19 Sep happiness is obviously great – as long as you know how to regulate it!
Typically, emotions are divided into positive and negative ones.
The positive emotions include happiness and joy, calm and satisfaction.
And the negative emotions include stress and anxiety, depression and anger.
It won’t surprise anyone to read that it’s important to know or learn how to regulate our negative emotions if we want to enjoy good mental health; too much anger or anxiety, for example, is not all that helpful.
But it might surprise some to hear that we also need to regulate positive emotions. Could too much happiness also be unhelpful?
Read on to find out…
via PsyPost by Eric Dolan
Scientists are beginning to investigate the importance of being able to attenuate positive emotions. A new study, published in the Journal of Personality Assessment, provides some of the first evidence that uncontrolled positive emotion is linked to negative outcomes.
“I was initially interested in seeing if we can improve people’s emotion regulation abilities by making them think that they’re better at it,” said Christopher Zou, a research scientist at Altus Assessments and the corresponding author of the study.
“But while I was conducting a literature review on this topic, I noticed that most of the literature on emotion regulation focuses exclusively on down-regulating one’s negative emotions (e.g., suppressing anger) or up-regulating one’s positive emotions (e.g., making yourself feel better).”
“I’m sure we can all think of times when we’ve met someone who has a little bit of trouble controlling their positive emotions as well — perhaps someone who can’t control their outburst of laughter, or maybe gets a little bit too wild at company gatherings,” Zou explained…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE