In collaboration with James Gross's psychophysiology lab, my lab has just published a shocker in the field o psychophysiology (Autonomic Nervous System Acitivity During Positive Emotions: A Meta-Analytic Review).
There has been a long debate about what specific physiological changes occur to the body during various positive emotions. And there are so many positive emotions in our life: awe, contentment, craving, excitement, gratitude, kama muta, pride, or sexual desire. We scrutinized the available literature and found nothing exciting. Nothing congruent. A myriad of different responses mostly weak difficult to synthesize conclusively. Many of them insignificant. The only, albeit weak promiss for stenic action-related emotions such as enthusiasm. This spine-chiller will surely be a call to change what we think about the physiology of positive emotions.
Moreover, we present that many studies focused on some positive emotions (mostly amusement) and some physiological responses (mainly heart rate and blood pressure)—few covered other areas of human experience. So let's give up watching funny cats and get down in our labs to a more profound positive experience! I firmly believe that despite these null results, there are positive things to be discovered in the field of positive emotions' physiology.
As I am somewhat sentimental, this text is also important because it is a very distant result and a particular milestone - of what we started doing here in 2003 with Prof. Helena Sęk, when we got interested in the physiology of positive emotions inspired by Barbara Fredrickson's work. This subject has become the main focus of my lab over the last dozen years, and hopefully, it will be so over the following decades.
Grab the paper as it is open-access!
There has been a long debate about what specific physiological changes occur to the body during various positive emotions. And there are so many positive emotions in our life: awe, contentment, craving, excitement, gratitude, kama muta, pride, or sexual desire. We scrutinized the available literature and found nothing exciting. Nothing congruent. A myriad of different responses mostly weak difficult to synthesize conclusively. Many of them insignificant. The only, albeit weak promiss for stenic action-related emotions such as enthusiasm. This spine-chiller will surely be a call to change what we think about the physiology of positive emotions.
Moreover, we present that many studies focused on some positive emotions (mostly amusement) and some physiological responses (mainly heart rate and blood pressure)—few covered other areas of human experience. So let's give up watching funny cats and get down in our labs to a more profound positive experience! I firmly believe that despite these null results, there are positive things to be discovered in the field of positive emotions' physiology.
As I am somewhat sentimental, this text is also important because it is a very distant result and a particular milestone - of what we started doing here in 2003 with Prof. Helena Sęk, when we got interested in the physiology of positive emotions inspired by Barbara Fredrickson's work. This subject has become the main focus of my lab over the last dozen years, and hopefully, it will be so over the following decades.
Grab the paper as it is open-access!
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