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Emociones Positivas Laborales
Abstract
El estudio de las emociones positivas se encuentra en auge desde los años 90 promovido en parte por el interés renovado de algunos expertos por estudiar aquello que “funciona” y “está bien” en las personas (Seligman y Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Las organizaciones son contextos potenciales en los que los trabajadores pueden desarrollar y expresar sus capacidades y fortalezas para alcanzar un mayor bienestar personal y laboral, aunque no sólo dependa de ellos. La denominada psicología positiva ha intentado desde su fundación incorporar el estudio de lo positivo entre sus objetivos con el fin de alcanzar una visión más comprehensiva de la naturaleza humana, incluido el ámbito de las organizaciones. Un primer acercamiento derivado de este auge e interés por lo positivo es el denominado “comportamiento organizacional positivo” (POB, Positive Organizational Behaviour) que se centra en el “estudio y aplicación de las fortalezas, recursos, y capacidades psicológicas que puedan ser desarrolladas y manejadas adecuadamente para mejorar el rendimiento en el lugar de trabajo” (Luthans, 2002, pp.59; Luthans, Youssef y Avolio, 2007). Este nuevo acercamiento estudia cómo capacidades como la sabiduría, la creatividad, la afectividad positiva, el sentido del humor, el optimismo, la esperanza u otros recursos, son utilizados en el afrontamiento diario de las demandas organizacionales y para fomentar el rendimiento. Una concepción errónea de este enfoque sería centrarse exclusivamente en fomentar o desarrollar las variables del trabajador que le pueden ayudar a nivel de resistencia en condiciones adversas laborales, sin realizar los cambios organizacionales necesarios (Garrosa y Carmona, 2011).
Complementariamente a este enfoque individual se encuentra aquel que estudia los
aspectos positivos del contexto organizacional que influyen en la habilidad de los trabajadores para prosperar (POS, Positive Organizational Scholarship) (Cameron, Dutton y Quinn, 2003). Desde esta perspectiva se pretende desarrollar contextos laborales positivos donde el respeto y las conductas cívicas sean la norma, así como generar posibilidades de desarrollo profesional y entornos amigables donde el trabajador pueda conciliar en mayor medida su entorno laboral y personal. Estas dos vertientes han terminado confluyendo en la denominada
Psicología de la Salud Ocupacional Positiva (POHP, Positive Occupational Health Psychology), que además de examinar cómo los fenómenos positivos (procedentes del contexto y de la persona) pueden ser usados para protegernos de los riesgos ocupacionales, promueve la salud y el crecimiento ocupacional (Bakker y Derks, 2010). Un enfoque de este tipo puede esclarecer como los diferentes contextos de trabajo afectan y se ven afectados por las emociones positivas (Ashkanasy y Ashton-James, 2007; Fredrickson y Dutton, 2008).
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El presente artículo introduce la sección monográfica sobre Psicología de la Salud Ocupacional Positiva (PSOP), presentando ocho trabajos teóricos y empíricos sobre diversos temas. Tradicionalmente, la investigación en salud ocupacional ha estado centrada principalmente en las causas de las enfermedades, así como en identificar y prevenir los factores laborales relacionados con el deterioro de la salud de los trabajadores. Sin embargo, esta aproximación sesgada no puede proporcionar una comprensión completa de los mecanismos que conducen al bienestar y rendimiento óptimo de los empleados. En este trabajo se discuten las diferencias de la PSOP con constructos similares, y se repasan las razones por las que es importante desarrollar esta área. En general, los estudios incluidos en esta sección monográfica demuestran la utilidad de centrarse en constructos positivos, y plantean ideas y cuestiones que esperamos contribuyan a seguir avanzando en el ámbito de la PSOP.
Workers' positive personality variables have a crucial role in the development of personal resources which help workers to provide guidance to health and well-being, and optimum employment development. From this perspective we have exposedsome of the most representative theories that try to offer an approximation and explanation of the mechanisms involved. Potentially, we aim to explore and offer a general view on how organizational and personal strengths may have a conclusive linkage with productivity, creativity, and quality of work, that is, with the organizational results. From this configuration, we go beyond the classic line of occupational risks prevention trying to understand the organizational, work and personal factors that promote health and well-being in organizations, both for workers and the users of the service provided. As a final point, some examples are discussed which can help in the realization of good labour practices.
