Happiness Unpacked: Positive Emotions Increase Life Satisfaction by Building Resilience

By Michael A. Cohn, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Stephanie L. Brown, Joseph A. Mikels, A. Conway. Emotion, 2009

1,544 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Happiness – a composite of life satisfaction, coping resources, and positive emotions – predicts desirable life outcomes in many domains. The broaden-and-build theory suggests that this is because positive emotions help people build lasting resources. To test this hypothesis we measured emotions daily for one month in a sample of students (N=86) and assessed life satisfaction and trait resilience at the beginning and end of the month. Positive emotions predicted increases in both resilience and life satisfaction. Negative emotions had weak or null effects, and did not interfere with the benefits of positive emotions. Positive emotions also mediated the relation between baseline and final resilience, but life satisfaction did not. This suggests that it is in-the-moment positive emotions, and not more general positive evaluations of one’s life, that form the link between happiness and desirable life outcomes. Change in resilience mediated the relation between positive emotions and increased life satisfaction, suggesting that happy people become more satisfied not simply because they feel better, but because they develop resources for living well.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6059b76d64bcd03332f8e5dd55ea5c61669d42dd

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Citations in the corpus

Feeling Good Makes Us Stronger: How Team Resilience Mediates the Effect of Positive Emotions on Team Performance (2016, background): “First, it has been shown that positive emotions can boost resilience (Algoe and Fredrickson 2011; Cohn et al. 2009) and that people who are particularly adept at self-generating”
A diary study on the happy worker: How job resources relate to positive emotions and personal resources (2012, background): “Likewise, Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, Mikels, and Conway ( 2009 ) found in a daily study of 86 students that changes in resilience over a period of 1 month mediated the relation between positive emotions and life satisfaction.”
Enhancing wellbeing: An emerging model of the adaptive functions of music listening (2016, background): “…to Fredrickson’s (2004) Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions , regulation of negative affect and the regular cultivation of positive emotional states will enhance wellbeing by increasing resilience and building psychological resources (Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, Mikels, & Conway, 2009).”
Religion and Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Positive Emotions (2014, background): “…emotions have been shown to increase well-being by broadening thought-action repertoires and by building consequential psychological, social, and physical resources (Cohn et al. 2009; Fredrickson et al. 2008; for a review of the broaden-and-build-theory of positive emotions, see Fredrickson 2013).”
Sense of Humor, Stable Affect, and Psychological Well-Being (2014, background): “Peak ratings are recommended, rather than average ratings, because they can be recalled more accurately (Cohn et al., 2009).”
Personality and Heart Rate Variability: Exploring Pathways from Personality to Cardiac Coherence and Health (2013, background): “Their physiological coherence promotes resilience and maintains health (Bradley et al., 2010; Cloninger et al., 2012; Cohn et al., 2009).”
The bored mind is a guiding mind: toward a regulatory theory of boredom (2018, background): “It has been argued that interest helps to expand the self by broadening one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions (Cohn et al., 2009; Fredrickson, 2013) and consequently, it can eventually lead to the buildup of durable personal resources.”
Improving classroom Learning environments by cultivating Awareness and resilience in education (cAre (2011, background): “They also practice self-induction of positive emotions (Cohn et al., 2009) to promote resilience and help reappraise emotionally provocative situations.”
Changes in emotions and their interactions with personality in a vacation context (2014, methodology): “Second, the mDES Scale (Cohn et al., 2009) was used to capture people’s emotions during the course of a vacation.”