Research

OVERVIEW

Can people be too happy? Can feeling too good lead to negative outcomes? We approach these questions by examining positive emotion in healthy community samples as well as psychiatric disorders characterized by extremes (i.e., bipolar disorder) and deficits (i.e., depression) in positive emotion. Work on positive emotion has tended to focus on how they help us pursue important personal goals, form and maintain social bonds, and broaden our scope of attention. Although such findings are important, it is paramount to also consider the potential downside or costs associated with positive emotions when experienced in certain degrees or contexts. Understanding the ways in which positive emotion goes awry is crucial for identifying upper boundary conditions of positive emotions as well as identifying areas of resilience and future intervention targets.

POSITIVE EMOTION AND BIPOLAR DISORDER

An ideal point of entry to study the upper extremes of positive emotion is through the study of people with a history of mania, or those with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (BD). The core diagnostic criterion for BD is excessive and pervasive positive emotionality (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Examples of the types of questions we work on include:

  1. Does BD enhance the magnitude of positive emotional reactions? We have found that people at high risk for, and diagnosed with, BD reported greater positive emotion experience and exhibit higher levels RSA, a putative parasympathetic marker of positive emotionality, in response to positive, negative, and even neutral stimuli (Gruber, Johnson, Oveis, & Keltner, 2008; Gruber, Harvey, & Purcell, under review). These results suggest that BD might be associated with a chronic elevation in positive affect regardless of context. We have proposed a novel account of positive emotion to describe this inflexible and persistent pattern of positive emotion disturbance (Gruber, in press).
  2. Does BD impair the ability to regulate positive emotions? We have recently begun to examine how people with BD naturally regulate emotions as well as whether they can voluntarily regulate emotional responses in adaptive ways when given specific instructions. Our work suggests that BD is associated with increased spontaneous efforts to regulate (Gruber, Harvey, & Gross, in prep) and an intact ability to use cognitive reframing techniques to decrease the magnitude of positive emotional responses (Gruber, Harvey, & Johnson, 2009). At the same time, BD is also associated with less reported success at regulating emotions (Gruber, Harvey & Gross, in prep). We are working on examining potential mechanisms to account for the apparent disjunction between troubled emotional functioning despite efforts to modify intense emotions.
  3. Which emotions are disrupted in BD? It is unclear which specific positive emotions are operating in the clinical depiction of BD (Johnson, Gruber, & Eisner, 2007). Thus far, we found that people at risk for, and diagnosed with, BD reported greater state and trait levels of reward and achievement oriented emotions relative to other-oriented emotions like compassion (Gruber & Johnson, 2009; Gruber, Culver, Johnson, Nam, Keller, & Ketter, 2009). We are still probing these puzzles on emotion specificity in BD.
  4. What are the neural correlates of disturbed positive emotion? One solution to better understand BD is to identify pathophysiological processes. Such identification may allow for more accurate diagnosis and facilitate the detection of individuals at risk for the development of BD. In prior work we have found individuals at risk for developing BD exhibit increased activity in reward-relevant regions to positive stimuli. We are currently developing projects that adopt a functional neuroimaging approach to better understand positive emotion dysregulation in BD.
  5. What is the clinical significance of emotion disturbance? Work here adopts a translational approach focused on building links between experimental approaches to quantify emotion disturbance with concurrent and prospective illness course. We are currently conducting longitudinal follow-up assessments to examine associations between laboratory responses to emotion stimuli and associations with symptom severity and functioning.

POSITIVE EMOTION ACROSS DISORDERS

When emotional responses go awry, however, they can result in substantial distress and impairment. Problematic emotional responses are central to many psychological disorders. Although our primary foci has been BD, we also adopt a transdiagnostic approach to understanding positive emotional features across a variety of clinical disorders and populations. Some examples of projects conducted in this area are below.

  1. Depression. Research on depression has typically focused on elevations in negative emotions, such as sadness and anger. However, a core symptom of depression – anhedonia — involves deficits in the ability to experience positive emotion. Even so, there has been a dearth of research examining which specific positive emotions are affected. We found that responses to stimuli that are self-focused (pride), but not other-focused (compassion), are impaired in people with symptoms of depression (Gruber, Oveis, Keltner, & Johnson, in press). These findings are consistent with the importance of self-focused biases on emotional life in depression.
  2. Schizophrenia. Despite stereotypic beliefs in global deficits in the experience of positive emotion in individuals with schizophrenia, a systematic program of research has shown that people with this disorder report experiencing levels of positive emotion that are comparable to controls (e.g., Kring & Neale, 1996). In collaboration with Dr. Ann Kring, we adopted a narrative approach to examine the context and manner in which schizophrenia patients describe their emotional experiences (Gruber & Kring, 2008). Findings suggest that patients represent their positive emotions in much the same way as non-patients, despite linguistic errors in conveying these experiences.
  3. Insomnia. The role of emotion in insomnia has not yet been systematically studied. In a current project, we found that people diagnosed with primary insomnia were characterized by a disjunction between emotion experience and physiological response to emotional stimuli (Gruber et al., under review). Future work is needed to understand whether attenuated daytime emotional responses causally contributes to night-time sleep disturbance.

BASIC POSITIVE EMOTION RESEARCH

A natural complement to our main focus on ways in which positive emotions are disturbed is by building a foundation in understanding more basic positive emotion processes. Recent work in affective science focuses on understanding the ways in which normative positive emotion states promote the pursuit of functionally distinct and relevant evolutionary goals. We focus on extending this line of work by documenting the normative functions of positive emotion states by examining physiological, behavioral, and appraisal markers of distinct positive states.

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

  • There are several exciting projects underway. Stay tuned for updates!