Does Happiness Lead to Success? Part 7
There is Experimental Evidence for Positive Affect Leading to Behaviours Paralleling Success
Positive perceptions of self and others
Self Perceptions
Induced positive emotions have a causal effect on positive self feelings. If you can induce a positive mood then you are more likely to describe yourself in positive terms, assess yourself as having superior task performance, have more favourable global self evaluations, recall more positive experiences and success in your past.
Happy moods improve feelings of self efficacy and while you are in a happy mood you will more likely set higher goals for yourself. Induced positive moods lead you to expect more success at tasks.
Positive moods lead you to attribute successes to stable factors within yourself and this is an essential part of being optimistic.
Perceptions, memories, and judgements of others
Positive affect promotes a liking and fondness for others and is associated with recollections of positive information about particular people.
Sociability and Activity
Sociability and extraversion
When you induced positive moods you will be more sociable and more likely to initiate a conversation with others and be more attentive to them.
Positive affect may increase feelings of energy for engaging in social interaction and raise expectations for rewards from communication. Therefore when people feel happy they seek out social interaction because the interactions are perceived as rich and rewarding.
Social Interaction, activity and energy
When you induced feelings of happiness you are likely to show greater interest in leisure activities, eating good meals, planning trips, going to a party, sporting events, rock climbing, shopping. Pleasant moods boost activity, energy and involvement in active leisure.
Enjoyment of activities and social interactions
You are more likely to enjoy activities and social interactions, and get satisfaction from them if you are in a pleasant mood. Induced pleasant mood causes people to get greater enjoyment from whatever tasks they do. Groups in a positive mood take more pleasure in group negotiation.
Summary
Transient happy moods lead you to seek out others and engage with the environment at large, to be more venturesome, open, and sensitive to others. There is increased perception of closeness with others, increased activity and physical arousal, and are more likely to have excited, affectionate, and affiliative feelings.
Additionally there are higher levels of energy to be had. Both positive affect and a feeling of liveliness and energy are aspects of extraversion.
Negotiation and Conflict resolution
Pleasant moods boost ones abilities to resolve conflict. Positive affect decreases the preference for resolving conflict by avoidance and increases reduction in conflict by using a collaborative approach. Induced positive mood makes it more likely that concessions will be made in face to face negotiations and that there will be weaker preference for avoidance and competition.
Prosocial Behaviour
Pleasant moods stimulate people to be more charitable, altruistic and generous and happy moods increase the likelihood and amount of helping.
Happy moods promote behaviours such as contributing money to charity, or to needy children, donating blood, volunteering for extra tasks.
Interestingly negative moods also promote helping especially if the helping promises to improve ones mood, and when the negative mood does not lead to a self preoccupation. Positive moods lead to helping in the majority of circumstances and negative moods lead to helping under specific conditions – when the rewards for helping are high and the costs are low.
Happy moods increase the liking for others and enhance ones sense of sharing ones good fortune. People in good moods anticipate positive outcomes and rewards for helping. They are more likely to recall positive aspects of helping in the past, view themselves as generous people, feel more confident, efficacious, resource laden, in control and optimistic about their ability to help.
Physical Wellbeing and Coping
Health Perceptions
Induced happy moods causes an increase in pain thresholds, lower blood pressure reactivity to stress and may boost health by improving self efficacy, optimism and efforts to battle illness.
Healthy Behaviour
Positive moods help exert willpower and self control over unhealthy or harmful urges and addictions.
Immunity
Watching a humorous movie can increase immunity. It is well known that negative moods can decrease immunity.
Creativity and Problem Solving
Flexibility and Originality
Induced positive moods lead to increased scores of originality and flexibility which is often labelled as creativity.
Also note that people in sad moods are more original than those in neutral moods but the positive group shows the most original responses.
Is Positive Affect a Magic Potion?
At times happiness will be the most adaptive response but there may be times when we need some level of discontent or misery. An exclusively happy life is unrealistic and may not be the most desirable.
Specific dissatisfactions can motivate happy people to work for change and pursue new directions. People who are happy with their lives may be dissatisfied with societal conditions. The two are distinct and the characteristics of the happy person are those that can help them improve others lives.
Do Happy People Have Negative Emotions?
Happy people experience negative emotions and this helps them be more successful as they are more approach focussed. They remain in a positive mood when things are good or in neutral but experience negative mood when things are very bad. Thus motivating them to withdraw, conserve resources and avoid harm.
The negative affect around bad events causes change in thoughts feelings and behaviours. We quit our rule of thumb mental processing and use vigilant and analytical processing instead. We then safeguard resources and focus on solving the immediate problem.
Happiness could be considered a density function. People vary in how much they are in a state of positive experience. Frequent positive experience is functionally beneficial but so is an ability to to react to negative experience.
Even the happiest individuals experience unhappiness sometimes. There is always ups and downs but happy people seem to be in the positive zone most of the time.
They can feel sad, anxious, or discouraged in response to negative feedback on performance. In everyday life, happy people react to negative events when appropriate but later return to a positive state.
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