Strategies for Cultivating Positive Emotions

Although we have tried to make the point that wellbeing goes beyond positive emotions and that our assessment of them is more complex than we may realize, positive emotions nevertheless remain both critical to theories of wellbeing and an obvious target for technological design. So how does one go about increasing positive emotions through technological design without falling pray to oversimplistic attempts? “Be angry” is poor direction for a stage actor, and “don’t be so sad, cheer up!” is fairly useless advice from a well-meaning friend. Technology designers should be wary to avoid the similar trap of trying to tell people what to feel.

A skilled director might tell her actor to bang his fist (a concrete instruction that both shows and elicits anger), a helpful friend might suggest we go for a walk together, and a therapist might encourage us to identify unhelpful thinking patterns, keep a journal, or improve our sleeping habits. We suspect that it is also to more concrete behavior, activities, and conditions (those that improve wellbeing according to research) that we as designers of technology are likely to turn for actionable design strategies for positive computing.

As a starting point, we will need a scope for the rather general term positive emotions. Fredrickson (2001) lists 10 emotions that she considers significant to wellbeing and phenomenologically distinct: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love. Fredrickson also points out that there are two ways of increasing your overall experience of positive emotion: by reducing negative emotions or by increasing positive ones.

Positive-psychology interventions—that is, “treatment methods or intentional activities that aim to cultivate positive feelings, behaviors, or cognitions” (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009)—represent the best collection of research-based strategies for promoting positive emotion. A meta-analysis by Nancy Sin and Sonja Lyubomirsky (2009) contained 51 randomized control trial studies, encompassing 4,235 participants. The r effect sizes ranged from –0.31 (studies where unexpectedly the control group had a better outcome than the treatment) to 0.84 with a mean of 0.29. Most studies compared a pretest with 8-week and 12-week follow-ups. The interventions included a whole spectrum of activities: mindfulness, gratitude, optimism, goal setting, and positive writing. Although the study does not report if any of the interventions were delivered with technology, there are online examples for many of these interventions.

The strategies noted here were purposely built for positive psychology, but we can also look to research on the psychological impact of commercial technologies. For example, recent randomized control studies on the use of casual games at East Carolina University (Russoniello, O’Brien, & Parks, 2009) showed that they generated positive emotions to the extent that they were effective in significantly reducing levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. Furthermore, a recent review of videogames from the perspective of their impact on young people’s wellbeing (Johnson, Jones, Scholes, & Colder Carras, 2013) concluded, “Research suggests that videogames contribute to young people’s emotional, social and psychological wellbeing. Specially, videogames have been shown to positively influence young people’s emotional state, self-esteem, optimism, vitality, resilience, engagement, relationships, sense of competence, self-acceptance and social connections and functioning.” (For more on the astounding potential of videogames to support wellbeing, see Jane McGonigal’s sidebar in this chapter.)

Similarly, research on social networks, which has turned up both positive and negative impacts on wellbeing, is invaluable to informing future designs and redesigns of this genre of software. One study (Mauri, Cipresso, Balgera, Villamira, & Riva, 2011) collected physiological data from 30 subjects and found evidence that looking at the Facebook homepage triggered physiological patterns resembling positive emotions (at least more so than doing math problems or looking at panoramas). A different study (Chou & Edge, 2012) suggested an apparently contradictory effect: “Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives.” Without a doubt, we need more research that helps us understand the complex and multifaceted impact of social networking on our psychological lives.

As important as identifying what works is taking into consideration the specific parameters and limitations that make it work. Every intervention has “optimum settings.” For example, for the “random acts of kindness” intervention, it is more effective if the activity is carried out not as daily routine, but rather intermittently. In a similar way, the capacity for digital games to nurture positive emotion will be impacted by the schedule and number of hours they are used. A recent review of videogames for wellbeing (Johnson, Jones, Scholes, & Colder Carras, 2013) noted that “how young people play as well as whom they play with may be more important in terms of wellbeing than what they play.”

Finally, it’s critical to keep in mind that when we speak of technology, we speak of highly complex systems that intermingle with multiple aspects of our lives and minds in many different ways. One system (e.g., a social network or a multiplayer game) is bound to elicit a large combination of both positive and negative emotions relating to a large combination of design decisions. Rather than seeking oversimplistic equations (such as social networks = good, or videogames = bad), we need to anticipate that the impacts will always be mixed and the process of untangling the complexity will always be ongoing.

