What is shared, what is different? Core relational themes and expressive displays of eight positive emotions

Abstract

Understanding positive emotions' shared and differentiating features can yield valuable insight into the structure of positive emotion space and identify emotion states, or aspects of emotion states, that are most relevant for particular psychological processes and outcomes. We report two studies that examined core relational themes (Study 1) and expressive displays (Study 2) for eight positive emotion constructs—amusement, awe, contentment, gratitude, interest, joy, love, and pride. Across studies, all eight emotions shared one quality: high positive valence. Distinctive core relational theme and expressive display patterns were found for four emotions—amusement, awe, interest, and pride. Gratitude was associated with a distinct core relational theme but not an expressive display. Joy and love were each associated with a distinct expressive display but their core relational themes also characterised pride and gratitude, respectively. Contentment was associated with a distinct expressive display but not a core relational theme. The implications of this work for the study of positive emotion are discussed.

Keywords:

• Positive emotion
• Appraisal
• Core relational theme
• Expressive display
• Differentiation

Acknowledgements

Portions of this work were completed while Belinda Campos was a graduate student at UC Berkeley supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a UC Berkeley Graduate Opportunity Fellowship and a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA supported by NIMH training grant MH15750 and the UCLA Center for the Everyday Lives of Families. Portions of this research were presented at a 2003 conference at the New York Academy of Sciences. The first two authors contributed equally to this work.

We are thankful to our UC Berkeley and UCLA teams of undergraduate research assistants for their assistance in data collection for Studies 1 and 2 and narrative coding for Study 1.

Notes

¹We considered including happiness because it is the only positive emotion on many basic emotion lists (Ekman & Davidson, 1994). However, the term “happiness” is also used to refer to a general sense of well-being and life satisfaction (e.g., Diener & Diener, 1996), or to a cognitive tendency to engage in downward social comparison (Lyubomirsky, 2001). Instead, joy was chosen to represent the emotion component of the broader term happiness.

²The emotions studied originally also included sympathy and desire. Both had a significantly less positive valence than the other emotions in Study 1 (sympathy: M=−1.00, SD=2.70; desire: M=1.45, SD=3.24). Further, in Study 2, the sympathy display was similar to the established display for sadness (Ekman, 1972). Thus, both were dropped from this final report.

³FACS includes all possible facial muscle movements, eye movements, and head movements intense enough to be captured by the video recording. The upper body movement codes documented the following 24 possible arm, torso, and complex head movements observed in the full data set of poses: (a) Nod—head nodding sharply, once or repeatedly; (b) Laughter—visible staccato exhalation; (c) Sigh—visible long, unpunctuated exhalation; (d) Shrug of the shoulders; (e) Shoulders Back, to expose the chest; (f) Slump forward, with upper back curved; (g) Sitting Up straight from a previously relaxed posture; (h) Arch of the back; (i) Forward Lean in the torso; (j) Side Lean in the torso; (k) Twist of the torso; (l) Slide, with rear end moving forward in the chair and body moving down; (m) Bounce, with head and body bouncing fluidly and repeatedly up and down; (n) Sway, with head and body swaying fluidly back and forth; (o) Arms Forward, reaching toward camera; (p) Arms Up, reaching toward ceiling; (q) Arms Wide, reaching out at 90 degree angles to torso; (r) Arms Crossed over chest; (s) Self Hug, wrapping arms around own chest without crossing; (t) Linking Hands behind head, with elbows out; (u) Face Touch, with fingers touching but not covering face; (v) Face Conceal, with the hands used to cover the mouth, eyes, or nose; and (w) Chin Rest, with one or both elbows on the table, and the chin resting in the cup of the hand. Of the 24, only Nod, Shrug, Shoulders Back, Forward Lean, Bounce, Arms Forward, Self Hug, and Chin Rest movements appeared in at least 10% of the poses of any positive emotion and were retained for analyses.

⁴Notably, participants commonly flashed a mild version of the expression they ultimately posed during the recalling and talking portion of the task.