Welcome back. This is the second week of mental health as our topic. With me today in the studio, we have Margaret and Ashden, picking up a little bit more of where we left off. Last time we talked a bit about depression and also treatment for depression, and other mental health disorders. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about positive affect in health. Now, positive affect, what is meant by that is basically having positive emotions, good things, happiness, amusement, and so on and it's relevant to mental health. So I want to remind you of the diagnostic criteria for major depression, and this first piece is depressed mood. The second piece is lost of interest or pleasure. Positive affects is the common theme, as we discussed before of what bonds these two together. So the opposite of positive affect is sadness, but also positive affect spans this notion of pleasurable experiences and pleasurable activities. So I want to tell you a little bit about the influence of a positive affect on mental health and physical health as well. So we're not really going to the full diagnosis or pathology, but we're talking more about how something like experiencing positive emotions can actually have real positive health outcomes. So what positive affect means? This can be something that's either state or trait, meaning it can either be something that's a state of being. I think that we probably all know these people who are just glowing and sparkly all the time and whatever. But it can also be something that's more dispositional, it's more current, and this is maybe more people experience more of a fluctuation and presentation or more like, it can be neutral and then all of a sudden get more sparkly or happy or experience positive affect. What we know is that higher positive affect, whether it be temporary state or more of a dispositional thing, is associated with longer lifespan, decreased levels of sickness, and also physical course. So in the state of the illness, the positive affect can actually influence the prognosis. So I'm going to go through a little bit of the heart and soul study, but basically what the bottom line is is that positive affect was associated with positive health behaviors. So better mood or reports of more positive emotion is actually associated with increased physical activity, better sleep, the ability to take medication on time and correctly, and so on. So we know that it actually experiencing positive affect can influence all of these other positive health behaviors in a positive way. I'm going to show you some data, I know it's just me really pointing at you right now, but this is the one that always says so much on. This is one of my favorite studies and it's called the Nun Study. So obviously, positive affect and nuns? We've all seen The Sound of Music, The Hills are Alive, She's so happy out there. Maybe not always the case. Anybody who's seen American Horror Story, the second season? Anyone? No. You all? Scary show? Not the nicest nun. Just [inaudible] I could talk about forever but I won't stay on track. I'm bringing these two here, because what the study identified is that not all Catholic nuns are as Julie Andrews. There was actually a range of what these researchers defined as positive affects, as demonstrated in the journals that these nuns capitally actually went through and analyzed the content of journals. So like, what happened today? Well, the hills were alive, whatever, versus maybe a little bit more of a cynical or edgy content coming out in some of these handwritten autobiographies. They were actually able to categorize these journals into those that would be defined as positive affect, where positive emotions were being articulated and positive emotional, it's just what would be identified as being demonstration of positive affect, versus less positive affect. Then they actually were able to assess and look at the influence of the positive versus the less positive on survival, and actually found that when they divided these nuns into quartiles of positive affect, it actually influenced lifespan, how long they lived. So you can see that quartile 4, up here, has the best probability of survival. So this although, of course, correlational, you couldn't categorize somebody into a group, "You're going to feel good, you're going to have positive emotion, and you're going to have less positive emotion." But this would be more dispositional positive affect and so really speaks to the extent to which perhaps this focus on positive emotion or attempt, and as much as that is able to be learned, which there's evidence to demonstrate that actually it is possible to learn positive emotion, actually has an influence on longevity or survival. More good days than bad days. Yeah. Even more days. Now, this is a little bit more recent, but one that's come up in class before. You guys remember the Facebook Experiment? Yeah, I love this study. I was talking about this, my mom was like, "You should get off Facebook. I saw the study in class and it was all the negative people on Facebook just makes you negative." It's basically what it is. There we go. What they actually did here, and this was Facebook messing with us. So I think that Facebook has some very good elements and I think the creator is a potentially pretty pro-social, and that he might be wanting to do some good, with social media. Although I could go on a whole other soapbox about social media and unpleasant trees associated with it and whatever. But that's a different class. Anyway, what they actually did was filter people's news feeds, so that the one group unwittingly, without realizing you're part of a naturalistic experiment. It wasn't really, but it was an experiment where they actually went through and made sure that the news items that you were seeing from your network, for some people, it was filtered so that most of the positive stuff showed up, and for other people it was filtered so that the negative stuff showed up. They were actually able to use their systems to look for positive words. So whether it be something like awesome, spectacular, terrific, so happy versus miserable, X, Y, Z, whatever, terrible, awful, whatever. So they had the keywords so they were able to search and one group only saw the negative stuff coming through, and one group only saw the positive stuff coming through. Then ultimately that influenced people's own status, their own reports of their mood of the things that they were saying. So it's like they'd literally were able to make the news feeds got up on the wrong side of the bed, for one group, and for another group filtering all good happy things to them and they actually saw influence on people's mood. It's a contagion affect of mood, which I thought was rather fascinating and to how that actually focusing on the negative, can drive you down to negativity, and posting the positive has the other affect is that, there's a [inaudible] lesson to be learned there. I think it's cool too. It's not just the people that you're directly surrounded with, it's something that you can just read and see, influences why you behave. Absolutely. That's, again, that theme that I'm trying to bring into this course of the media portrayals, not only of things like news, but of science of our health literature and the extent to which that can really influence our interpretation and the way we choose, we meaning us and everybody, choose to behave.
