It's a wonderful life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts.

Abstract

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning. Keywords positive affect; counterfactual reasoning; gratitude; affective forecasting; adaptation In 1897, the Rev. Johnson Oatman, Jr. published a hymn called "Count Your Blessings" with the lyrics, "Count your many blessings, every doubt will fly/And you will be singing as the days go by" (Osbeck, 1982, p. 54). Philosophers, spiritual leaders, life coaches, therapists, and grandmothers have echoed these sentiments, namely that people would be happier if they simply paused to consider the many positive events that have happened in their lives.The scientific evidence for this hypothesis, however, is mixed. Emmons and McCullough (2003), in a seminal article, were the first to report experimental evidence in favor of the "count your blessings" hypothesis. In three experiments, participants were asked to list things for which they were grateful every day for 2 weeks, every day for 3 weeks, or once a week for 9 weeks. People in the various "count your blessings" conditions reported greater subjective Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Minkyung Koo, Department of Psychology, 102 Gilmer Hall, P.O. Box 400400, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400. E-mail: mk4rn@virginia.edu. well-being than did people in control conditions, but the results were not entirely consistent across studies. In two of the three studies, for example, there were no significant differences in reported positive or negative emotions between the gratitude and control conditions. Attempts to replicate these findings have yielded inconsistent results. At least four studies found no effect of thinking about positive events on people's positive emotions, negative emotions, or subjective well-being (Burton & King, 2008;Froh, Sefick, & Emmons, 2008; Lyubomirsky, Sousa, & Dickerhoof, 2006, Study 2; Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006, Study 2). 1 Two studies, on the other hand, found that thinking about positive events did improve people's affect or well-being (Burton & King, 2004;Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005). NIH Public AccessThis mixed bag of resul...

Keeping the magic alive: social sharing of positive life experiences sustains happiness

“…Similarly, thinking about how a positive outcome was surprising and might never have happened led to more positive affect than thinking about how the outcome actually did happen and was unsurprising (Koo, Algoe, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008). In contrast, writing about positive life events in a systematic and analytical way reduced positive emotion compared to simply thinking about the events (Lyubomirsky, Sousa, Dickerhoof, 2006).…”

From what might have been to what must have been: Counterfactual thinking creates meaning.

“…Spanning both ends of the emotional spectrum, counterfactual thinking can produce not only regret but also gratitude. Recent research has shown that mentally subtracting positive events from one's life can actually increase positive affective states (Koo, Algoe, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008) through a process akin to "counting one's blessings. "…”

Making it last: Combating hedonic adaptation in romantic relationships

“…In one study, participants instructed to contemplate what life would be like without a particular positive event reported higher wellbeing than those not instructed to mentally subtract (Koo, Algoe, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008). In particular, participants who imagined their lives if they had never met their romantic partner reported higher relationship satisfaction than those who did not mentally subtract their relationship.…”