Abstract
Social and personality psychology have been criticized for overreliance on potentially biased self-report variables. In well-being science, researchers have called for more “objective” physiological and cognitive measures to evaluate the efficacy of well-being-increasing interventions. This may now be possible with the recent rise of cost-effective, commercially available wireless physiological recording devices and smartphone-based cognitive testing. We sought to determine whether cognitive and physiological measures, coupled with machine learning methods, could quantify the effects of positive interventions. The current 2-part study used a college sample (N = 245) to contrast the cognitive (memory, attention, construal) and physiological (autonomic, electroencephalogram) effects of engaging in one of two randomly assigned writing activities (i.e., prosocial or “antisocial”). In the prosocial condition, participants described an interaction when they acted in a kind way, then described an interaction when they received kindness. In the “antisocial” condition, participants wrote instead about an interaction when they acted in an unkind way and received unkindness, respectively. Our study replicated previous research on the beneficial effects of recalling prosocial experiences as assessed by self-report. However, we did not detect an effect of the positive or negative activity intervention on either cognitive or physiological measures. More research is needed to investigate under what conditions cognitive and physiological measures may be applicable, but our findings lead us to conclude that they should not be unilaterally favored over the traditional self-report approach.
Highlights
Most people report wanting to be happy (Diener, 2000) – that is, to feel satisfied with their lives and to experience frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions (Diener et al, 1999)
Change Across Negative Intervention represents the intercept when the positive intervention is coded as Pos = 1 and represents mean change in each DV across the negative intervention
Change Across Positive Intervention is the intercept when Pos = 0, and the Difference Between Intervention Conditions is the standardized regression coefficient that represents the effect of intervention condition. ∗Represents significance after Bonferroni correction
Summary
Most people report wanting to be happy (Diener, 2000) – that is, to feel satisfied with their lives and to experience frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions (Diener et al, 1999). Literature in the growing area of well-being science points toward positive activity interventions (PAIs), such as writing letters of gratitude (e.g., Emmons and McCullough, 2003; Lyubomirsky et al, 2011), and practicing kindness (e.g., Dunn et al, 2008; Chancellor et al, 2018), as simple behavioral strategies to promote well-being, many of which have been empirically validated (Sin and Lyubomirsky, 2009; Bolier et al, 2013; Layous and Lyubomirsky, 2014) These PAIs have the potential to improve affect, and in turn, promote positive health and well-being outcomes without the use of drugs, costly or stigmatizing treatment, or significant behavioral changes. For such interventions to become useful and trusted tools for clinical or public use, the ability to detect their efficacy is critical
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
