The Role of Emotion on Pathways to Positive Health

Abstract

Abstract Many of the core questions in affective science (e.g., Are there basic emotions? What are the antecedents and functions of emotion? How do individuals differ in emotional reactivity?) have developed without explicit connection to the realm of human health. Alternatively, when emotion has entered the health realm (e.g., Does anger increase cardiovascular risk? Is optimism protective?), it has frequently been with little connection to mainstream research in affective science. This separation is not a state of affairs to lament, but rather represents opportunities for the future in which the fields of emotion and health can enrich and extend each other. Our objective in this chapter is to bring the nexus between these realms into focus via discussion of five guiding premises for relating emotion to health. These serve as conceptual guideposts for examining past, current, and future empirical studies, and do so with an emphasis on testable hypotheses. The five premises are: (1) emotions consequential for health are about something; (2) health requires a focus on co-occurring discrete emotions; (3) health is biopsychosocial in nature and necessitates integration of phenomenology and neurophysiology; (4) cumulative, chronic emotions are consequential for health; and (5) emotion can be protective and promote positive health. Each premise is illustrated via separate substantive studies, although a unifying theme across them is the need for integrative endeavors that put together psychosocial experience, underlying biological mechanisms, and health outcomes. A second generic observation setting the stage for what follows is the relative paucity of knowledge about positive emotion-health linkages. Our goal is to bring greater attention to salubrious connections between affective experience and health, mental and physical. An emphasis on positive health, we note, does not translate simplistically to a focus on exclusively positive affective experience. As we will argue, one of the intriguing challenges of future work is to unearth basic processes whereby negative emotions, ubiquitous in human experience, can be transformed into benign, or even beneficial, influences on health. Finally, while we seek to underscore the positive health theme, much in our chapter deals with the role of emotion in illness as that is where most prior work has been conducted. In building connections between affective experience and health, we propose that it is particularly valuable to anchor emotion in the life contexts in which they occur. This is a call for greater emphasis on what gives rise to emotion. Ekman’s (1992) description of basic emotions emphasized that they “evolved for their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks” (p. 171).