Concept Essay: Positive Emotion

Jingwen Li

Concept Essay

ENG 150

10/6/2015

Positive Emotion

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller.

Emotion is something that people cannot see and touch, but it accompanies people every day. People are quite familiar with it and they use it, enjoy it and control it. However, there will still be some people who wonder what emotion is. According to Dictionary.com, emotion is defined as “an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness” (emotion). As part of emotion, positive emotion is an essential factor in people’s lives. Positive emotions have the antecedent, a role of signaling happiness, and a function to approaching actions that are going to be stated.

An emotion begins with an individual’s assessment of the personal meaning of some antecedent event – what Lazarus

(1991) called the person-environment relationship, or adaptational encounter. Either conscious or unconscious, this appraisal process triggers a cascade of response tendencies manifested across loosely coupled component systems, such as subjective experience, facial expressions, and physiological changes. Same as positive emotion, it also comes out by this way. Joy, happiness, and love appears when something people like happens. By assessing the

personal meaning of events, positive emotion will come to people.
Positive emotions play a role of marking flourishing, or optimal well-being. Positive emotions serve as markers of flourishing, or optimal well-being. Certainly moments in people’s lives characterized by experiences of positive emotions-such as joy, interest, contentment, love, and the like—are moments in which they are not plagued by negative emotions – such as anxiety, sadness, anger, and despair. Consistent with this intuition, the overall balance of people’s positive and negative emotions have been shown to predict their judgments of subjective well-being. Building on this finding, Kahneman suggested that “objective happiness” can best be measured by tracking people’s momentary experiences of good and bad feelings. According to this perspective, positive emotions signal flourishing.
Positive emotions have a function that approaching behaviors or continued actions.

Broaden-and-build theory is an alternative model, which was developed by Fredrickson, to catch positive emotion effects. The reason why it is called broaden-and-build is that positive emotions appear to broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertories and build their enduring personal resources. To support the idea, the general question of whether specific positive emotions differentially motivate particular behaviors was tested by CAVANAUGH, L. A., BETTMAN, J. R., and LUCE, M. F.. By testing the novel hypothesis that specific positive emotions may have different effects on prosocial behavior directed toward close versus distant others. The result finally shows that positive emotion will affect people’s behavior and

action.

By assessing the personal meaning of events, emotion comes up. What’s more, positive emotions have not only a role of marking happiness, but also a function to continue

behaviors.