![]() These resources can be cognitive, like the ability to mindfully attend to the present moment psychological, like the ability to maintain a sense of mastery over environmental challenges social, like the ability to give and receive emotional support or physical, like the ability to ward off the common cold. In turn, these broadened outlooks often help people to discover and build consequential personal resources. How do they do this? How do people’s fleeting and subtle pleasant states pave the way to their later success, health, and longevity? Fredrickson’s (1998) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions outlines a possible path: Because positive emotions arise in response to diffuse opportunities, rather than narrowly-focused threats, positive emotions momentarily broaden people’s attention and thinking, enabling them to draw on higher-level connections and a wider-than-usual range of percepts or ideas. Indeed, a recent meta-analysis of nearly 300 findings concluded that positive emotions produce success and health as much as they reflect these good outcomes ( Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). People who experience frequent positive emotions have even been shown to live longer ( Danner, Snowdon, & Friesen, 2001 Moskowitz, 2003 Ostir, Markides, Black, & Goodwin, 2000). Yet on the other hand, research indicates that positive emotions contribute to important downstream life outcomes, including friendship development ( Waugh & Fredrickson, 2006), marital satisfaction ( Harker & Keltner, 2001), higher incomes ( Diener, Nickerson, Lucus, & Sandvik, 2002), and better physical health ( Doyle, Gentile, & Cohen, 2006 Richman et al., 2005). Moreover, positive emotions are less intense and less attention-grabbing than negative emotions ( Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001) and are more diffuse ( Ellsworth & Smith, 1988). On one hand, they are fleeting: Like any emotional state, feelings of joy, gratitude, interest, and contentment typically last only a matter of minutes. ![]() Discussion centers on how positive emotions are the mechanism of change for the type of mind-training practice studied here and how loving-kindness meditation is an intervention strategy that produces positive emotions in a way that outpaces the hedonic treadmill effect.Ī paradox surrounds positive emotions. In turn, these increments in personal resources predicted increased life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms. ![]() Results showed that this meditation practice produced increases over time in daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, produced increases in a wide range of personal resources (e.g., increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms). The authors tested this build hypothesis in a field experiment with working adults ( n = 139), half of whom were randomly-assigned to begin a practice of loving-kindness meditation. ![]() Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions asserts that people’s daily experiences of positive emotions compound over time to build a variety of consequential personal resources. ![]()
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