Happiness is best kept stable: positive emotion variability is associated with poorer psychological health.

Emotion Happiness Is Best Kept Stable: Positive Emotion Variability Is Associated With Poorer Psychological Health

Happiness Is Best Kept Stable: Positive Emotion Variability Is Associated With Poorer

Positive emotion has been shown to be associated with adaptive outcomes in a number of domains, including psychological health. However, research has largely focused on overall levels of positive emotion with less attention paid to how variable versus stable it is across time. We thus examined the psychological health correlates of positive emotion variability versus stability across 2 distinct...

Emotion differentiation and intensity during acute tobacco abstinence: A comparison of heavy and light smokers.

The ability to recognize and label discrete emotions, termed emotion differentiation, is particularly pertinent to overall emotion regulation abilities. Patterns of deficient emotion differentiation have been associated with mood and anxiety disorders but have yet to be examined in relation to nicotine dependence. This study employed ecological momentary assessment to examine smokers' subjectiv...

Running Head: VALUING HAPPINESS AND DEPRESSION Desperately seeking happiness: Valuing happiness is associated with symptoms and diagnosis of depression

Culture shapes the emotions people feel and want to feel. In Western cultures, happiness is an emotion that many people want to feel. Although experiencing happiness is associated with increased well-being and psychological health, recent evidence suggests wanting to feel happy to an extreme degree, or, highly valuing happiness leads to decreased well-being. To examine whether these effects of ...

Valuing happiness is associated with bipolar disorder.

Although people who experience happiness tend to have better psychological health, people who value happiness to an extreme tend to have worse psychological health, including more depression. We propose that the extreme valuing of happiness may be a general risk factor for mood disturbances, both depressive and manic. To test this hypothesis, we examined the relationship between the extreme val...