Positive Affect and the Other Side of Coping

Susan Folkman and Judith Tedlie Moskowitz

University of California, San FranciscoAlthough research on coping over the past 30 years hasproduced convergent evidence about the functions of cop-ing and the factors that influence it, psychologists still havea great deal to learn about how coping mechanisms affectdiverse outcomes. One of the reasons more progress hasnot been made is the almost exclusive focus on negativeoutcomes in the stress process. Coping theory and researchneed to consider positive outcomes as well. The authorsfocus on one such outcome, positive affect, and reviewfindings about the co-occurrence of positive affect withnegative affect during chronic stress, the adaptive func-tions of positive affect during chronic stress, and a specialclass of meaning-based coping processes that support pos-itive affect during chronic stress.

search on coping over the past 30 years has beendominated by contextual models that emphasize,coping by a person situated in a particular stress-ful encounter (e.g., Lazarus, 1966; Lazarus & Folkman,1984; McCrae, 1984) or stressful social condition (e.g.,Pearlin, Lieberman, Menaghan, & Mullin, 1981; Pearlin &Schooler, 1978). Studies based on these conceptualizationsvary in the weight they give to the influence of antecedentfactors such as personality (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1986;McCrae & John, 1992), individual and social resources(Holahan & Moos, 1986, 1987, 1990), and developmentover the life span (e.g., Aldwin, 1994; Strack & Feifel,1996). Despite these variations, research based on contex-tual approaches converges on the following points:1. Coping has multiple functions, including but notlimited to the regulation of distress and the management ofproblems causing the distress (cf. Parker & Endler, 1996).2. Coping is influenced by the appraised characteris-tics of the stressful context, including its controllability(Baum, Fleming, & Singer, 1983; Folkman, Lazarus,Dunkel-Schetter, DeLongis, & Gruen, 1986).3. Coping is influenced by personality dispositionsincluding optimism (for a review, see Carver & Scheier,1999), neuroticism, and extraversion (McCrae & Costa,1986).4. Coping is influenced by social resources (Holahan,Moos, & Schaefer, 1996; Pierce, Sarason, & Sarason,1996).Psychologists have made less progress, however, inanswering the fundamental questions that motivated inter-est in coping in the first place: How does coping helpindividuals minimize or avoid the adverse mental and phys-ical health effects of stress? Does coping really matter?Discussions of this lack of progress often cite limitations ofassessment techniques (e.g., Coyne & Gottlieb, 1996;Coyne & Racioppo, 2000, this issue; Stone, Greenberg,Kennedy-Moore, & Newman, 1991) and the underutiliza-tion of qualitative methods (Lazarus, 1999), or they cite thelack of attention to the interpersonal aspects of coping (e.g.,Lepore, 1997; O'Brien & DeLongis, 1997).These criticisms all have merit and need to be ad-dressed, but we believe there is another reason that copingresearch has fallen short of its promise to explain thepsychological mechanisms through which people managestress effectively. Historically, coping has most often beenevaluated in relation to its effectiveness in regulating dis-tress. This orientation is completely understandable giventhe history of coping and its origins in ego psychology(e.g., Menninger's, 1963, and Vaillant's, 1977, classicmodels) in which the primary concern was the regulation ofanxiety. What has been underrepresented in coping re-search is an approach that looks at the other side of thecoin, an approach that examines positive affect in the stressprocess.Positive affect has not been entirely neglected in mod-els of stress. It has been discussed in relation to the primaryappraisal of stressful situations as challenges, which signalsthe possibility of mastery or gain and is characterized bypositively toned emotions such as eagerness, excitement,and confidence. Positive affect is also discussed in relationto the appraisal of the resolution of a stressful encounter asfavorable or successful, leading to emotions such as hap-piness and pride (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985), and it isdiscussed as a response to the cessation of aversive condi-tions, when people are likely to experience an offsettingpositive emotion such as relief (for a review, see Taylor,Helgeson, Reed, & Skokan, 1991). In addition, a number ofstudies have examined other kinds of positive outcomes ofstressful events, even though the events themselves maynot have had favorable resolutions. Such outcomes include

Editor's note.

Mark R. Somerfield and Robert R. McCrae developed thisPsychology in the Public Forum section.

Author's note.

The writing of this article was supported by Grants 49985and 52517 from the National Institute of Mental Health and by Grant58069 from the National Institute of Mental Health and the NationalInstitute of Nursing Research.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to SusanFolkman or Judith Tedlie Moskowitz, Center for AIDS Prevention Stud-ies, University of California, 74 New Montgomery" Street, Suite 600, SanFrancisco, CA 94105. Electronic mail may be sent to sfolkrnan@psg.ucsf.edu or jmoskowitz@psg.ucsf.edu.