This study examined whether the psychological climate for service friendliness correlated positively with employee displayed positive emotions, and whether such positive emotional displays influenced customer purchase decision and customer reactions concerning an organization. Data were collected from 290 sales clerks in 156 retail shoe stores in Taiwan, and from 284 customers who were served by one of the sales clerks. Results indicated a positive relationship between psychological climate for service friendliness and employees’ displayed positive emotions. The study also indicated that employees’ positive emotional displays would increase customer willingness to return to the store and pass positive comments to friends.
The study tested the extent to which positive and negative affect at work mediate personality effects (Emotional Intelligence) on job satisfaction. Participants were 523 educators who completed the Wong Law Emotional Intelligence Scale, a version of the Job Affect Scale and the General Index of Job Satisfaction. Results using structural equation modelling indicated that positive and negative affect at work substantially mediate the relationship between EI and job satisfaction with positive affect exerting a stronger influence. In males, affect at work fully mediated the EI effect on job satisfaction. Among the four EI dimensions, use of emotion and emotion regulation were significant independent predictors of affect at work. The results confirm expectations deriving from Affective Events Theory regarding the role of work affectivity as an interface between personality and work attitudes and extend the literature on EI effects in organizational settings.
Group emotional contagion, the transfer of moods among people in a group, and its influence on work group dynamics was examined in a laboratory study of managerial decision making using multiple, convergent measures of mood, individual attitudes, behavior, and group-level dynamics. Using a 2 times 2 experimental design, with a trained confederate enacting mood conditions, the predicted effect of emotional contagion was found among group members, using both outside coders' ratings of participants' mood and participants' self-reported mood. No hypothesized differences in contagion effects due to the degree of pleasantness of the mood expressed and the energy level with which it was conveyed were found. There was a significant influence of emotional contagion on individual-level attitudes and group processes. As predicted, the positive emotional contagion group members experienced improved cooperation, decreased conflict, and increased perceived task performance. Theoretical implications and practical ramifications of emotional contagion in groups and organizations are discussed.
This study provides a comparative test of two psychological theories concerning the relationship between affect and performance. Managerial simulations are used to test whether people who are positive in disposition perform better or worse on both decisional and interpersonal tasks. Results are consistent in supporting the happier-and-smarter as opposed to the sadder-but-wiser hypothesis, since they show positive relationships between dispositional affect and performance. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to both the older literature on links between satisfaction and performance and the more recent controversy over the dispositional approach to job attitudes.
D. Watson and A. Tellegen (1985) proposed a "consensual" structure of affect based on J. A. Russell's (1980) circumplex. The authors' review of the literature indicates that this 2-factor model captures robust structural properties of self-rated mood. Nevertheless, the evidence also indicates that the circumplex does not fit the data closely and needs to be refined. Most notably, the model's dimensions are not entirely independent; moreover, with the exception of Pleasantness–Unpleasantness, they are not completely bipolar. More generally, the data suggest a model that falls somewhere between classic simple structure and a true circumplex. The authors then examine two of the dimensions imbedded in this structure, which they label
Negative Activation (NA) and
Positive Activation (PA). The authors argue that PA and NA represent the subjective components of broader biobehavioral systems of approach and withdrawal, respectively. The authors conclude by demonstrating how this framework helps to clarify various affect-related phenomena, including circadian rhythms, sleep, and the mood disorders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reviews research in psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior to develop a conceptual framework that specifies how positive emotion (PE) helps employees obtain favorable outcomes at work. It is proposed that feeling and expressing PEs on the job have favorable consequences on (1) employees, independent of their relationships with others (e.g., greater persistence); (2) reactions of others to employees (e.g., "halo," or overgeneralization to other desirable traits); and (3) reactions