Psych 180

1
Psych 180

• Pleasure and Positive Experience
• Lecture 2

2
What is pleasure?

• Can be anything from intense sharp pleasure
• Orgasms, rush
• Mellow diffuse pleasure
• Relaxing while listening to the ocean

3
Who cares about pleasure?

• Higher emotions possibly signal safety and
  provide the opportunity to build and consolidate
  psychological skills
• Some of the most crucial and basic behaviors are
  pleasurable
• Eating
• Drinking
• Sex
• Important for the survival of the species

4
What about the non-biological pleasures?

• Socializing, experiencing relationships
• Also crucial for survival of the species
• People that have stronger social networks thrive
  more

5
Lack of pleasure

• Psychology mainly focused research here
• Referred to as anhedonia
• Possibly biological
• Improper brain structures and chemical levels

6
What do we know about pleasure?

• There are degrees of pleasure
• Not necessarily easy to rate on a 7-pt scale
• We can still compare things (which is more
  pleasurable)
• Pleasure is multidimensional
• Can include positive and negative aspects
• Something bittersweet
• Pleasures can result from adding something or
  subtracting something
• Removing discomfort can be very pleasurable
• Pleasure can be in the present or in the past
  (memories) or in the future (hopes)

7
Peak-end theory

• Recollection of pleasure is NOT a simple summary
  of the individual moments
• What is important is the most extreme rating
  throughout the experience and the rating before
  it ended
• What doesnt seem to matter is how long the
  experience lasted
• Known as duration neglect

8
PRESENT THIS BEFORE THE THEORY ITSELF
9
Experiments

• Colonoscopy experiment from Authentic Happiness
• Two groups
• Group 1 Hand in ice cold water for 60 seconds
• Group 2 Hand in ice cold water for 60 seconds,
  plus an extra 30 seconds in the same water that
  had the temp raised 1 degree
• Which group found it more pleasurable?
• Group 2

10
Peak-end theory continued

• Just be careful
• A 20 minute vacation that has a strong high and
  ends well may not be all that satisfying or
  enjoyable
• From the text And in the sexual domain,
  duration neglect has a different and decidedly
  dysfunctional definition

11
Song activity

• In notebooks

12
Question

• How much would you pay for Dr Smiths Rio Hondo
  coffee mug?
• Lets say I give you each one of these mugs. Now
  I want it back. How much would I have to pay you
  to get it back?

13
How accurate are people at predicting future
pleasures and behaviors?

• Not very
• Mere exposure effect
• Having heard or seen something before makes you
  more likely to like it
• You dont even have to be aware that you have
  heard or seen it before (Zajonc, 1998)
• Endowment effect
• We will bestow a greater worth in an object if we
  have it than if we dont have it, even if the
  object is the same

14
Other inaccuracies about pleasure

• People are inaccurate when predicting how long
  their pleasure or pain may last
• People consistently overestimate how long these
  feelings will last
• People are extremely inaccurate about predicting
  their future happiness as well (Daniel Gilbert)
• People constantly adapt to where they are
• The same pleasurable experience for a second,
  third, or fourth time yields less pleasure than
  the first time
• Proposed hedonic treadmill
• Constantly have a changing baseline that we
  compare our well-being and happiness to

15
BRING SOME OF SELIGMANs AH in here about
adaptation
16
Positive Psychology and Emotions

• More complex than a feeling
• An emotion implies that they may drive us to a
  purpose (root is motion)
• Negative emotions
• Probably selected for evolutionarily
• Fear accompanies the avoidance of danger
• Fight or flight
• Have an immediate reaction that accompanies them
• Anger leads to fighting
• Sadness leads to crying

17
Positive emotions

• Immediate reaction isnt there
• Barbara Fredrickson believes that these emotions
  provide safety in the present so that we can
  better prepare ourselves for the future
• Positive emotions allow for a focus on broader
  concepts and not necessarily the here and now
• Broaden and build theory

18
Fredrickson and Branigan (2005)

• Showed college students films to produce either
• Amusement, contentment, anger, anxiety
• Students that saw amusement or contentment were
  more likely to see global patterns not the local
  ones

19
Positive emotions even undue negative ones

• College students given a task that raised anxiety
• Told to write a speech and would be videotaped
  and evaluated
• Before though, they were shown film clips to
  induce certain emotions
• Those that saw the positive emotions had more
  rapid recovery of their heart rates than those
  that saw a sad or neutral film

20
Three questions about broaden and build theory

• Do different positive emotions work better or
  worse for broaden and build?
• What about emotions that are pleasurable but work
  against broaden and build (like lust, pride)?
• What about individual differences of personality?
• Some of us can easily become happy and others
  arent quite as easily altered
• How do the studies account for this?

21
Moods vs emotions

• Moods are more trait-like
• Emotions are more state-like

22
Hedonic capacity

• The ability to experience positive feelings
• Possibly rooted in genetics
• Possibly linked to extraversion
• Now called positive affectivity

23
PANAS

• Positive and Negative Affect Schedule
• Present people with positive moods and negative
  moods
• Inspired vs ashamed
• Ask them to rate how it describes themselves
• Possibly right now, over the past few days, or in
  general
• Positive words are averaged together and the
  negative words are averaged together
• Get a score of positive affectivity and a score
  of negative affectivity

24
Affectivity

• Seems to be stable across weeks, months, years
  and decades
• grumpy old men may well have been testy young
  men, petulant youth, whiny toddlers and difficult
  babies
• Seems to also be stable across situations too
• Levels of variability are also stable
• Some people fluctuate a lot
• Others rarely fluctuate

25
Positive vs Negative The differences

• More likely to be extraverted, socially active,
  have more friends, more acquaintances, more
  involved in organizations
• More likely to be married (happily married too),
  like their jobs
• More likely to be spiritual or religious
• Heritability index of around .4
• Chart on pg 64

26
Flow

• Similar to the idea of being in the zone
• The experience of working at full capacity
• Began by looking at people that did things for
  intrinsic reasons
• People that do things for enjoyment have an
  engagement that is quite similar to each other,
  even though they are doing different things

27
Components of flow

• Take from AH
• Usually happens in voluntary activities but can
  happen at work as well

28
What do we know about flow?

• Some people have lots of flow
• Others dont
• Families that provide challenging activities and
  support for their kids experience more flow
• Early schooling experiences targeting identifying
  interests and skills may lead to more flow

29
If you have more flow as a youth

• You are more likely to achieve with creative
  domains later in life
• Possibly linked to health
• Weak source here though- unpublished dissertation
• NEED TO ADD MORE FROM THE ACTUAL BOOK ?

30
(No Transcript)