Broaden and Build Theory

Fredrickson hypothesized that positive emotions have a “broadening effect”

on the momentary thought-action repertoire: They allow us to discard
automatic responses and instead look for creative, flexible, and unpredictable
new ways of thinking and acting (Fredrickson 2004).

That’s the broadening part of the theory. So, what do we build?

By broadening our perspectives and actions, we tend to build important and

lasting physical, intellectual, psychological, and social resources that may
have contributed to our ancestors’ survival.

In Fredrickson’s 2001 and 2004 articles, there’s a review of different

experiments that serve as empirical support for the broaden-and-build theory
of positive emotions. They examine how positive emotions lead to a
broadening effect on attention and a more global form of visual processing.

Additionally, positive emotions may allow for more creative cognitive

processing, including making more connections and creating more inclusive
categories.

Implications
One implication of the broaden-and-build theory is that positive emotions
may help us process the residue of negative emotions.

For instance, when your heart rate rises after experiencing a negative
emotion, you bounce back to a calmer pace if experiencing positive
emotions. This could also mean that positive emotions aid in protecting
personal health and well-being. As Fredricksen (2000) remarks:

“The psychological broadening sparked by one positive emotion can increase

an individual’s receptiveness to subsequent pleasant or meaningful events,
increasing the odds that the individual will find positive meaning in these
subsequent events and experience additional positive emotions” ( p.16).

Positive Affect

Affect: affect is a person’s immediate response to o stimulus, and it is

typically based on an underlying sense of arousal. Specifically, professor Nico
Frijda (1999) reasoned that affect involves the appraisal of an event as
painful or pleasurable –that is, its valence- and the experience of autonomic
arousal.
Emotions, in everyday speech, are any relatively brief conscious experience
characterised by intense metal activity and high degree of pleasure or
displeasure. Emotion is often intertwined with mood, temperament,
personality, disposition and motivation.

Happiness: a positive emotional state that is subjectively defined by each

person.

Subjective well-being: it involves the subjective evaluation of one’s current

status in the world. Diener et al 1984 defines subjective well-being as a
combination of positive affect (absence of negative affect)and general
satisfaction ( i.e., subjective appreciation of life’s rewards).

It is used as a synonym for happiness

Emotional Intelligence

 “The ability to perceive emotion, integrate emotion to facilitate thought, understand

emotions and to regulate emotions to promote personal growth.” Salovey and Mayers
(2000)
 According to Byron Stock(2007)“Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the ability to acquire
and apply knowledge from your emotions and the emotions of others.” You can use
the information about what you are feeling to help you make effective decisions about
what to say or do (or not to say or do) next.
 We need EI to
 ·improves relationships with human beings
 ·improves communication with people
 increase creativity;
 learn from mistakes
 to reduce stress levels;
 managing change more confidently;
 enjoy the work wholeheartedly
 feeling confident and positive in attitude

History of Subjective well being

Subjective well being is defined as a person’s cognitive and affect evaluations

include emotional reactions to events as well as cognitive judgments of
satisfaction and fulfillment. Thus, subjective well-being is a broad concept
that includes experiencing high levels of pleasant emotions and moods, low
levels of negative emotions and moods and high life satisfaction.

HISTORY OF SUBJECTIVE WELL BEING RESEARCH

Utiliatarian’s such as Jeremy Bentham, however, argued that the presence of

pleasure and the absence of pain are the defining characteristics of a good
life. Thus the subjective well-being researchers, focusing on the emotional,
mental, and physical pleasures and pain that individuals experience.
Although there are other desirable personal characteristics beyond whether a
person is happy (Ryan and Deci, 2001; Ryff and singer, 1998), the individual
with abundant joy has one key ingredient of a good life.

In 1925, Flugel studied moods by having people record their emotional

events and then summing their emotional reactions across modern
experience sampling approaches to measuring subjective well-being online
as people go about their everyday lives. After World War 2, survey
questionnaires. The pollsters studied large numbers of people who were often
selected to produce representative samples of nations. George Gallup, Gerald
Gurin and his colleagues, and Hdley Cantril pioneered the use of large-scale
surveys as an assessment technique. They asked people questions such as,
“how happy are you?” with simple response options varying from “very
happy” to “not very happy.”

