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Mood Over Matter: Can Happiness Be Your Undoing?, Melissa Falkenstern, Holly H. Schiffrin, S. Katherine Nelson, Lyndsey Ford, Christina Keyser

Psychological Science

Research in the field of positive psychology has revealed many advantages of positive emotions. According to the undoing hypothesis (Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998), positive affect can undo the physiological effects of negative emotion. The present study examined whether positive emotions could undo the cognitive effects of negative emotion. A letter identification task was used to measure changes in cognitive processing of 86 college students who were induced into a positive, negative, or neutral affective state by viewing various film clips. The results of this study provided preliminary support for the hypothesis that positive emotions undo the cognitive effects of negative …