Positive Feeling

and Positive
Character
Matt Cohen
Katie Kerrigan
Sammy Mintzer
Grant Bishop
Chapters 1-3
Questions
1. Why should we care about this research?

1. What is important for an undergraduate now
and in the future?

1. How does this research impact career
choices and careers in general?
Positive Feeling and Positive
Character
1932, sisters Cecilia OPayne and
Marguerite Donnelly write short sketch of
their lives
Very happy Eager joy
Duchenne Smile
Genuine, corners of your mouth turn up and the
skin around the corners of your eyes crinkles.

How Psychology Lost Its Way And I Found
Mine
Diagnosis v. Prevention
Field of psychology mainly focused on diagnosis of
mental illness
Learned helplessness
Goal in becoming APA president is to re-shift focus to
prevention/the good life
Identifying and utilizing strengths and virtues-
make life worth living
Why Bother to Be Happy?
Evolution and Positive Feeling
Positive feelings about a person or an object encourage us to approach it,
whereas negative feelings make us avoid it
Purpose of negative emotions- first line of defense against external threats
Example: fear is a negative emotion that signals to us that danger is lurking
But why do we have positive emotion?
Research shows that there is a personality trait of bubbliness and
cheerfulness called positive affectivity
Positive and negative affectivity can be measured with the PANAS scale
The amount of positive and negative affectivity that one has is genetically
predisposed; However, natural selection has plenty of uses for people with
both negative and positive affectivity

Intellectual Broadening and Building
Barbara Fredrickson found the purpose of positive emotion in evolution:
Positive emotions broaden our intellectual, physical, and social resources
People tend to like positive people better
The mental set of people with positive emotions is expansive, tolerant, and
creative
They are open to new ideas, and more likely to be creative in fulfilling a
task

Happy but Dumb?
Depressed people often more accurate in their judgments about their own
skills and memories of events
However, in important, real-life decisions, happier people tend to be smarter
than unhappy people
When events are threatening, happy people are able to quickly adopt a
skeptical and analytic frame of mind
A positive mood jolts us into an entirely different way of thinking from a
negative mood


Building Resources
Physical resources
Productivity
When the bad things happen to happy people
Social resources
More friends
Married
Happiness and Win-Win: Evolution
Reconsidered
Questions
1. Why should we care about this research?

1. What is important for an undergraduate now
and in the future?

1. How does this research impact career
choices and careers in general?
Self-Assessment
What are some key advantages of being
happy?
In what ways would you consider yourself an
optimist?
Can one control the amount of positive
affectivity that he/she has?