People differ in the extent to which they arrange their daily lives to include pleasant experiences, an individual difference I label prioritizing positivity.  I will discuss the measurement of prioritizing positivity, its connection to emotional well-being, and the effects of inducing prioritizing positivity.

Lahnna Catalino is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Scripps College. She earned PhD in Social Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Broadly speaking, her research interests are in the study of emotions, emotion regulation, well being, and health. Through surveys, experience-sampling methods, and laboratory studies, she seeks to understand effective ways people deliberately pursue happiness (i.e., positive emotions). Catalino shows that people who proactively seek out pleasant events when organizing daily life report more positive emotions and fewer depressive symptoms than people who do not. To measure this individual difference, prioritizing positivity, she developed a six-item scale. This research contributes to the current debate in affective science about whether or not the pursuit of happiness backfires.

This talk explores the relationship between positive spontaneous thoughts and incentive salience – a psychological property thought to energize approach motivation by rendering cues that are associated with prior enjoyment more likely to stand out to the individual when subsequently encountered in the environment. Building on initial evidence that positive spontaneous thoughts may co-occur with incentive salience and that both constructs mediate the effect of liking on wanting, the research discussed herein tested a stronger hypothesis: that positive spontaneous thoughts actually play an active role in amplifying approach motivation. In that experiment, 80 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to receive false feedback (or not) meant to alter their perceptions of their spontaneous thoughts about a target physical activity. Results revealed that participants who were led to believe that their spontaneous thoughts about a target activity were especially positive planned to devote more time to that activity over the coming week than participants who received no such information about their spontaneous thoughts. Collectively, these findings suggest that positive spontaneous thoughts may play an important role in shaping approach motivation. Broader implications and future directions in the study of positive spontaneous thoughts are discussed. 

Dr. Elise Rice is a Cancer Research Training Award Postdoctoral Fellow in the Behavioral Research Program at the National Cancer Institute. In her work, Dr. Rice aims to clarify how positive emotions and automatic processes shape health behaviors with the ultimate goal of improving health and well-being. One representative line of her research explores the role of positive spontaneous thoughts in motivation; findings from that work may have implications for promoting sustainable behavior change that does not depend in large part on effortful self-control. Dr. Rice earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.