“The paper provides preliminary evidence that persons who more often experience positive emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm, and calmness, are less likely to develop a range of diseases, live longer, and experience fewer symptoms and less pain.”

There has been considerable discussion of the potential role of positive emotions in behavior and health over the last few years. Particularly in relation to health, there has been no real attempt to address whether the existing literature supported this emphasis, nor any discussions of the nature of evidence that would be convincing. Our review attempted to fill these voids.

The review paper is essentially a synthesis of knowledge with an emphasis on clarifying concepts and improving methodologies for those interested in doing future research in the field.

The paper provides preliminary evidence that persons who more often experience positive emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm, and calmness, are less likely to develop a range of diseases, live longer, and experience fewer symptoms and less pain.

Dr. Cohen had conducted some earlier research in this area and we were interested in to what extent the broader existing literature was consistent with his conclusions. One particular obstacle in synthesizing the research was how to conceptualize positive affect. Almost every researcher has a different idea on how to measure it and as a result, it was difficult to understand which types of positive emotions were responsible for any found health effects.

It is really too early to say. Additional work clarifying some of the ambiguities and possible alternative explanations needs to be done. Moreover, we need to know more about the extent to which stable individual differences in the experience of positive emotions can be changed by intervention.