I common media claim is that if you think positively and contain all of these positive emotions it will positively affect your health, and the same with negative emotions and affecting your health negatively. The media source that I used for my claim was Oprah.com. the link is http://www.oprah.com/health/how-your-emotions-affect-your-health-and-immune-system.
I will be using various other sources to prove whether this media claim is true or not, including Fredrickson and Joiner’s research report titled Positive Emotions Trigger Upward Spirals Toward Emotional Well-being, How Positive Emotions Build Physical Health: Perceived Positive Social Connections Account for the Upward Spiral Between Positive Emotions and Vagal Tone by Kok et. al, Cohen and Pressman’s journal article titled Positive Affect and Health, and Aspinwall and Tedeschi’s article titled The Value of Positive Psychology for Health Psychology: Progress and Pitfalls in Examining the Relation of Positive Phenomena to Health.
Fredrickson and Joiner’s article stated that positive emotions broaden your attention and cognition. By broadening attention and cognition, it promotes creative thinking which helps us to cope with things such as stress. Their experiment consisted of 183 college students and they went on to ask these students how they felt and coped with very situations in their lives. All in all, in their experiment they were able to determine that their hypotheses were correct and that positive emotions do in fact trigger upward spirals to- ward enhanced emotional well-being. Therefore, this is evidence to support my media claim, because they stated that the individuals who were better at coping with the stressors in their lives and had a positive outlook throughout the whole experiment ended up having the most positive results when it came to the individual’s mental health.
The article composed by Kok et al. stated that positive emotions have a positive effect on the physical body. There is an upward spiral effect that reinforces the tie between the emotions that we have and the effect that they have on our health. They also gave examples in their article speaking of how people who are happier live longer as well as people who are happy do not get sick as often due to their heightened immune system. The authors stated that positive emotions result in positive social connections, which is linked to greater physical health.
This experiment consisted of 65 individuals who were either students or faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These individuals were told to go to a workshop once a week for six weeks. This workshop consisted of mediating for one hour. The participants were also encouraged to meditate at home in their free time as well, but how much time they spent meditating was up to them. The participants were also told to write down every day how many minutes they meditated, prayed, or had solo spiritual activity. These researchers were able to conclude that their hypothesis was correct and that positive emotions do affect your health positively they even went on to say that positive emotions are a type of nutrients for the human body. This adds to the evidence of my media claim, because they too see the health benefits of possessing positive emotions.
Cohen and Pressman’s article stated that negative affective styles such as anxiety, depression, or hostility can result in an increased risk for illness or even mortality. They also stated the reverse, that people with positive affective styles tend to live longer and have less illness and pain. They looked at one study in particular where they were comparing two nuns, and the one that used more positive words in her journal lived longer than the nun that commonly used negative words in her journal. There were six other studies that were very similar to this, where all of the participants were over the age of 60, but the results were unanimous. They were also able to conclude that positive emotions positively affect the human body. This source one more adds to the support of my media claim, the positive emotions effect the physical body positively.
In my final article, Aspinwall and Tedeschi speak of positive psychology and how positive thought, feelings, and experiences can improve your health or wellbeing. Optimism as well as all of these positive emotions can positively affect the body. They discussed multiple different positive aspects and all of their benefits to the body. At the end of their article they were able to conclude and promote all of the positive results of using positive psychology. This article once again adds to my compilation of articles that support my media claim that I got from Oprah.com to support the idea that positive emotions positively affect the physical human body.
Argument
My topic is how positive emotions and thoughts affect the physical body. I found this media source at Oprah.com. The statement was that when we express positive emotions it can also positively affect our health resulting in getting sick less often and living longer lives compared to people who are not as positive as often.
I believe that positive emotions and thoughts do in fact affect the physical body positively due to the unanimous results across the board for all four of my sources. They all came to the conclusion that this concept of positive psychology is beneficial for all and it is a supported media claim due to the various amounts of testing from all of these different researchers in my peer-reviewed journals presented here.
“Positive emotions trigger upward spirals to- ward enhanced emotional well-being” (Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002) This quote is just one of the many that support the ideal of positive psychology and the many positive results that come from this ideal. This long with all of the results from the other articles fully supports the media claim that I presented. With all of these researchers agreeing on the positive effects of positive psychology it can be seen that this technique is more than just a claim in the media, it is a true technique with positive results for lots of people all around the world.
Reflection
From doing this assignment I learned how much research there actually is on this topic and the fact that is actually has its own category of psychology. I had heard of the effects of positive thinking many times but I had never actually researched the topic before so it was very interesting to read all of the research that was supporting this ideal.
The most interesting thing about reading all of these articles was the fact that it effects people of all ages, races, and genders. No matter what type of person you are positive psychology can help improve both your mental and physical health. No matter if you have a mental health situation like depression or anxiety or if you have physical pain, positive psychology can help improve your health.
Some of the most challenging things about reading these articles are trying to interpret some of the diagrams or graphs. Some are more in depth and take a little bit more time to comprehend than other ones.
From the information that I learned from these researchers I am now about to use the skills in positive psychology to lower my stress and enhance both my mental and physical health. I can use these ideals to help my friends as well and encourage them to think as optimistically as possible to help their overall health as much as they can.
All in all, I believe this research was very beneficial in order to further my understanding of this aspect of psychology. This new information will also allow me to enhance my everyday life by doing positive psychology activities so that my mental and physical health is increased and hopefully there will be positive results, like seen in all of the research articles that I read and talked about here in this paper.