June 2000

•

American Psychologist

10.1037//0003-066X.55.6.647

647

the perception of benefit from the stressful encounters (e.g.,Affleck, Tennen, Croog, & Levine, 1987), the acquisitionof new coping skills and resources (e.g., Schaefer &Coleman, 1992), the perception of growth related to theirstress (e.g., Holahan & Moos, 1987, 1990, 1991; Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999; Park, Cohen, & Murch, 1996),and spiritual or religious transformation that results fromthe stressful experiences (e.g., Aldwin, 1994; Pargament,1997).In general, however, most models of stress do notemphasize positive affect or, in particular, its adaptationalsignificance, nor do they describe the kinds of copingprocesses that people use to generate or sustain positiveaffect in the midst of personally significant, enduring stress(see also Folkman & Moskowitz, in press). In this article,we highlight these aspects of positive affect. We argue that:• positive affect can co-occur with distress during agiven period,• positive affect in the context of stress has importantadaptational significance of its own, and• coping processes that generate and sustain positiveaffect in the context of chronic stress involvemeaning.

Positive Affect Co-OccursWith Distress

Although it is widely recognized that negative affect goeshand in hand with chronic stress, increasing empiricalevidence shows that positive affect also occurs duringchronic stress, often with surprising frequency. In a studyof people hospitalized with a severe or chronic illness,Viney (1986) found that the patients reported significantlyhigher levels of positive emotion than did participants in anonpatient comparison group. Silver and Wortman (1987,as reported in Wortman & Silver, 1987) reported similarfindings in which people experiencing extreme chronicstress (one group with spinal cord injuries, one group ofbereaved parents) experienced positive emotions signifi-cantly more frequently than negative emotions within ashort time of the occurrence of the negative event thatprecipitated the chronic stress. In a longitudinal study of253 caregiving partners of men with AIDS (Folkman,1997a), participants were assessed every two months fortwo years and semiannually for three additional years. Theparticipants were found to have significantly elevated lev-els of depressive mood (assessed with the Center for Epi-demiologic Studies Depression Scale; Radloff, 1977)throughout caregiving and up to three years after the deathsof their partners. With the exception of the time immedi-ately surrounding the deaths of their partners, however,they also reported experiencing positive affect (assessedwith a modified version of Bradburn's, 1969, affect scales)with at least the same frequency that they experiencednegative affect.

The Nature of the Relationship BetweenPositive and Negative Affect

Our observation that positive and negative affect can co-occur during periods of intense stress touches on the on-going debate about the extent to which positive and nega-tive affect are bipolar or independent constructs. (See re-cent work by Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1998, and Russell& Carroll, 1999, for full reviews of the debate and insight-

ful

suggestions for a resolution.) For the most part, thedebate on the relationship between positive and negativeaffect has been concerned primarily with the momentaryexperience of affect and whether a person can experiencepositive affect and negative affect simultaneously. How-ever, we are not concerned with the relationship betweenpositive and negative affect at any given moment. We areconcerned with the slightly different issue of whether pos-itive and negative affect can both occur during a stressfulperiod of time. We argue that this type of co-occurrence,which has been observed in the studies we cited, is com-pletely plausible and, furthermore, may serve an importantfunction. Over a given stressful period, numerous affect-inducing events occur, the majority of which are likely toproduce negative affect. However, despite the overridingstressful circumstances, events that prompt positive affectalso occur. For example, one caregiver in our study re-ported feeling "incredibly happy and very hopeful and verypositive ... really elated" in response to a positive eventthat occurred during the same week in which he reportedthe following unrelated stressful event:It was the day I took C. for his doctor's appointment and he gotvery weak and we ended up taking him to the emergency room.I had already been upset by seeing him become pale and faint. Irealized the situation was not good but I didn't say anything andtried desperately to remain composed .... We had been there forabout three hours and his primary doctor came over to see howthings were. She said, "It occurs to me that we're not talkingabout years, but merely a matter of months." It was a chillingstatement that has been echoing in my head ever since.When viewed from a stress and coping perspective,findings that positive and negative affect co-occur duringintensely stressful periods suggest that the important ques-tion is not the extensively debated issue about the relation-ship between positive and negative affect. Rather, the ques-tion is, why is positive affect there at all? Does it haveadaptational significance?

Positive and Negative Affect Viewed From aCoping Perspective

The adaptational significance of negative affect has beenextensively studied in terms of its motivational and atten-tional effects. Negative affect, for example, focuses atten-tion on the problem at hand (Frijda, 1988) and is associatedwith specific evolutionarily adaptive forms of action (e.g.,anger prompts the urge to attack, fear prompts the urge toflee; Frijda, 1986; Frijda, Kuipers, & Schure, 1989; Laza-rus, 1991).In comparison, there has been little discussion of theadaptational significance of positive affect. Early emotiontheorists, when they considered positive affect at all, pro-posed that it served as a safety signal and was likely to leadto decreased vigilance and shallower processing of infor-mation compared with negative affect (for reviews, see648 June 2000 • American Psychologist

