Positive Psychology Sept 16: Quick Summary/Talking Points – Jack Haselhorst (sorry, it’s long)

1. Tsai (2017) Ideal affect in daily life: implications for affective experience, health and
social behavior.
- Ideal affect is “the affective states that people value and ideally want to feel” (p. 118)
- Actual affect is what people are actually feeling
o Tsai’s research shows that there is a difference between ideal and actual affect in
that “most people want to feel more positive than negative, and they want to feel
more positive and less negative than they actually feel” (p. 118)
- Tsai utilized Affect Valuation Theory, or AVT, to explore how ideal affect shapes different
affective experiences. AVT has 3 proponents to it:
o Suggests that how people want to feel is different from what they are actually
feeling
o Cultural factors have more power in shaping ideal affect as compared to actual
affect. On the other hand, temperamental factors have more significance in
shaping people’s actual affect as compared to their ideal affect
o Ideal affect has great influence in what people decide to do in their daily lives
- HAP: high arousal positive states; excitement, enthusiasm, elation, etc.
- LAP: low arousal positive states; calm, peacefulness, serenity, etc.
- While there was a lot of research/experiments compiled into this study, a main takeaway
is that, due to cultural differences, European Americans typically want to feel “excited
states” (HAP) and Hong Kong Chinese typically want to feel “calm states” (LAP).
o These cultural discrepancies can be extended to a broader understanding of
cultural differences via independent vs. interdependent modes of self
 “… independent contexts emphasize influencing others (i.e. altering one’s
environment so that it is consistent with one’s personal beliefs and
preferences)” (p. 119). Since changing your environment involves action,
and for action to take place there must be physiological arousal, the more
people want to make those changes and influence others the more they
tend to value HAP.
 Interdependent contexts instead emphasize adjusting to others (i.e.
making one’s personal beliefs and values consistent with the surrounding
environment). “Because adjusting to others involves suspended action in
order to assess what the environment demands, and suspended action
 requires decreases in physiological arousal, the more people want to
adjust to others” (p. 119)

2. Fredrickson, B.L. (2009) Positivity

- Positivity is necessary for flourishing in life
- There are ten aspects of positivity: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride,
amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.
o Aside from love, the first 9 aspects are listed in order of relative frequency
starting with the most widely experienced positive emotions to the least
experienced positive emotions

3. Fredrickson, B.L. (2001) The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology

- Broaden-and-build theory: “… states that certain positive emotions—including joy,
interest, contentment, pride, and love—although phenomenologically distinct, all share
the ability to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires and build their
enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social
and psychological resources” (p. 219)
- Positive emotions are thought of as indicators of optimal well-being but may also be able
to produce flourishing
- Emotions are defined as: “multicomponent response tendencies that unfold over
relatively short time spans” (p. 218)
o Emotions start as a response/assessment to a certain stimulus. This appraisal
results in either unconscious/conscious activation of response tendencies
expressed through a variety of physiological/cognitive systems (heart rate
change, subject experience processing, facial expressions, etc.)
- Affect = consciously accessible feelings
- Emotions differ from affect in that they are about some “personally, meaningful
circumstance” while affect is usually “free-floating or objectless” (p. 218).
o Additionally, emotions are typically brief while affective states are more long
lasting
o Emotions are put into discrete categories (joy, fear, etc.) while affect is seen along
a spectrum of positive and negative emotional activation
 - Emotions are linked to the concept of specific action tendencies: emotions bring out a
certain collection of ideas about “possible courses of action [that] narrow in on a specific
set of behavioral options” (p. 219)
o Action tendencies associated with positive emotions tend to be vague or not
specified
- Action tendencies associated with negative emotions narrow momentary thought-action
repertoires; action tendencies associated with positive emotions broaden momentary
thought-action repertoires
o Joy: urge to play
o Interest: urge to explore
o Contentment: urge to savor current life circumstances
o Pride: urge to share news of achievement with others
o Love: creates recurring cycles of urges to play, explore, savor, and share
achievements with loved ones
- The undoing hypothesis: positive emotions have the power to correct or undo the effects
of negative emotions

A Couple of Talking Points/Questions

1. Regarding ideal vs. actual affect, what are some issues that may arise when basing data
off of cultural factors? What further research needs to be done to counter these issues?
2. Why do you think that some of the positive emotions listed are experienced less
frequently than others?
3. What is the place of specific action-tendencies when associated with negative emotions?
Are those negative thought-action repertoires any less valuable than positive thought-
action repertoires?