Good things happen to people every day. Some positive events are routine, such as passing a pop-quiz, finishing a project at work, or having lunch with your best friend. Other positive events are major, such as making the basketball team, landing your first job, or getting engaged. Research has shown that positive events occur about three times more often than negative events. Further, positive events contribute significantly to mental and physical health. Although much research has highlighted what people do when negative events occur, little is known about what people do when good things happen. Moreover, very little research has focused on how or why positive events are associated with better health and well-being. One thing that is known from past work is that an important way that people react to positive events is to share their good news with others, a process called capitalization. When others react supportively to capitalization attempts, the discloser experiences personal benefits (beyond the effect of the positive event itself), such as more positive emotions, higher subjective well-being and self-esteem, and decreased loneliness. In addition, receiving supportive capitalization responses is associated with increases in the quality of the relationship between the discloser and the responder (e.g., higher satisfaction, trust, and closeness). This project will investigate the idea that one reason why positive events affect health and well-being is because they increase people's ability to deal effectively with life's typical stressors.
Specifically, this work will test the idea that when people share positive events and receive supportive responses, they cope better with later negative events. This project is thus designed to understand the role that responses to capitalization disclosures play in shaping important coping resources: perceptions of the social support available during stressful times, perceptions of self-efficacy, and perceived control over one's outcomes. A key prediction is that receiving supportive responses to positive event disclosures will lead to increases in the perception of the availability of support for negative events, and increases in feelings of self-efficacy and control of life's stressors. In contrast receiving unsupportive responses to positive event disclosures will lead to decreases in these coping resources. The project balances the careful control offered in the laboratory with studies that occur in the natural context of everyday social interaction by employing diverse methods including a longitudinal study with a daily experience component, experimental laboratory studies, and a field experiment with daily experience methodology.
This project is important because the majority of people's life experiences are positive but scientists know very little about how people respond to them or how they regulate them. Even less research has examined how positive experiences contribute to people's ability to cope with stressors. The results have a high potential to benefit society because they will improve our understanding of these coping processes which have a documented impact on well-being, health and even mortality. The results have the potential to inform theoretical models of stress, coping, and close relationships, help understand the source of perceptions of social support and coping resources, and may provide the basis for effective interventions aimed at increasing coping resources and reducing stress.
