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Garnering support for distressing experiences is highly important, yet notoriously challenging. We examine whether expressing positive thoughts and feelings when seeking support for negative events can help people elicit support, and we present a theoretical process model that explains why it might do so. The model includes three support-eliciting pathways through which expressing positivity could increase support: by strengthening providers’ prorelational motives, increasing providers’ positive mood, and enhancing providers’ expected support effectiveness. It also includes a support-suppressing pathway through which expressing positivity could decrease support: by undermining providers’ appraisals of support seekers’ needs. After presenting the model and providing evidence for each indirect pathway, we review research regarding the direct pathway. We then consider various types of positivity, discuss possible moderators, and identify directions for future research. Our model highlights support seekers’ underemphasized role in shaping support receipt and provides a novel perspective on positive expressivity’s potential value in distress-related contexts.

When people seek support in times of distress, receiving high‐quality support is critical to personal and relational well‐being. A rich body of work has examined support processes, but the role that support‐seekers play in eliciting support has received surprisingly limited attention. Yet, theory and research indicate that seekers’ behavior prior to and during support transactions shapes the support they receive. In the present paper, we summarize the literature on support‐seeking, describing how particular behaviors that seekers enact (deliberately or incidentally) affect their support receipt. We describe how each behavior facilitates (or hinders) providers’ ability to provide effective support and/or motivates (or demotivates) providers’ support provision efforts, and we consider why some people fail to enact certain support‐eliciting behaviors. Finally, we discuss the implications of our facilitate and motivate approach and identify important directions for future research. This work represents a promising springboard for examining a surprisingly underappreciated perspective in support transactions.

This paper proposes that the human mind in its creativity and emotional self-awareness is the result of the evolutionary transition from sexuality to eroticism. Eroticism is arrived at and defined by the high amount of energy displayed in animal sexuality. We propose that the unique human emotional intelligence is due to this "overflow" of mating energy. What from the survival viewpoint looks like an enormous waste of time and energy reveals itself to be an unexpected psychological benefit. The diversion of sexual energy from procreation-a process that results in erotic fantasies-turns intimacy into a source of human self-consciousness. This places different emphasis on the meaning of eroticism and provides a coherent scenario of mental development beyond mere cognitive capacities. Arguments are presented on how erotic imagination, or sexual excitation as an end in itself, promotes the human propensity for explorative curiosity; data from ethology, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience are presented to support these arguments. As philosophical anthropologists, we do not provide new empirical data, but the available results of comparative behavioral research confirm our hypothesis.

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