Don't Hide Your Happiness!

          The emerging field of positive psychology holds a relatively modern view that we should encourage making normal life more fulfilling and promote mental health, rather than concentrating solely on mental illness.   There are many practical applications of positive psychology, which include helping individuals and organizations use and identify their strengths to increase subjective levels of well-being.  Therapists, counselors, coaches, and even HR departments and business strategists use the positive psychology techniques.  A plethora of past research indicates that positive psychological functioning, meaning low levels of depressive symptoms, high self-esteem and general well-being, leads to beneficial outcomes. 

            In order to gain a better understanding of psychological functioning, Mauss, et al. (2011) conducted a study to examine how positive emotions can lead to better mental health.  They specifically concentrated on communication of the positive emotion: happiness.  Researchers predicted that a greater difference between a participant's rating of personal amusement during a funny video clip (‘experience’) and their facial expression of amusement (‘behavior’) would predict greater levels of depressive symptoms and lower levels of well-being.  Their reasoning for this was that communication is most effective when someone acts in congruence with how they feel.  For instance, communication is disrupted if a person fake-smiles when they are actually unhappy.  The researchers believed that this dissociation would lead to negative psychological functioning.

            In order to test this, the researchers first measured depressive symptoms and well-being.  Six months later, they conducted the experiment, which consisted of having 135 participants watch an amusing video clip and rating their positive emotion experience while professionals interpreted their positive emotional behavior by coding participants’ facial expressions.  Six months after the experiment, they measured depressive symptoms and well-being again.

            As predicted, a greater dissociation between emotional experience and behavior predicted higher levels of depressive symptoms and lower levels of well-being.  The dissociation even predicted a change in psychological functioning as those who had a greater difference in behavior and experience increased in depressive symptoms and decreased in well-being after six months.  The importance of these results lies in their implications for research on emotion regulation mechanisms.  In addition, there are immense benefits for longer-term relationships with other people.  Others might judge someone who acts in one way but experiences emotion another way as inauthentic and therefore lacking trustworthiness or predictability.  This has an impact on the quality and coordination of communication between two people.  In the end, positive emotions should be adaptive and accurately communicated to others.  This is an important piece of knowledge added to our understanding of how positive emotions lead to good outcomes.

Kylie Muratore