Positive Affect: What Is It And What Benefits Does It Give Us?

Positive affect, the protagonist of this article, is nothing more than a general mood made up of a set of positive emotions. These emotions will be able to guarantee us multiple benefits. In fact, it has been shown that they take care of our health, improve the perception we have of our body and help make our relationships stronger and more pleasant.

After this premise, let’s move on to the question you will all have in mind: how can we increase positive affection in our life? It can be done through the development of our personal strengths, resilience and mood. By strengthening these aspects, in fact, we will be able to enjoy our emotions to a greater extent and exploit its positive consequences in our relationships.

Do you want to understand how it works? Find out more in this article!

What is positive affect?

Affection is an emotional state that we can feel at a precise moment. It is a feeling that can be positive or negative. In general, we speak of negative affect when it is composed of emotions with a negative value; it is a question of positive affect, on the other hand, when emotions with a positive value predominate.

Negative affect has always aroused greater curiosity in psychological studies, since it is precisely negative emotions that have a greater relationship with psychological therapy. This therapy, in fact, mainly treats people who have problems, but does not focus sufficiently on those who do not report them.

On the contrary, the so-called positive affect has aroused the interest of scholars for a relatively short period of time, particularly in the field of positive psychology *. The main components of positive affect are cheerfulness, good humor, optimism, enthusiasm and love.

* Positive psychology is a current that wants to emphasize the importance of positive affect in psychological processes.

What are the benefits of positive affection?

As you can imagine, presenting a set of positive emotions has a very beneficial influence on people. First of all, it promotes psychological well-being. Furthermore, this excellent mental health, as you well know, also positively affects our physical health.

In addition to affecting our health, positive affection will improve the quality of our social relationships. The latter will give us more satisfaction, because we will put in place social facilitators of communication, such as the ability to start a conversation or to hold the gaze.

We will also improve our trust in others and the ability to collaborate, as well as generosity (both with others and towards ourselves). This will guarantee us more effective communication, as we will be able to generate and feel more empathy. In this way, we will create deeper and more stable bonds and relationships.

How Can We Increase Positive Affection?

Being filled with positive affection and therefore happier will feel wonderful. Even without considering the multiple benefits it brings, who wouldn’t want to be happier? We must be aware that there will always be situations that will make us suffer, which is normal. However, it is not normal to sink into that pain and completely bury the positive affect.

In order to avoid falling into this trap, we must make these positive emotions more present in our life. But how? By developing our positive strengths, resilience and mood.

• Positive strengths are those abilities that already exist in the way we behave, think or feel in a particular way. They stimulate the subject and allow its functioning, development and performance in the best way. Being aware of what our positive strengths are, as well as trying to develop others that we consider important, will increase our positive affection.

• Another way to accomplish this is through resilience. It consists in the ability to face problems in a positive way, in order to then be able to move forward with our life. It implies being able to overcome the difficulties of life, in order to emerge strengthened from any complicated situation. In summary, it favors our personal development in the face of negative experiences.

• Finally, we can stimulate positive affection through mood. Thanks to laughter, we will produce more of the hormones that help us control stress, such as adrenaline or cortisol. Our thinking will become more flexible, in this way we will also improve our capacity for emotional regulation.

A positive state of mind will also help us to interpret the situations we face in a more lucid way. It will affect our ability to establish and obtain social support. Finally, it will give us a hand when we have to endure a painful situation and will stimulate our immune system.

As we have seen, positive affect plays a very important role in our personal development and overall health, as well as in the quality of our interpersonal relationships. In addition, it has a great advantage: it can be increased! So… What are you waiting for?