of employees to others (e.g., helping others). Results from an 18-mo study of 272 employees indicate that PE on the job at Time 1 is associated with evidence of work achievement (more favorable supervisor evaluations and higher pay) and a supportive social context (more support from supervisors and coworkers) at Time 2. PE at Time 1 is not significantly associated with job enrichment at Time 2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tested the prediction of the reformulated learned helplessness model, which claims that the tendency to explain bad events by internal, stable, and global causes potentiates quitting when bad events are encountered. Two studies were conducted, using a total of 197 life insurance agents as Ss. Explanatory style, as measured by the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), correlated with and predicted the performance of the Ss. In a cross-sectional study, Ss scoring in the top half of the ASQ sold 37% more insurance in their 1st 2 yrs of service than those scoring in the bottom half. In a prospective 1-yr study of newly hired agents, Ss who scored in the top half of the ASQ when hired remained in their job at twice the rate and sold more insurance than those scoring in the bottom half of the ASQ. These 2 studies support the claim that a pessimistic explanatory style leads to poor productivity and quitting when bad events are experienced, and they extend the usefulness of the ASQ to the workplace. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
recently, we have begun to explore . . . [the] process of emotional contagion / people's conscious analyses give them a great deal of information about their social encounters / [people] can also focus their attention on their moment-to-moment emotional reactions to others, during their social encounters / this stream of reactions comes to them via their fleeting observations of others' faces, voices, postures, and instrumental behaviors / further, as they nonconsciously and automatically mimic their companions' fleeting expressions of emotion, people also may come to feel as their partners feel / by attending to the stream of tiny moment-to-moment reactions, people can gain a great deal of information on their own and their partners' emotional landscapes
begin by defining emotion and emotional contagion and discussing several mechanisms that we believe might account for this phenomenon / review the evidence from a variety of disciplines that "primitive emotional contagion" exists / examine the role of individual differences in emotional contagion / outline some of the broad research questions researchers might profitably investigate (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
in our discussion of emotion and dysfunction, we have intimated that emotions are instructive about persons because both emotions and the personality are organized around the problem of surviving, getting along, and flourishing over the life course
begin by addressing the question of what an emotion is / describe our own [the authors'] recent work directed at illuminating what we see as one of the important issues in emotion theory—the role of cognitive appraisal
embed this work in a general model of emotion, which identifies the key variables and processes within a systems framework emphasizing person-environment relationships and cognitive mediation
illustrate how emotion theory makes firm contact with a variety of topics currently being pursued across diverse psychological disciplines, especially personality and social psychology
the adaptational problem and the evolution of emotion / appraisal theory / personality, society, and biology in emotion (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Executive Overview Interest in and research about affect in organizations have expanded dramatically in recent years. This article reviews what we know about affect in organizations, focusing on how employees' moods, emotions, and dispositional affect influence critical organizational outcomes such as job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, prosocial behavior, teamwork, negotiation, and leadership. This review highlights pervasive and consistent effects, showing the importance of affect in shaping a wide variety of organizational behaviors, the knowledge of which is critical for researchers, managers, and employees. CEO wanted to cut our budget by 6%! Jerry's voice had an edge to it, and I could tell that my explanations about the budget were not going to solve this one. Would he ex-plode? Would he blame me? Worse, would he threaten to quit? I could feel the good mood I had started with this morning rapidly disappearing. The insistent brittleness in his voice made me feel defensive and I was starting to get angry myself. I needed to decide what to do next, but I was having trouble remembering the rationale for the raise. I felt like yelling at him. That, I told myself, cannot happen. I need to keep it under control. . .I'm the boss here, remember? He's watching how I act. I need to figure out how I want to deal with his anger—and mine. . .
