Abstract
BackgroundThe relationships between positive and negative emotional experience and physical and psychological well-being have been well-documented. The present study examines the prospective positive relationship between concurrent positive and negative emotional experience and psychological well-being in the context of psychotherapy.Methods47 adults undergoing psychotherapy completed measures of psychological well-being and wrote private narratives that were coded by trained raters for emotional content.ResultsThe specific concurrent experience of happiness and sadness was associated with improvements in psychological well-being above and beyond the impact of the passage of time, personality traits, or the independent effects of happiness and sadness. Changes in mixed emotional experience preceded improvements in well-being.ConclusionsExperiencing happiness alongside sadness in psychotherapy may be a harbinger of improvement in psychological well-being.
Highlights
The respective benefits and drawbacks of positive and negative emotional experience on physical and psychological well-being have been well documented [1,2,3]
A notable exception is the co-activation model of health proposed by Larsen and colleagues [4], which holds that experiencing positive emotions concurrently with negative emotions may detoxify them, transforming a negative emotional experience into fodder for meaningmaking and subsequently enhanced well-being
We investigated whether mixed emotional experience – the concurrent experience of happiness and sadness – prospectively benefits improvement in psychological well-being
Summary
The respective benefits and drawbacks of positive and negative emotional experience on physical and psychological well-being have been well documented [1,2,3]. We investigated whether mixed emotional experience – the concurrent experience of happiness and sadness – prospectively benefits improvement in psychological well-being. The context for this investigation was a naturalistic longitudinal study of psychotherapy in an outpatient clinic. The present study aims to demonstrate that concurrent happiness and sadness may temporally precede improvements in psychological well-being in the context of psychotherapy While this emphasis necessarily restricts the generalizability of this study to the psychotherapeutic context, the current work may have implications for the basic scientific understanding of mixed emotional experience as well as for influencing psychotherapeutic practice. The present study examines the prospective positive relationship between concurrent positive and negative emotional experience and psychological well-being in the context of psychotherapy
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
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 callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
