Positive emotions are known to be helpful in times of stress by buffering resilient individuals from negative effects of stress and speeding physical and psychological recovery from stress. But less is known about the mechanisms that explain these effects. In the present study, we sought to answer the following question: How do positive emotions influence recovery from stress when thinking about a stressor?

Hypothesis: Because positive emotions broaden the same cognitive resources that are thought to facilitate recovery from stress when individuals are thinking about a stressor, we expect that positive emotions improve recovery from stress when individuals are thinking about a stressor.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

Failure: Participants ostensibly failed an (impossible) anagram task alongside a confederate, who ultimately “successfully completed” the task.

Emotional Context/Regulation Manipulation: While viewing either a positive or neutral video, participants were asked to think about the task either with the goal of decreasing negative emotion (reappraisal) or with no particular goal (reflect).

Thought listing: Participants listed each thought they had during the emotion regulation task.  Then they indicated how each thought made them feel (more or less negative, or did not change how negative they felt).

ANALYSIS AND IMPACT

 

Key findings:

• When individuals reflected about a recent failure, induced positive emotion facilitated recovery from stress.
• These findings emphasize the importance of the emotional context in which reflection occurs. If an individual is going to spend time thinking about a negative event, the context in which this takes place could drastically change the way he or she feels.
• When individuals reappraised the failure experience, positive emotions did not facilitate recovery from stress.
• Because reappraisal has an explicit emotion regulatory goal and specific instructions that direct an individual toward adaptive cognitive thoughts processes, the associated broadened cognitive state may have less of an impact on reappraisal.
• Even though reappraisal and reflection in a positive context led to similar decreases in negative emotion, each strategy appears to be accomplishing emotion regulation through different means, as evidenced by differences in patterns of thought.
• Although induced positive emotion in the no instruction condition was sometimes effective in prompting recovery from stress, these effects are less consistent and reliable than reappraisal and reflection.