正面情緒的力量
How Positive Emotions Help Us kidshealth
Positive emotions balance out negative ones, but they have other powerful benefits, too.
Instead of narrowing our focus like negative emotions do, positive emotions affect our brains in ways that increase our awareness, attention, and memory. They help us take in more information, hold several ideas in mind at once, and understand how different ideas relate to each other.
When positive emotions open us up to new possibilities, we are more able to learn and build on our skills. That leads to doing better on tasks and tests.
People who have plenty of positive emotions in their everyday lives tend to be happier, healthier, learn better, and get along well with others.
The Importance of Positive Emotions
Science is helping us find out how valuable positive emotions can be. Experts have learned a lot from recent brain studies. Here are two findings that can help us use positive emotions to our advantage:
1. Let Positive Emotions Outnumber Negative Ones
When we feel more positive emotions than negative ones, difficult situations are easier to handle. Positive emotions build our resilience (the emotional resources needed for coping). They broaden our awareness, letting us see more options for problem solving.
Studies show that people feel and do their best when they have at least three times as many positive emotions as negative emotions. That's because of something called the negativity bias.
The negativity bias is a natural human tendency to pay more attention to negative emotions than to positive ones. It makes sense when you think about it: Negative emotions call our attention to problems - problems we might need to deal with quickly. Tuning in to negative emotions can be a survival mechanism.
The negativity bias has a downside, though: It can make us think a day went badly, not well, even if we experienced equal amounts of positive and emotions that day. It takes at least three times as many positive emotions to tip the scales and make a day seem like a great one.
2. Practice Positivity Every Day
Building habits that encourage us to feel more positive emotions can help us be happier, do better, and reduce our negative emotions. Building positive emotions is especially important if we're already dealing with a lot of negative feelings such as fear, sadness, anger, frustration, or stress.
低薪會傷腦
Lower Income Could Affect Memory and the Brain for the Worse
Olga Khazan theatlantic.com
This relationship held even after the authors controlled for things like mental and physical health, cognitive ability, and even their socioeconomic status in childhood, rather than adulthood. That is, growing up rich or poor didn’t necessarily affect the brain health of the middle-aged people. But it seems something about their lives in adulthood did.
What could those things be? People who had lower-paying jobs might have had worse access to health care and healthy food. They might live in more polluted neighborhoods or have lives that are less intellectually stimulating. The stress of being low on the socioeconomic totem pole raises levels of allostatic load—a measure of stress hormones that cause wear and tear on the body, including the brain.
“We’re starting to learn more about the impact of both stress and continuous learning on the brain,” says Gagan Wig, a neuroscientist at UTD and the principal investigator of the study. “It’s consistent with the idea that lifelong experiences might influence brain health.”
Past studies have also suggested that being low in socioeconomic status can affect the way we think. A paper in Science in 2013 found that “a person’s cognitive function is diminished by the constant and all-consuming effort of coping with the immediate effects of having little money, such as scrounging to pay bills and cut costs.” The cognitive cost of poverty, that study found, was practically like losing an entire night of sleep. Another study from last year found that people who had lived in poverty performed worse than those who had never been poor on tests of verbal memory, processing speed, and executive functioning.
“I think this [PNAS paper] builds on the past work on cognitive function and poverty,” says Jiaying Zhao, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the 2013 study. “This shows how chronic poverty can influence brain anatomy. This paper provides the neural evidence.”
In the PNAS study, the relationship between socioeconomic status and the brain measures didn’t hold up for the very youngest adults (those aged 20 to 34) or the very oldest adults (those over 64) in the sample. It could be that only the healthiest people among the low-socioeconomic-status groups survived to old age, or that by the time people reach their 70s and 80s, social and economic determinants are less important to their brain health than is the biological aging process. Also, this study included very few people below the poverty line, which is the condition the earlier papers were largely studying.
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