Pride, a ''self-conscious'' emotion involving complex self-evaluative processes, is a fundamental human emotion. Recent research provides new insights into its nature and function. Like the ''basic'' emotions, pride is associated with a distinct, universally recognized, non-verbal expression, which is spontaneously displayed during pride experiences. Yet, pride differs from the basic emotions in its dependency on self-evaluations and in its complex structure, which is comprised of two theoretically and conceptually distinct facets that have divergent personality correlates and cognitive antecedents. In this article, we summarize findings from the growing body of research on pride and highlight the implications of this research for a broader understanding of emotions and social behavior. When it comes to motivating social behavior, pride may be the most important human emotion. Our most meaningful achieve-ments, both everyday and life changing, are accompanied by feelings of pride. Students experience pride after receiving a good grade, children after succeeding at a new task, and ado-lescents after finding a mate. Adults feel pride in response to a promotion at work, a child's first steps, and once-in-a-lifetime accomplishments like winning the Nobel Prize. Conversely, wounded pride lies at the heart of many of society's largest problems, such as intergroup conflict and terrorism, as well as smaller interpersonal problems, such as an argument that de-stroys a friendship. Indeed, pride is a cornerstone emotion that fuels several fundamental human pursuits: the desire to achieve; to attain power and status; to meet a romantic partner with high mate value; to feel good about oneself and one's social group; and to raise successful, intelligent, and well-behaved children.
This study explored how affect relates to creativity at work. Using both quantitative and qualitative longitudinal data from the daily diaries of 222 employees in seven companies, we examined the nature, form, and temporal dynamics of the affect-creativity relationship. The results indicate that positive affect relates positively to creativity in organizations and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Time-lagged analyses identify positive affect as an antecedent of creative thought, with incubation periods of up to two days. Qualitative analyses identify positive affect as a consequence of creative thought events, as well as a concomitant of the creative process. A preliminary theory of the affect-creativity cycle in organizations includes each of these links and proposes mechanisms by which they may operate.
In spite of accepted definitions of job satisfaction as "affect" very little is known about the causes and consequences of true affective experiences in work settings. Working from the basic literature on moods and emotions, we introduce a theory of affective experience at work which emphasizes the role of work events as proximal causes of affective reactions. We discuss the structure of affective experiences, their situational and dispositional causes and their effects on performance and job satisfaction.
Three studies investigated the influence of mood states on the processing of positive and negative information regarding caffeine consumption and on the impact of this information on one's mood, attitudes, and intentions. The results were consistent with the predictions of the mood-as-a-resource hypothesis: First, the induction of positive mood in high (compared with low) caffeine consumers enhanced recall of negative information about caffeine consumption. Second, processing information about caffeine consumption undermined the positive mood of high (but not low) caffeine consumers. Third, the induction of positive mood enhanced the impact of negative information about caffeine on high (compared with low) caffeine consumers' attitudes and intentions toward caffeine consumption.
Posted 3/2000. The previously unstudied emotion of elevation is described. Elevation appears to be the opposite of social disgust. It is triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue. Elevation involves a warm or glowing feeling in the chest, and it makes people want to become morally better themselves. Because elevation increases one's desire to affiliate with and help others, it provides a clear illustration of B. L. Fredrickson's (see record 2000-03082-001) broaden-and-build model of the positive emotions.
This special section of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology provides ample illustration of the increasingly important role of organizational behavior research on work-related issues of health and well-being. More specifically, the 9 articles contained in this special section highlight the varied application and potentially widespread benefit of considering the main effects of employee physical health and psychological well-being. The authors conclude with a discussion of how emerging research issues in occupational health psychology can be used to build a stronger science of organizational behavior.
Psychological capital: Investing and developing positive organizational behavior Several years ago, a growing number of psychologists became concerned that the field had overemphasized the negative at the sacrifice of the positive. In seeking the illusive solutions of healing mental illness and dysfunctional behavior, both academic and practicing psychologists had almost completely ignored strengths and developing and helping healthy, productive people reach even higher levels of functioning. The field had largely ignored the elements that contribute to flourishing, instead focusing on what made individuals fail. The jump start for a more positive psychology came in 1998 when then president of the American Psychological Association Martin Seligman challenged the field to better understand what was right with people instead of solely concentrating on what was wrong with people (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Sheldon and King, 2001). Indeed, what Seligman was calling for was a more balanced approach to studying what constituted the ...
