scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

What good are positive emotions in crises? A prospective study of resilience and emotions following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001.

TLDR
This paper found that positive emotions in the aftermath of crises buffer resilient people against depression and fuel thriving, consistent with the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and positive emotions experienced in the wake of the attacks fully accounted for the relations between precrisis resilience and later development of depressive symptoms.
Abstract
Extrapolating from B. L. Fredrickson's (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, the authors hypothesized that positive emotions are active ingredients within trait resilience. U.S. college students (18 men and 28 women) were tested in early 2001 and again in the weeks following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Mediational analyses showed that positive emotions experienced in the wake of the attacks--gratitude, interest, love, and so forth--fully accounted for the relations between (a) precrisis resilience and later development of depressive symptoms and (b) precrisis resilience and postcrisis growth in psychological resources. Findings suggest that positive emotions in the aftermath of crises buffer resilient people against depression and fuel thriving, consistent with the broaden-and-build theory. Discussion touches on implications for coping.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

Addressing Moderated Mediation Hypotheses: Theory, Methods, and Prescriptions.

TL;DR: This article disentangle conflicting definitions of moderated mediation and describes approaches for estimating and testing a variety of hypotheses involving conditional indirect effects, showing that the indirect effect of intrinsic student interest on mathematics performance through teacher perceptions of talent is moderated by student math self-concept.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?

TL;DR: The results reveal that happiness is associated with and precedes numerous successful outcomes, as well as behaviors paralleling success, and the evidence suggests that positive affect may be the cause of many of the desirable characteristics, resources, and successes correlated with happiness.
Journal ArticleDOI

Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?

TL;DR: Evidence is reviewed that resilience represents a distinct trajectory from the process of recovery, that resilience in the face of loss or potential trauma is more common than is often believed, and that there are multiple and sometimes unexpected pathways to resilience.
Journal ArticleDOI

Positive psychological capital: measurement and relationship with performance and satisfaction

TL;DR: In this article, two studies were conducted to analyze how hope, resilience, optimism, and efficacy individually and as a composite higher-order factor predicted work performance and satisfaction, and the results indicated that the composite factor may be a better predictor of performance than the individual facets.
Journal ArticleDOI

Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought‐action repertoires

TL;DR: Two experiments with 104 college students tested the broaden‐and‐build theory, which hypothesises that positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought‐action repertoires and negative emotions, relative to a neutral state, narrowed thought‐ action repertoires.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

The CES-D Scale: A Self-Report Depression Scale for Research in the General Population

TL;DR: The CES-D scale as discussed by the authors is a short self-report scale designed to measure depressive symptomatology in the general population, which has been used in household interview surveys and in psychiatric settings.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Satisfaction With Life Scale.

TL;DR: The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) as mentioned in this paper is a scale to measure global life satisfaction, which does not tap related constructs such as positive affect or loneliness, and has favorable psychometric properties, including high internal consistency and high temporal reliability.
Journal ArticleDOI

The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

TL;DR: The theory and findings suggest that the capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to the study of human flourishing.
Related Papers (5)
Trending Questions (1)
What Good Are Positive Emotions?

The paper suggests that positive emotions experienced after a crisis, such as gratitude, interest, and love, can help buffer resilient individuals against depression and promote psychological growth.