative emotions) allows some individuals to "bounce back" better than others (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004).

Finally, a study by Cohn and colleagues found that positive emotions have a direct issue on resilience, which in turn helps build a strong sense of life satisfaction (2009).

These effects may be due to the "broadening and building" that positive emotions seem to provoke; the more positive emotions a person experiences, the stronger their perception of a positive baseline state to "bounciness dorsum" to after failure or tragedy.

Additionally, experiencing consistent positive emotions might encourage a person to seek out a wide variety of sources of meaning and fulfillment, sources they can depend on to pull them back up to their anxiety when they go knocked downward.

Overall, in that location is evidence to suggest that positive emotions can protect against memory impairment (MacKenzie, Powell, & Donaldson, 2015). It is unclear how this protection may work, although it may exist explained through the Broaden-and-Build Theory as well. Positive emotions may aggrandize focus and retentiveness capacity and enhance the ability to call up both central and peripheral details (Yegiyan & Yonelinas, 2011).

Both enhanced resilience and better memory tin can provide benefits in many domains of life, including in the workplace. In fact, there are several ways that positive emotions can lead to better productivity and more constructive work.

How Positive Emotions Can Improve the Workplace

Positive emotions accept been shown to accept a positive touch on on relationships (romantic, friends, and family), therapy and counseling outcomes, grades and bookish achievements, and personal development (Linley, Joseph, Maltby, Harrington, & Wood, 2009); now we can add ane more domain to this listing—the workplace.

As much equally we may endeavor to carve up them, our emotions and personal life do accept an bear on on our work. Luckily, this tin work in positive also as negative ways.

Positive emotions have led to enhancements and improvements in piece of work life, physical and mental wellness, social relationships, community involvement, and income (Danner, Snowdon, & Friesen, 2001; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005), all of which are either directly or indirectly related to work.

Enhancing Employee Date

A contempo study by Goswami, Nair, Beehr, and Grossenbacher (2016) cemented the human relationship between positive emotions and employee appointment—as well as showing a link between leaders' use of humour and employee engagement!

Further, positive emotions encouraged organizational citizenship behavior (an employee'south voluntary commitment to non-obligatory or not-mandatory tasks that benefit his or her organization) as well as increasing work engagement; additionally, they had a double positive impact by decreasing negative attitudes and behaviors that are not in line with organizational values (Avey, Wernsing, & Luthans, 2008).

Improving Task Satisfaction

Positive emotions accept been found to result in increased cocky-efficacy, higher chore satisfaction, and amend mental health in general (Schutte, 2014). They have even been shown to connect to higher job satisfaction during task disharmonize (Todorova, Carry, & Weingart, 2014).

More specifically, the positive emotions of interest and gratitude are linked to enhanced satisfaction with ane'southward work, while gratitude also positively impacts satisfaction with one's coworkers and supervisors (Winslow, Hu, Kaplan, & Li, 2017). The same report that produced these results as well found that both involvement and gratitude predict an employee's satisfaction with his or her promotion.

Not merely do positive emotions heighten satisfaction with the chore, they besides reduce turnover intentions and reduce the effects of stress on employees (Sui, Cheung, & Lui, 2015).

These findings are intuitive; it makes sense that experiencing more positive emotions at work, similar joy, interest, gratitude, and happiness, increases satisfaction with the work. Greater satisfaction with work has a clear and direct relationship with intentions to stay with the position.

Effective Leadership

Positive emotions in the workplace tin facilitate more effective leadership too every bit increasing job satisfaction.

A study from 2013 surveyed followers to assess the human relationship between transformational leadership and positive emotions on the one manus, and the affect on task performance on the other; the written report establish that transformational leadership and positive emotions have a positive effect on job operation (Liang & Steve Chi, 2013).

Not only was transformational leadership'southward effect on performance enhanced, but its touch on on work engagement was as well institute to be enhanced by positive emotions (Wang, Li, & Li, 2017).

Similarly, authentic leadership was found to lead to more effective innovation in followers when coupled with positive emotions (Zhou, Ma, Cheng, & Xia, 2014).

Another style of leadership, known as intellectual stimulator leadership, is more effective in boosting employee job satisfaction, endeavour, and effectiveness when positive emotions like enthusiasm, hope, pride, happiness, and inspiration complement the leadership (Zineldin, 2017).

Enhancing the Company's Lesser Line

When employees experience positive emotions at work, they feel a broadening of perspective and may be able to build important resources.

Early research on the effects of positive emotion on employee achievement and productivity institute that the more positive emotion an private experienced on the task, the higher their pay and better their supervisor evaluations were 18 months afterward (Staw, Sutton, & Pelled, 1994).

Staw and colleagues also found that MBA students with higher positive emotions performed more accurately on a decision-making job than students with lower levels of positive emotions (1993).

Further research found that increased positive emotions resulted in increased clarity surrounding expectations in ane's role, effective and value-congruent use of organizational resources, fulfillment in ane's function, amend relationships at work, and a general increase in the ownership employees experience over their work and the creativity that drives innovation and contributes to organizational success (Harter, Schmidt, & Keyes, 2002).

Additionally, the expression and amplification of positive emotions tin lead to enhanced goal attainment, whether the expression of emotions is directed towards co-workers or superiors (Wong, Tschan, Messerli, & Semmer, 2013).

Finally, positive emotions (in the class of promise, optimism, and resilience) were institute to not only increase job satisfaction, piece of work happiness, and organizational commitment, just likewise to improve employee performance, measured by both self-report and organizational performance appraisals (Youssef & Luthans, 2007).

A Take-Dwelling Message

There has never been more interest in positive emotions and their effect on our lives—and for good reason!

Positive emotions are linked to numerous benefits in relationships, in one's health and well-existence, and in the workplace. Keep an centre out for news on positive emotions, and you will be keeping upwards with a bright and vibrant area of research.

Thank you for reading. If you have any comments on positive emotions or desire to suggest further reading, delight let us know in the comment section below.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don't forget to download our 3 Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free.

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