Positive Emotions

When people talk about emotions, they usually mean the difficult ones: anxiety, anger, sadness, shame. Those are the feelings that send people looking for help, and they take up most of the space in books and conversations about emotional life.

But there’s a whole other side of emotional life that gets far less attention. Hope when things are hard. Pride after doing something well. Wonder at a night sky. The pull of curiosity. The warmth of being kind, or of being loved. These feelings are quieter than joy and more varied than happiness, and they matter more than most of us realize.

This guide is about those positive emotions: what they are, what they do for us, and how to make more room for them.

More than happiness

The psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, one of the leading researchers on positive emotions, focuses on ten that people commonly feel:

• Joy: delight when something good happens.
• Gratitude: appreciation for something good that came from outside yourself.
• Serenity: a calm, settled contentment.
• Interest: curiosity and fascination that draw you to explore.
• Hope: the belief that things can get better, even when they’re hard.
• Pride: satisfaction in something you’ve achieved.
• Amusement: the lightness of finding something funny.
• Inspiration: being moved by excellence or goodness in others.
• Awe: the feeling of encountering something vast that you can’t easily take in.
• Love: warmth and connection with others, which often holds all the others within it.

Joy, gratitude, serenity and amusement are covered in How to Be Happy and the guides linked from it. This guide focuses on the others.

What positive emotions do

They broaden and build

Negative emotions narrow our attention. Fear focuses you on the threat, anger on the obstacle. That’s useful in an emergency. Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions do the opposite: they widen attention, making people more open, creative and willing to explore.

Over time, she argues, that openness builds lasting resources: friendships, skills, knowledge and resilience. A child who feels safe and curious explores more and learns more. An adult who feels hopeful tries more and achieves more. Positive emotions may be fleeting, but what they help build can last.

They help the body recover from stress

In experiments by Fredrickson and Robert Levenson, people who were shown a stressful film and then a film that brought on contentment or amusement recovered from the stress, measured in heart rate and blood pressure, faster than those who saw a neutral or sad film. They called this the undoing effect: positive emotions may help undo the physical effects of stress.

They connect us to others

Many positive emotions are social. Love, kindness, gratitude and shared laughter draw people together. Fredrickson describes love not only as a long-term bond but as moments of shared warmth between people, which she calls positivity resonance.

A word of caution

Some popular ideas about positive emotions have gone too far. A once-famous claim that people need a precise ratio of about three positive emotions to every negative one in order to flourish was strongly criticized and later withdrawn as a precise figure. There’s no magic number. Nor is there any need to feel positive all the time. Positive emotions grow best alongside difficult ones, not in place of them.

The positive emotions in this guide

Hope

Hope is what keeps people going when things are hard. It isn’t simple optimism, the belief that everything will turn out fine, but the sense that there are ways forward and that you can take them. Feeling Hopeless? How to Find Hope Again looks at how to rebuild it when it’s been lost.

Pride

Pride has a mixed reputation, but the healthy kind, satisfaction in effort and achievement, motivates people and helps them persevere. Many people find it surprisingly hard to feel. How to Feel Proud of Yourself explores why, and what helps.

Awe

Awe is the feeling we have in the presence of something vast: mountains, oceans, a newborn baby, great music, the night sky. Research suggests it makes people feel smaller in a good way, more connected and more generous. See What Is Awe and Why Is It Good for You?

Interest and curiosity

Curiosity is the pull toward the new and the unknown. It drives learning, makes life more interesting and can even help relationships. Why Is Curiosity Important? looks at the research.

Love and kindness

Love is at the heart of human life. One of the most direct ways to feel it is to give it: through kindness, generosity and care. Research consistently finds that being kind benefits the giver as well as the receiver. Why Is Kindness Important? explains why.

Inspiration

Inspiration is the feeling of being moved and lifted by someone else’s excellence or goodness: a great performance, an act of courage, a story of someone overcoming the odds. Research by Todd Thrash and Andrew Elliot suggests that inspiration is linked to creativity and progress toward goals. You can invite it by spending time with work and people you admire.

How to feel more positive emotions

• Notice them. Positive emotions are often quieter than negative ones, and easy to miss. Pausing to notice a moment of hope, pride or wonder makes it stronger.
• Seek out their sources. Time in nature for awe and serenity. New experiences for interest. Time with people you love for love and amusement. Meaningful goals for hope and pride.
• Share them. Telling others about good moments strengthens the feeling and the connection.
• Don’t force them. Trying too hard to feel positive tends to backfire. Make room for good feelings rather than demanding them.
• Accept the hard feelings too. People who accept their difficult emotions tend to have more space for positive ones.

A small practice

At the end of each day this week, look at the list of ten positive emotions above and ask: which of these did I feel today, even briefly? Write down the emotion and the moment. By the end of the week, you’ll know which ones come easily to you and which you might want to make more room for.

For more on how emotions work, see How to Understand Your Emotions.