Positive Psychology at Work brings the fields of positive psychology and appreciative inquiry together for the first time to provide leaders and change agents with a powerful new approach to achieving organizational excellence. Draws together positive psychology and appreciative inquiry in the context of leadership organizational challenges for the first time. Presents academically rigorous and referenced material in a jargon-free, accessible manner. Arranged with chapters focused on specific organizational challenges to allow readers to quickly find ideas relevant to their unique situation. Features short contributions from experienced practitioners of positive psychology and Appreciative Inquiry, and includes case studies from the UK, Europe, Australia and the USAA.
This article proposes a positive approach to organizational behavior (OB). Although the importance of positive feelings has been recognized through the years in the academic OB and popular literature, both management scholars and practitioners have arguably too often taken a negative perspective-trying to fix what is wrong with managers and employees and concentrating on weaknesses. Positive organizational behavior (POB) follows the lead of recently emerging positive psychology, which is driven by theory and research focusing on people's strengths and psychological capabilities. Instead of just retreading and putting a positive spin on traditional OB concepts, this unveiling of POB sets forth specific criteria for inclusion. Not only does positivity have to be associated with the concept, but it must also be relatively unique to the OB field, have valid measures, be adaptable to leader/management and human resource training and development, and, most important, capable of contributing to performance improvement in today's workplace. The criteria-meeting concepts of confidence/self-efficacy, hope, optimism, subjective well-being/happiness, and emotional intelligence (or the acronym CHOSE) are identified and analyzed as most representative of the proposed POB approach. The implications of these POB concepts for the workplace are given particular attention.
This chapter examines some of the literature demonstrating an impact of affect on social behavior. It will consider the influence of affect on cognition in an attempt to further understand on the way cognitive processes may mediate the effect of feelings on social behavior. The chapter describes the recent works suggesting an influence of positive affect on flexibility in cognitive organization (that is, in the perceived relatedness of ideas) and the implications of this effect for social interaction. The goal of this research is to expand the understanding of social behavior and the factors, such as affect, that influence interaction among people. Another has been to extend the knowledge of affect, both as one of these determinants of social behavior and in its own right. And a third has been to increase the understanding of cognitive processes, especially as they play a role in social interaction. Most recently, cognitive and social psychologists have investigated ways in which affective factors may participate in cognitive processes (not just interrupt them) and have begun to include affect as a factor in more comprehensive models of cognition. The research described in the chapter has focused primarily on feelings rather than intense emotion, because feelings are probably the most frequent affective experiences. The chapter focuses primarily on positive affect.
Recent debates between the job enrichment and social-information-processing perspectives have led to a trend toward greater situationalism in organizational research. This paper, however, argues for a more dispositional approach in which the role of the person is emphasized. Using a longitudinal sample, measures of affective disposition from as early as adolescence were used to predict job attitudes in later life. Results showed that dispositional measures significantly predicted job attitudes over a time span of nearly fifty years. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of both theories of job attitudes and organizational development activities that attempt to alter employee job satisfaction.
In this article, the author describes a new theoretical perspective on positive emotions and situates this new perspective within the emerging field of positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory posits that experiences of positive emotions broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires, which in turn serves to build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources. Preliminary empirical evidence supporting the broaden-and-build theory is reviewed, and open empirical questions that remain to be tested are identified. The theory and findings suggest that the capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to the study of human flourishing.
Though interest in the emotion of gratitude has historically focused on its role in social exchange, new evidence suggests a different and more important role for gratitude in social life. The find-remind-and-bind theory of gratitude posits that the positive emotion of gratitude serves the evolutionary function of strengthening a relationship with a responsive interaction partner (Algoe, Haidt, & Gable, 2008). The current article identifies prior, economic models of gratitude, elaborates on unique features of the find-remind-and-bind theory, reviews the accumulating evidence for gratitude in social life in light of this novel perspective, and discusses how the find-remind-and-bind theory is relevant to methodology and hypothesis testing. In sum, within the context of reciprocally-altruistic relationships, gratitude signals communal relationship norms and may be an evolved mechanism to fuel upward spirals of mutually responsive behaviors between recipient and benefactor. In this way, gratitude is important for forming and maintaining the most important relationships of our lives, those with the people we interact with every day.
Awe has been defined as an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that overwhelm current mental structures, yet facilitate attempts at accommodation. Four studies are presented showing the information-focused nature of awe elicitors, documenting the self-diminishing effects of awe experience, and exploring the effects of awe on the content of the self-concept. Study 1 documented the information-focused, asocial nature of awe elicitors in participant narratives. Study 2 contrasted the stimulus-focused, self-diminishing nature of appraisals and feelings associated with a prototypical awe experience with the self-focused appraisals and feelings associated with pride. Study 3 found that dispositional awe-proneness, but not dispositional joy or pride, was associated with low Need for Cognitive Closure, and also documented a relationship between dispositional awe and increased emphasis on membership in "universal" categories in participants' self-concepts. Study 4 replicated the self-concept finding from Study 3 using experimentally elicited awe. Implications for future work on awe are discussed.
This research examines mood as a collective property of work groups. We argue that work group members experience group moods when they can detect and display mood information through observable behavioral expressions. To test the hypothesis that work group moods are manifested behaviorally, we developed an observational instrument and compared observers' reports of work group mood with self-reported measures from 70 work groups. As predicted, groups converged for eight distinct mood categories, and observers' reports of work group mood were consistent with groups' aggregated self-reported values. Convergence in members' moods was positively associated with task and social interdependence, membership stability, and mood regulation norms. Theoretical and practical implications of work group mood are discussed.
Abstract This study explored relationships between sense of humor, stress, and coping strategies. Undergraduate,students (N=258) from,introductory psychology courses completed a perceived stress scale, an everyday problems scale, a state anxiety inventory, a sense of humor scale, and a scale assessing their preferred coping strategies. High and low sense of humor,groups were determined,by selecting participants with self-reported sense of humor,at one standard deviation above and below the overall mean,on the sense of humor,scale. The high sense of humor,group,appraised,less stress and reported less current anxiety than a low sense of humor,group,despite experiencing a similar number,of everyday,problems,in the previous two months. The high humor,group was more likely to use positive reappraisal and problem-solving coping strategies than the low humor,group. A weaker relationship existed between,appraisal of stress and number,of problems in the low humor,group because this group perceived greater stress at low and average,number,of everyday,problems,than the high humor,group. The results were discussed as supporting the role of humor,in restructuring a situation so it is less stressful, and the relationship of humor to both emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies. Numerous,studies have supported,the anecdotal,view that humor,and
The effects of uncertainty of criteria and secrecy in decision making on the tendency of subjects to choose job applicants similar to themselves were examined. Uncertainty was operationalized as a choice among candidates approximately equally qualified as defined by a set of candidate attributes. Secrecy referred to two conditions: (1) whether or not the decision-maker's name was to be publicly identified with the recommendation; and (2) whether or not the information used by the subject to form his recommendation was to be released to others. Uncertainty tended to increase the use of social similarity as a criterion for choice, while the release of information relevant to the choice tended to decrease the subjects' choice of others similar to themselves in both incertain and certain conditions. Identifying the subject with his choice tended to increase the use of social similarity when information was not released, but tended to decrease it when information was released. This interaction effect was less clear in reliability and interpretation.
Our first objective in this qualitative study was to validate the conceptualization of vigor as comprising physical strength, emotional energy and cognitive liveliness. Our second objective was to explore vigor's work-related antecedents. We applied theme analysis to the contents of interviews held with 38 randomly selected employees. The results clearly supported the three-component conceptualization of vigor as most employees (77%) related to vigor as a multifaceted variable. The most frequent work-related antecedents of vigor that emerged from the interviews were meaningful interactions with others, coping with challenging situations, and achieving success on a project. By superimposing the Job Characteristics Model on these qualitative findings, we inferred from the items describing vigor's antecedents that job significance, supervisory feedback, and job identity were the most frequently mentioned antecedents of vigor at work. Additionally, we found indications of a spillover effect of vigor from the home to the work domains.
Correlations between affectivity and job satisfaction measures were examined by cumulating research findings across studies. Correlations between (1) job satisfaction and positive affectivity, (2) job satisfaction and negative affectivity and (3) job satisfaction and affective disposition, were separately analyzed. The mean correlation corrected for coefficient alpha in the two measures correlated were: 0.49 for positive affectivity (N=3326, k=15), −0.33 for negative affectivity (N=6233, k=27) and 0.36 for affective disposition (N=1415, k=7). Results indicated that 10–25% of variance in job satisfaction could be due to individual differences in affectivity. No strong moderator variables were found. Implications for a dispositional and situational source of job satisfaction are discussed.
A number of studies have shown that humor is associated with interpersonal competence so it was hypothesized that a high level of intimacy is associated with a high level of humor. The Measures of Psychosocial Development (used to measure intimacy) and the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire were given to 103 undergraduates. The high intimacy group of 52 scored significantly higher on humor than the low intimacy group of 51. Humor apparently helps people succeed in intimate relationships because it allows them to handle the stress within those relationships. Also pursuing studies of the relationship between humor and such Eriksonian psychosocial characteristics such as identity, generativity, and integrity, seems worthy.
Vigor refers to individuals' feelings that they possess physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness, and represents a moderate-intensity affect experienced at work. Though it has been assessed in past research as a mood state, vigor has hardly been the focus of any integrative theoretical treatise. I first provide a description of vigor's conceptual framework and also of past attempts to conceptualize and measure it. Then, a summary of vigor's relations with other attitudinal constructs to which it is related is provided. Next, based on the Conservation of Resources theory, I outline possible antecedents of vigor. Using the Broaden-and-Build theory, the next section depicts proposed consequences of vigor. The two theoretical perspectives are combined to construct a theoretical model describing vigor, its antecedents and consequences. I then suggest several open research questions concerning the study of vigor at work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Positive mood at work (as an affective state) was hypothesized to be significantly and positively associated with the performance of both extrarole and role-prescribed prosocial organizational behaviors. Moreover, positive mood was hypothesized to have effects on prosocial behavior above and beyond the effects of fairness cognitions. Conversely, positive mood as a trait (i.e., positive affectivity) was expected to be unrelated to either form of prosocial behavior. Finally, the form of role-prescribed prosocial behavior investigated, customer-service behavior or helpful behavior directed at customers, was hypothesized to be positively associated with sales performance. These hypotheses were tested with a sample of 221 salespeople. All of the hypotheses were supported. Implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Posted 3/2000. The previously unstudied emotion of elevation is described. Elevation appears to be the opposite of social disgust. It is triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue. Elevation involves a warm or glowing feeling in the chest, and it makes people want to become morally better themselves. Because elevation increases one's desire to affiliate with and help others, it provides a clear illustration of B. L. Fredrickson's (see record
2000-03082-001) broaden-and-build model of the positive emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
So-called optimism has long given thoughtful people pause because of connotations of naiveté and denial, but optimism has become a more respectable stance, even among the sophisticated. Research has linked optimism to positive mood and good morale, to perseverance and effective problem solving, to achievement in a variety of domains, to popularity, to good health, and even to long life and freedom from trauma. In this chapter, we review what is known about one cognate of optimism-explanatory style, how people habitually explain the causes of events that occur to them. We trace the history of explanatory style research, which originated in studies of learned helplessness and depression as a way to make sense of the range of reactions in the wake of uncontrollable bad events. We focus on the neglected question of the origins of explanatory style, which seem to be multiple. We conclude by addressing issues that need to be considered by positive psychologists doing research on explanatory style. Research still focuses too much on negative outcomes, ignoring the premise of positive psychology that what makes life most worth living needs to be examined in its own right, not simply as the absence of problems.
Despite their interest in why people do what they do, psychologists typically overlook interest itself as a facet of human motivation and emotion. In recent years, however, researchers from diverse areas of psychology have turned their attention to the role of interest in learning, motivation, and development. This article reviews the emerging body of work on the psychology of interest, with an emphasis on what contemporary emotion research has learned about the subject. After considering four central questions—Is interest like other emotions? What functions does interest serve? What makes something interesting? Is interest merely another label for happiness?—the article considers unanswered questions and fruitful applications. Given interest's central role in cultivating knowledge and expertise, psychologists should apply research on interest to practical problems of learning, education, and motivation.