Aspinwall, 1998; Fredrickson, 1998). If this were the case,positive affect would be maladaptive in the context ofchronic stress because it would counteract the adaptiveattentional and motivational effects of negative affect.However, theoretical and empirical work indicate that pos-itive affect can have significant adaptive functions, bothunder normal conditions and under conditions of stress.Twenty years ago, Lazarus, Kanner, and Folkman(1980) considered the functional role that positive emotionsserve in the context of stressful events. They hypothesizedthat under stressful conditions, when negative emotions arepredominant, positive emotions may provide a psycholog-ical break or respite, support continued coping efforts, andreplenish resources that have been depleted by the stress.Recently, Fredrickson (1998) proposed a complementary

broaden-and-build model

of the function of positive emo-tions. In contrast to the narrowing of attention and specificaction tendencies associated with negative emotions,Fredrickson reviewed evidence showing that positive emo-tions broaden the individual's attentional focus and behav-ioral repertoire and, as a consequence, build social, intel-lectual, and physical resources--resources that can becomedepleted under chronically stressful conditions.Empirical evidence for the function of positive affecthas begun to accumulate. Isen and her colleagues haveshown in a number of studies that positive affect promotescreativity and flexibility in thinking and problem solving(Isen & Daubman, 1984; Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki,1987; Isen & Geva, 1987; Isen, Johnson, Mertz, & Robin-son, 1985). Positive affect also facilitates the processing ofimportant (e.g., self-relevant) information even if that in-formation is negative and may potentially damage self-esteem (Reed & Aspinwall, 1998; Trope & Neter, 1994;Trope & Pomerantz, 1998).Positive affect may also serve as a buffer againstadverse physiological consequences of stress. Positive af-fect, for example, has been shown to offset the potentiallydamaging physiological concomitants of negative affect.Fredrickson and Levenson (1998) induced negative emo-tion in participants by showing them a film that elicitedfear. Participants were then shown one of four films de-signed to elicit contentment, amusement, sadness, or noemotion (neutral condition). Measures of cardiovascularreactivity indicated that those individuals who were shownthe contentment or amusement film had faster recovery tobaseline than did participants shown the sad or neutral film.This study suggests one route by which positive emotionsmay undo some of the negative physiological effects asso-ciated with negative emotions.Another route through which positive affect may off-set the deleterious physiological effects of stress is throughthe neuroendocrine system. Suggestive preliminary datacome from a study by Epel, McEwen, and Ickovics (1998)in which women who reported finding positive meaning inresponse to a traumatic event had more adaptive hormonalresponses to a subsequent laboratory stressor. The wom-en's positive affect as a result of meaning-based coping inresponse to traumatic events may have made them morephysiologically resilient in the face of subsequent stressand may have helped protect them from the maladaptiveneural, endocrine, and immune responses to chronic stressthat can lead to disease (Epel et al., 1998; McEwen, 1998).The possibility that positive affect may have a role in theprevention of adverse physiological effects of stress that isnot simply the obverse of negative affect' s deleterious roleis further reinforced by findings that positive and negativeaffect are associated with different neural structures (Ca-cioppo & Gardner, 1999; Davidson, 1992; LeDoux, 1995;Tomarken & Keener, 1998).Positive affect in the context of chronic stress mayalso help prevent clinical depression. Intense, prolongednegative affect, such as that experienced in chronicallystressful conditions, without compensatory experiences ofpositive affect may overwhelm the regulatory function ofemotion and result in clinical depression (Gross & Munoz,1995). Experiences of positive affect in the midst of stress-ful circumstances may interrupt and thereby short-circuitthis rumination spiral and prevent the decline into clinicaldepression.Work by Reich and Zautra and their colleagues sup-ports this possibility. They found that positive life events(and presumably the positive affect associated with them)were related to decreased distress as well as increasedpositive affect in individuals who were experiencing thechronic stress of disability (Zautra, Reich, & Guamaccia,1990) or who had recently experienced many negative lifeevents (Reich & Zautra, 1981). However, the associationbetween positive events and decreased distress may bespecific to contexts that are stressful (Zautra, Potter, &Reich, 1997), because for control groups who were notexperiencing stress, positive events were associated withincreased positive affect only and not with decreased dis-tress (Reich & Zautra, 1981; Zautra et al., 1990).In a study of AIDS-related caregiving, Moskowitz,Acree, and Folkman (1998) explored the possibility thatpositive affect helps prevent clinical depression. Mosko-witz et al. compared the average levels of positive andnegative affect (assessed with modified versions of Brad-bum's, 1969, positive and negative affect scales) of menwho did and did not experience clinical depression over thecourse of the study. Not surprisingly, men who experiencedclinical depression (as assessed by a version of the Struc-tured Clinical Interview for the

Diagnostic and StatisticalManual of Mental Disorders,

3rd ed., revised [SCID];Spitzer, Williams, Gibbon, & First, 1988) had significantlyhigher levels of negative affect on average in the interviewsprior to becoming clinically depressed than did men whodid not become clinically depressed. In addition, however,depressed men also reported significantly lower averagelevels of positive affect (Moskowitz et al., 1998). Althoughthese correlational data cannot prove that the combinationof increased negative affect and decreased positive affectcaused clinical depression, the data are consistent with thepossibility that without the protective effects of sufficientlevels of positive affect, people who are experiencing highlevels of negative affect are more likely to become clini-cally depressed.June 2000 • American Psychologist 649