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PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
The Psychological Health Benefits of Accepting Negative Emotions and
Thoughts: Laboratory, Diary, and Longitudinal Evidence
Brett Q. Ford
University of Toronto
Phoebe Lam, Oliver P. John, and Iris B. Mauss
University of California, Berkeley
Individuals differ in the degree to which they tend to habitually accept their emotions and thoughts without
judging them—a process here referred to as habitual acceptance. Acceptance has been linked with greater
psychological health, which we propose may be due to the role acceptance plays in negative emotional
responses to stressors: acceptance helps keep individuals from reacting to—and thus exacerbating—their
negative mental experiences. Over time, experiencing lower negative emotion should promote psychological
health. To test these hypotheses, Study 1 (N⫽1,003) verified that habitually accepting mental experiences
broadly predicted psychological health (psychological well-being, life satisfaction, and depressive and anxiety
symptoms), even when controlling for potentially related constructs (reappraisal, rumination, and other
mindfulness facets including observing, describing, acting with awareness, and nonreactivity). Next, in a
laboratory study (Study 2, N⫽156), habitual acceptance predicted lower negative (but not positive) emotional
responses to a standardized stressor. Finally, in a longitudinal design (Study 3, N⫽222), acceptance predicted
lower negative (but not positive) emotion experienced during daily stressors that, in turn, accounted for the
link between acceptance and psychological health 6 months later. This link between acceptance and psycho-
logical health was unique to accepting mental experiences and was not observed for accepting situations.
Additionally, we ruled out potential confounding effects of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and life
stress severity. Overall, these results suggest that individuals who accept rather than judge their mental
experiences may attain better psychological health, in part because acceptance helps them experience less
negative emotion in response to stressors.
Keywords: acceptance, negative emotion, stressors, psychological health
Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157.supp
People commonly experience negative emotions and thoughts
but approach those negative mental experiences in different ways.
On one hand, people can judge these emotions and thoughts as
unacceptable or “bad,” struggle with those experiences, and strive
to alter them. On the other hand, people can accept their emotions
and thoughts and acknowledge them as a natural occurrence. The
tendency to accept (vs. judge) one’s mental experiences represents
a fundamental individual difference that should have important
implications for downstream outcomes: Because negative emo-
tions and thoughts are very common, the way individuals approach
those experiences has great power to shape individuals’ day-to-day
lives, with possible cumulative effects on longer-term outcomes.
Although research has suggested that it is generally beneficial to
accept (vs. judge) mental experiences, key questions remain re-
garding the mechanisms of these benefits, as well as the scope of
these benefits (how broadly does acceptance benefit different
facets of psychological health?), their generalizability (how do the
benefits of acceptance apply across diverse individuals?), and their
specificity (how can alternative explanations for the benefits of
acceptance be ruled out?).
We propose that individuals who tend to accept their mental
experiences may attain greater psychological health because ac-
ceptance helps them experience less negative emotion in response
to stressors. At first glance, it may seem paradoxical that individ-
uals who accept their negative mental experiences should feel less
negative emotion. However, both theory and preliminary findings
suggest that acceptance involves helping individuals not react to
their own emotions and thoughts, which in turn helps attenuate
those mental experiences and allow them to diffuse more quickly
(Campbell-Sills, Barlow, Brown, & Hofmann, 2006;Singer &
Dobson, 2007). As people who habitually accept their mental
experiences repeatedly experience less negative emotion, their
psychological health should improve.
This article was published Online First July 13, 2017.
Brett Q. Ford, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto;
Phoebe Lam, Oliver P. John, and Iris B. Mauss, Department of Psychology,
University of California, Berkeley.
Brett Q. Ford and Phoebe Lam contributed equally to this work. Preparation
of this article was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants awarded
to Iris B. Mauss (AG031967 and AG043592). An early version of the present
manuscript’s results was presented as a poster at the Emotion Preconference of
the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in 2016.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Brett Q.
Ford, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 1265 Military
Trail, Toronto, ON, M1C 1A5 Canada. E-mail: brett.ford@utoronto.ca
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology © 2017 American Psychological Association
2018, Vol. 115, No. 6, 1075–1092 0022-3514/18/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157
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