Psychological and physiological responses accompanying positive emotions elicited on seeing favorite persons

Abstract

Positive emotions are evoked on seeing one's favorite person. To investigate the psychological and physiological responses accompanying these positive emotions, we simultaneously recorded various parameters such as the mood state, heart rate, skin conductance level (SCL), serum levels of catecholamines, and proportions of T cells and natural killer (NK) cells among the lymphocytes while participants viewed films featuring their favorite persons. The participants reported that they felt better and invigorated; in addition, SCL and proportion of NK cells in peripheral blood increased significantly, and these physiological changes were positively correlated. These results suggest that positive emotions elicited on seeing a favorite person may lead to psychological and physiological activation and, more importantly, may promote health.

A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bone (Proverbs 17 : 22; New International Version)

Keywords:

• psychoneuroimmunology
• positive emotion
• natural killer cells
• skin conductance level

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Shinici Kakumu (Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology, Aichi Medical University, Japan) for his suggestions and encouragement throughout this study. We also thank Dr. Chowdhury V. Sur, Mr. Tomohiro Osugi (Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan), and Dr. Steve Franconeri (Department of Psychology, Northwestern University) for their valuable discussions and for reviewing this manuscript and Mr. Hiroki Murakami (Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University, Japan) for his technical assistance. This work was supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (No. 16330136), and Health and Labour Sciences Research Grant on Research on Occupational Safety and Health from Japan Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (No. H17-RODO-5). Masahiro Matsunaga is supported by a Research Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists.