Positive emotions part 1 Flashcards
How do we go about defining happiness in the hedonic tradition according to Aristippus
Aristippus: not just sensual pleasure
• Pursuit and achievement of pleasure
• Aristippus → intellectual, sensory pleasures
• Followers → emphasize the sensual pleasures, food, drinks, sex
How do we go about defining happiness in the hedonic tradition according to Freud
Freud: sexuality and aggression
• Happiness was achieved in individuals who are able to love and to work
What is most modern research in the hedonic tradition about
happiness, or subjective well-being (SWB)
• Asking people how happy they are
How do we go about defining happiness in the Eudaimonic tradition according to Aristotle?
Aristotle: life of moral, intellectual virtue
• Moral virtue → practicing moral behaviour
• Intellectual virtues → wisdom, knowledge, through teaching
• Not the emotion of happiness but leading a good life
How do we go about defining happiness in the Eudaimonic tradition according to Rogers and Maslow?
Rodgers, Maslow
• Humanist
• Leading a life that has meaning, purpose, value, contributes to the well-being of those around us
How do we go about defining happiness in Process theories according to Csikszentmihalyi
autotelic activities → flow, engaged in for their own sake with no expectation that they will lead to a goal or personal payback
• Not happy when engaged in flow activities but result of those activities
How do we go about defining happiness in Process theories according to Snyder?
Snyder: hope = goal expectancy
• Hope was the source of happiness
what is Meaningfulness as goal selection?
• Central process of happiness is creating meaning in ones life
Who is Ed Diener?
- Past president of APS
* Current president of IPPA (International Positive Psychology Association)
What is objective well-being?
→ income, health status, employment, economic and social measures
What is subjective well being?
→ assessed in some European countries, and UN movement
o Positive affect → high levels
o Negative affect → low levels
o Assessing positive and negative ratio
Are Measures of positive and negative affect are highly negatively coordinated with each other ?
NO, they are separate dimensions which must be measured separately
What is life satisfaction?
→ how happy are you with various parts of your life
→ Different domains which are assessed and given a number
→ Cognitive component
What is PANAS? what are the positive and negative emotions
- Developed by Morgan and Clark
- 20 item, 5-choice Likert scale
- Positive emotions: interested, excited, strong, enthusiastic, proud, alert, inspired, determined, attentive, active
- Negative emotions: distressed, upset, guilty, scared, hostile, irritable, ashamed, nervous, jittery, afraid
What is PANAS-X (positive, negative and other emotions scales)
Much bigger scale
- 60 item, 5 choice Likert scale
• 11 scales based on factor analysis of positive emotions
Positive emotion scales
• Joviality (8), Self-assurance(6), Attentiveness (4)
Negative emotion scales:
• Fear (6), Hostility (6), Guilt (6):
Sadness (5)
Other affective scales
• Shyness (4), Fatigue (4), Serenity(3), Surprise (3)
what is the subjective happiness scale? (SHS)
- Lyubomirsky & Lepper (1999)
- 4 items, 7-choice Likert scale – choices vary
- “In general, I consider myself…”: not a very happy person…A very happy person
- “Compared to most peers, I consider myself…”: Less happy….More happy
What is the satisfaction with life scale?
- Diener et al (1985)
- 5 items, 7-choice Likert scale (Strongly agree…Strongly disagree)
- In most ways, my life is close to my ideal
- The conditions of my life are excellent
- I am satisfied with my life
etc.
what is trait happiness?
tendency to maintain a particular, generally stable, consistent level of happiness throughout life
• Reflection of personality
• Typically what we measure
whats the difference between trait happiness adn state?
state (daily variations around the average)
- Most of the research based on trait happiness
- Significant life events cause changes in state happiness → those levels generally trend back up or down towards the average
- Lottery vs. recent paraplegics → within a few months their level of happiness had returned to their pre-event level of happiness
What is the amount of time it takes to adapt to certain life events / to return to baseline happiness (marriage, widowhood, divorce, unemployment, long-term disability)
- Marriage: 2 years (boost → return to baseline)
- Widowhood: 8 years (takes a bit longer, for women)
- Divorce: long-term effects
- Unemployment: long-term effects
- Long-term disability: 8 years
How do you measure SWB in children?
- PANAS-C (C for children)
- 6 or 7 - 18yrs
Other scales - Students’ life satisfaction scale
- Multidimensional students’ life satisfaction scale
What are the dimensions in the Multidimensional students’ life satisfaction scale?
1) Family
2) Friends
3) Self (what you think about yourself)
4) Living environment
5) School
How does LS correlate with life events?