Strategies for Cultivating Positive Emotions

Although we have tried to make the point that wellbeing goes beyond positive emotions and that our assessment of them is more complex than we may realize, positive emotions nevertheless remain both critical to theories of wellbeing and an obvious target for technological design. So how does one go about increasing positive emotions through technological design without falling pray to oversimplistic attempts? “Be angry” is poor direction for a stage actor, and “don’t be so sad, cheer up!” is fairly useless advice from a well-meaning friend. Technology designers should be wary to avoid the similar trap of trying to tell people what to feel.

A skilled director might tell her actor to bang his fist (a concrete instruction that both shows and elicits anger), a helpful friend might suggest we go for a walk together, and a therapist might encourage us to identify unhelpful thinking patterns, keep a journal, or improve our sleeping habits. We suspect that it is also to more concrete behavior, activities, and conditions (those that improve wellbeing according to research) that we as designers of technology are likely to turn for actionable design strategies for positive computing.

As a starting point, we will need a scope for the rather general term positive emotions. Fredrickson (2001) lists 10 emotions that she considers significant to wellbeing and phenomenologically distinct: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love. Fredrickson also points out that there are two ways of increasing your overall experience of positive emotion: by reducing negative emotions or by increasing positive ones.

Positive-psychology interventions—that is, “treatment methods or intentional activities that aim to cultivate positive feelings, behaviors, or cognitions” (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009)—represent the best collection of research-based strategies for promoting positive emotion. A meta-analysis by Nancy Sin and Sonja Lyubomirsky (2009) contained 51 randomized control trial studies, encompassing 4,235 participants. The r effect sizes ranged from –0.31 (studies where unexpectedly the control group had a better outcome than the treatment) to 0.84 with a mean of 0.29. Most studies compared a pretest with 8-week and 12-week follow-ups. The interventions included a whole spectrum of activities: mindfulness, gratitude, optimism, goal setting, and positive writing. Although the study does not report if any of the interventions were delivered with technology, there are online examples for many of these interventions.

The strategies noted here were purposely built for positive psychology, but we can also look to research on the psychological impact of commercial technologies. For example, recent randomized control studies on the use of casual games at East Carolina University (Russoniello, O’Brien, & Parks, 2009) showed that they generated positive emotions to the extent that they were effective in significantly reducing levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. Furthermore, a recent review of videogames from the perspective of their impact on young people’s wellbeing (Johnson, Jones, Scholes, & Colder Carras, 2013) concluded, “Research suggests that videogames contribute to young people’s emotional, social and psychological wellbeing. Specially, videogames have been shown to positively influence young people’s emotional state, self-esteem, optimism, vitality, resilience, engagement, relationships, sense of competence, self-acceptance and social connections and functioning.” (For more on the astounding potential of videogames to support wellbeing, see Jane McGonigal’s sidebar in this chapter.)

Similarly, research on social networks, which has turned up both positive and negative impacts on wellbeing, is invaluable to informing future designs and redesigns of this genre of software. One study (Mauri, Cipresso, Balgera, Villamira, & Riva, 2011) collected physiological data from 30 subjects and found evidence that looking at the Facebook homepage triggered physiological patterns resembling positive emotions (at least more so than doing math problems or looking at panoramas). A different study (Chou & Edge, 2012) suggested an apparently contradictory effect: “Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives.” Without a doubt, we need more research that helps us understand the complex and multifaceted impact of social networking on our psychological lives.

As important as identifying what works is taking into consideration the specific parameters and limitations that make it work. Every intervention has “optimum settings.” For example, for the “random acts of kindness” intervention, it is more effective if the activity is carried out not as daily routine, but rather intermittently. In a similar way, the capacity for digital games to nurture positive emotion will be impacted by the schedule and number of hours they are used. A recent review of videogames for wellbeing (Johnson, Jones, Scholes, & Colder Carras, 2013) noted that “how young people play as well as whom they play with may be more important in terms of wellbeing than what they play.”

Finally, it’s critical to keep in mind that when we speak of technology, we speak of highly complex systems that intermingle with multiple aspects of our lives and minds in many different ways. One system (e.g., a social network or a multiplayer game) is bound to elicit a large combination of both positive and negative emotions relating to a large combination of design decisions. Rather than seeking oversimplistic equations (such as social networks = good, or videogames = bad), we need to anticipate that the impacts will always be mixed and the process of untangling the complexity will always be ongoing.
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