(Originally posted January 2, 2024)
New year, new RIP! I hope that everyone has had a wonderful holiday season, and I’d like to kick the year off with something positive. Well, in a manner of speaking, I’d like to kick the year off by talking about positivity itself!
Over the years, I have heard many, many, many times that psychological science is a ridiculously diverse discipline, which is one thing that I absolutely love about the field. Take any given psychological topic, and you can study it through the lens of any number of subdisciplines. Are you interested in studying dating? You can study it through the lens of how romantic partners influence each other (social psych). You can study it by trying to figure out the different ways that people try to find a short- or long-term mate (evolutionary psych). You can study it through how people think about or understand their relationships with others (cognitive psych). You can study how relationships vary across time/space (cultural psych). You can study how relationship styles form and change throughout our lives (developmental psych). The list goes on and on. And that’s just talking about one particular slice of romantic relationships!
Many areas of psychology are cross-sub-disciplinary, in that you will find people in different areas of psychology working on the same problems, albeit from different perspectives or theoretical backgrounds. If you were to make a network/graph plot of psychology topics and subdisciplines, however, you would tend to find clusters of topics that tend to belong to a handful of subdisciplines. And, as such, you often won’t find too many social psychologists studying, for example, the neural or cognitive mechanisms involved in how we perceive color. Some topics, like smoking cessation, are skew heavily toward being studied by folks working in the areas of biopsychology, whereas things like stereotyping prejudice are more in the social/cognitive space. To be clear, there are still a handful of oddballs out there who add some serious skew to these distributions but, ultimately, the majority of topics are still by and large “controlled” by one or two subdisciplines.
One of the great exceptions to this trend, however, is the study of emotions. Emotions are one of the “big three” areas of Psychology, sometimes called the “ABC’s” of Psychology (i.e., Affect, Behavior, Cognition). Emotions are a deeply, deeply integral aspect of human experience, and the study of emotions defies the conventional boundaries of psychology subdisciplines, and really, the boundaries of Psychology itself. The study of emotions transcends the confines of social psychology, cognitive psychology, or any single field. Put simply: everyone is interested in emotions, and the history of scholarship on the topic is exceedingly thick, to say the least. This is one of those areas where many of the greatest minds in human history have concentrated serious attention — one could spend dozens of lifetimes reading the emotion literature from disciplines as diverse as philosophy, biology, sociology, law, medicine, anthropology, communications, literature, history… really, just about every academic discipline in existence (yes, even math and physics)… and only begin to scratch the surface. The folks that I know and work with who are serious “affective scientists” are some of the most intelligent, well-read, and well-rounded scholars that I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.
But, let’s not read all of that literature. We’re still technically on holiday break, after all. Let’s just talk about some of the basics here — in fact, one of the basic facts that we know about emotions. For the most part, people generally tend to skew toward a slightly positive mood. Not neutral, mind you, but positive. That is to say: the “default” affective state for the typical person is mildly pleasant. Why should that be the case? If emotions are some thing that we experience to motivate a particular behavior (e.g., the feeling of fear motivates “fight or flight” behaviors), why don’t we exist in some kind of a neutral state until something happens that leads to a positive or negative state?
That, my friends, is the topic of today’s RIP. What I really love about this paper is that it gives a very clear perspective not just on this so-called “positivity offset” that humans generally exist in and experience, but really, it sheds light on the concept of emotion itself. In practical terms, understanding the positivity offset has implications for fields beyond psychology — the implications are huge for virtually every discipline that cares about emotions: public health, economics, education… the list is huge. Knowing even one thing about what emotion does and what it looks like, in general, is richly informative across a broad swath of things rolled up into the general concepts of “human experience” and “the human condition.”
As we step into the new year, exploring the intricacies of our emotional landscape and the underlying factors shaping it provides a fascinating perspective. Today’s RIP on the positivity offset not only highlights a specific aspect of our emotional experience but invites us to reflect on the broader nature of emotions and their role in our lives. So, here’s to a year of exploring the complexities of the human psyche and, hopefully, finding ways to cultivate and share a little more positivity along the way. Please do read, and enjoy, Diener et al.’s paper: Why People are in a Generally Good Mood.
Diener, E., Kanazawa, S., Suh, E. M., & Oishi, S. (2015). Why people are in a generally good mood. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 19(3), 235–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868314544467
Bonus readings for those of you with a little bit of downtime. These are two very accessible books that have been foundational in my understanding of the constructs of “mood” and “emotion.” Highly, highly recommended that everyone read them, preferably in chronological order. And I do mean everyone — we all operate with the concept of “emotion” so regularly that it’s truly critical to stop and think about what, precisely, mood and emotion are and what we already know about them.
- Watson, D. (2000). Mood and temperament. Guilford Press.
- Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.