- Positive daily events: r = .39
- Negative daily events: r =-.39
- Positive major events: r =.30
- Negative major events: r = -.22
what personal attributes are correlated with life satisfaction
- Self-esteem
- Internal locus of control
- Emotionally stable temperament → no correlation in adults but yes in children
- Attribution style
- Unrelated to IQ
What is an Internal locus of control
→ personal sense we have of who is control of us, internal locus of control is that we are in charge of our lives → Maslow’s HONESTY, we are in control of our decisions not extrinsic factors of control
What attribution style goes along with life satisfaction?
→ why events have taken place
• Optimism/pessimism
• Best when we attribute good things to ourselves
• Interpret Good events as stable, internal, global → contusive to our happiness
• Bad events → due to things external to ourselves
• unstable, external, local
What characteristics are present in children who had warm, attentive parenting?
- Social competence → more friends, better able to maintain friendships and a wider social circle
- Lower levels of both internalizing and externalizing behaviours
What are internalizing and externalizing behaviours?
1) Externalizing problems: acting out
2) Internalizing: anxiety depression
What are causal mechanisms for warm relationship between mother and child?
• Child’s own Temperament → leaves the parent to behave in a warmer parenting style
• Continuity of caregiving quality → 15-18 months of positive parenting, if it later declines relationship does not change
• Emotion regulation styles
→ Bring out warm and successful parenting (Parenting = effect)
• Internal working model
→ model for all future relationships
Huebner found that for children 10-13 LS was more related to what?
LS more related to satisfaction with family than to friends; no relation to demographics, or grades → role of peers becomes as important later on
what did Amata (1994) find made individual contributions to LS?
emotional closeness to mothers, fathers, make independent contributions to LS / SWB
what did Demo & Alcock (1996) find was the strongest predictor of adolescent well-being
mother-adolescent disagreement
• Difficulty → mother and daughter
Does having children effect SWB?
→ answer is not clear
- Childlessness by choice has no negative impact on SWB
direction
→ being happy could have lead to the couples having more children, children might not add to the happiness
What is the effect of SWB for only children?
- Only children do not have lower SWB; may have higher SWB → believed that only children were at a disadvantage as they do not have siblings to interact with, in fact if the trend in the literature is correct, it is more likely that only children may have higher SWB
• Only child full recipient of parental attention
• Increased quality of parenting
What is the effect on SWB for first borns?
- First born tend to come out very well compared with later born in an extended family → time spent with parents
what did Polit and falco find about only children adn middle children
only children better psychological adjustment than middle children → middle children tend to have more difficult time adjusting
Low warmth, high hostility = ?
= lower SWB, more externalizing, poorer peer relationships
• Negative relationship with siblings = ?
negative impact on SWB, high levels of acting out and poor peer relationships
Sibling favouritism =
lower SWB, emotional and behavioural problems
• If parents, in the eyes of the child, have favouritism
→ Externalizing behaviour in less favourite child
→ Typical in sibling dyads
what is the effect of marriage on SWB?
higher SWB than single, divorced
- Greater emotional commitment to the relationship = greater SWB
- Less benefit in collectivist countries
Why is there a positive effect of marriage on SWB
- SWB may influence events in marriage → higher SWB may lead to more positive events in marriage
- Higher SWB = greater chance of marriage → different causation?
- Marriage = emotional support, financial support, less stress and higher levels of satisfaction
- Social support for marriage → people who are married are looked upon more nicely by society
what did Lucas (2005) find in a sample of 30,000 German with regards to marriage and SWB?
- Those who got married, stayed married had higher SWB long before marriage
- After two years of marriage you return to normal levels of SWB
How does extraversion relate to positive affect and SWB?
pos. correlation with PA and SWB
What is neuroticism associated with?
→ associated with depression, anxiety
- positive correlation w negative affect
- neg correlation w SWB
How does agreeableness relate to positive and negative affect?
- pos correlation with positive affect
- neg correlation w neg affect
what is h2
measure to which the variability can be associated with variability of the genomes in some population
What did Telegan et al find about the heritability of PA, NA and SWB in MZ and DZ twins reared together or apart?
- Positive affect: h2 = .40
- Negative affect h2 = .55
- Well-being: h2 = .48
What did Roysamb et al (2002): adult MZ and DZ twins find
- Global SWB: h2 = .46 (males); .54 (females)
- No influence of shared environment → only component of importance was non shared → linked to positive daily events that the individual experiences
What did Stubbe et al (2005) find about adult MZ and DZ twins vs. siblings
- Life satisfaction: h2 = .38
* All effects non-additive
Overall is SWB heritable
- Seems to be some genetic components
- Expected to be higher in our society as we have unique non-shared environments