Although early subjective well-being studies were characterized by very short

scales, many important discoveries were made. In 1969, for example,
Norman Bradburn showed that pleasant and unpleasant affects are
somewhat independent and have different correltes- they are not simply
opposites of one another. Thus, the two affects must be studied separately to
gain a complete picture of individuals well-being. This finding had important
implications for the field of subjective well- being: it showed that clinical
psychology’s attempts to eliminate negative states would not necessarily
foster positive states. The elimination of pain may not result in a
corresponding increase in pleasure; riding the world of sadness and anxiety
will not necessarily make it a happy place.

Wilson reviewed the relatively small amount of research on “avowed

happiness” in 1967, and Diener [1984] provided a review of the much larger
database on subjective well-being that had accumulated by the mid- 1980.
By that time, the field was becoming a science. In 2005, Lyubomirsky, king,
and Diener published another Psychological Bulletin reviewing the
consequences of happiness.

MEASURMENT OF SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING

Early survey instruments usually posed a single question about people’s

happiness or life satisfaction. As the field matured, more multi-item scales
appeared, with greater reliability and validity than the single- item
instruments. Lucas, Diener, and Suh [1996] demonstrated that multi- item life
satisfaction, pleasant affect, and unpleasant affect scales formed factors that
were seperable from each other, as well as from other constructs such as self
esteem.

THEORETICAL APPROACH TO SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING

Many theories of happiness have been proposed since Aristotle’s insights.

These theories can be categorized into three groups; (a) need and goal
satisfaction theories; (b) process or activity theories; and (c) genetic and
personality predisposition theories. The first constellation of theories centers
on the idea that the reduction of tensions (eg., the elimination of pain and the
satisfaction of biological and psychological needs) leads to happiness. Freud’s
pleasure principle and Maslow’s hierarchical needs model represent this
approach. In support of this view, Sheldon, Eliot, Kim, and Kasser (2001)
activities that match their level of skills. He called the state of mind the
results from this matching of challenges and skill “flow,” and he argued that
people who often experience flow tend to be very happy. Goal researchers
agree that having important goals and making progress toward goals are
reliable indicators of well-being, and therefore goals theories can combine
the elements of need satisfaction and pleasurable activity in explaining
subjective well-being.

HEDONIC ADAPTATION

Since Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman’s famous study that compared

lottery winners to patients with spinal cord injuries, many have to believe
that human beings can and do adapt to many life events, and that life events
do not have a significant long term effect on ones well-being. Large scale
longitudinal projects revealed that people do not adapt to drastic changes in
life circumstances such as becoming disabled, divorced, or unemployed.
Namely, many unfortunate individuals who experience these radical changes
in life circumstances do not return to their pre- incidence level of happiness
and therefore the concept of set point should not be deemed fixed.

Wilson, Gilbert and their colleagues have begun exploring the underlying
mechanisms of hedonic adaptations, using an experimental method. For
instance these researchers have shown that providing an explaination for a
positive event sped up hedonic adaptation to the event. When a positive
event occurred, an individual would feel happy for longer period of time if he
or she did not find out why this event happened. The effort to alter hedonic
adaptation had just begun. Clearly, the scientific investigation into how to
prevent hedonic adaptation to a positive event is an exciting research
agenda and will likely make an important contribution to subjective well-
being research and positive psychology in the future.

THE EFFECT OF INTERVENTIONS

Fordyce (1977, 1983) created an intervention program based on the idea that
people’s subjective well-being can be increased if they learn to imitate the
traits of happy people, such as being organized, keeping busy, spending
more time socializing, developing a positive outlook, and working on a
healthy personality. He found that the program produced increases in
happiness compared to a placebo control, as well as compared to participants
in conditions receiving only partial information. Most impressive, he found
lasting effects of the intervention in follow ups evaluations 9-28 months after
the study.

Recently, a number of additional effective interventions on happiness have

been reported, ranging from kindness interventions and gratitude
interventions to variant of the writing intervention. Recent intervention
studies are clearly promising. However, more diverse dependent variables
and measuring instruments would be desire able, as well as explorations of
which interventions are most beneficial, and why.