Savoring positive emotions: coping with negative affect in the present and from the past

The ability to regulate emotion under stressful circumstances is a crucial component of resilient coping and healthy psychological wellbeing. However, typical strategies aimed at dampening negative emotions (e.g., suppression) are not effective for everyone or in all contexts, suggesting a critical need for alternative forms of coping. One potential alternative is to focus on increasing positive feelings instead. Bolstering positive emotion can broaden one’s scope of cognition and help build psychological resources for coping with future adversity. Thus, the overarching goal of this dissertation was to examine whether positive emotion-focused coping could counter negative affect occurring in the present moment (e.g., experiencing acute stress) and stemming from past adversity (e.g., remembering negative memories). In Experiments 1-2, we found that enhancing positive emotions via positive reminiscence successfully reduced two detrimental consequences of acute stress exposure—stress hormone levels (i.e., cortisol) and negative mood. Using fMRI, positive reminiscence also engaged neural circuitry linked to emotion regulation (DLPFC, VLPFC) and reward-processing (striatum, MFPC), suggesting its emotion regulatory function. In Experiments 3-7, we then tested whether finding positive meaning in past negative events could adaptively update our memories, changing how we feel (emotion elicited by the memory) and what we remember (content of memory) in the future. Positive meaning finding, but not focusing on neutral or negative aspects of a memory, led to the subsequent re-emergence of positive emotion and positive memory content 1-week later (Experiment 3). Critically, we replicated this finding across 4 additional experiments. Adaptive updates were long-lasting, remaining even after 2-months, highlighting the durability and longevity of the effect (Experiment 4). Positive meaning finding only led to updates after a reminder and a 24h, but not 1h delay, consistent with a reconsolidation account (Experiment 5). It was also more effective than receiving a monetary reward after retrieval (Experiment 6). Using multi-session fMRI, positively reinterpreted memories had greater neural pattern dissimilarity at future retrieval in regions associated with memory (hippocampus) and reward (striatum), suggesting a greater change in the neural representation of memory (Experiment 7). Together, this research highlights how savoring positive emotions is adaptive for coping with negative affective states, which has implications for adaptive psychological wellbeing and protection from clinical disorders.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference