Beyond Happiness: Other-Praising Emotions
Happiness is the most widely studied positive emotion in Psychology (and not quite coincidentally the topic of one of the most read blog posts on psychologytoday.com for October). The benefits of experiencing happiness go far beyond merely "feeling good", and include a range of physiological and behavioral responses. For example, happiness energizes, motivates, and keeps us healthy by positively influencing our immune system.
While happiness comes in many shades and flavors, and despite the fact that we often use happiness as a catch-all term for all good feelings, happiness is in fact not the only game in town, when it comes to positive emotions. There exist other positive emotions that similar to happiness supply us with good feelings of their own, and cause behavioral responses that are quite distinct from happiness. One class of such emotions are the "other praising" emotions.
Other-praising emotions are emotions that are caused when we witness or interact with excellent individuals, or experience gratitude. The feeling you get when you read about the charity and sacrifice of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King is an other-praising emotion. So is the feeling you get when you watch tapes of Michael Jordan playing basketball, Usain Bolt shattering world records, or the young Michael Jackson performing the moonwalk. The feeling you get when a stranger returns the wallet that you unknowingly left behind is also an other-praising emotion. These emotions, as a recent study in the Journal of Positive Psychology points out, are very distinct to happiness, and also very distinct from each other.
***The way that positive emotions, and in particular other-praising emotions differ, is in regards to the specific type of behavior they elicit, or what exactly they motivate us to in response to our positive emotions.
The three major other-praising emotions that are currently being studied more intensively are "Elevation", "Admiration", and "Gratitude".
Monday, November 16, 2009
Daniel R. Hawes - Beyond Happiness: Other-Praising Emotions
A nice article from the Psychology Today blogs, specifically from Daniel Hawes Evolved Primate: "Identity, decision making and human behavior from an integrated social science perspective."
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