An old song says, “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the
negative.” The advice in this song is
simple. Focus on the positive elements
of your life. Don’t dwell on negative
things that have happened. Is that the
key to your future happiness?
A fascinating paper in the September, 2011 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by Erin O’Mara, James McNulty, and Benjamin Karney suggests that it isn’t as
simple as that. They explore two key
factors that affect whether you should think positively about negative
experiences in the past.
The first factor is controllability. Some negative things that happen to you are
uncontrollable. A car accident, serious
illness, or loss of a loved one is generally uncontrollable. There was nothing you could do about the
event that happened, and you have little control whether something like that is
likely to happen in the future.
Other negative things are more controllable. If you have a friend who is mean to you, you
can choose not to spend time with that friend again. If your job causes you stress, you can choose
to do things differently at work, or even to change jobs.
The second factor is the severity of the negative
event. Some events are very
negative. Losing a loved one or being
abused by a romantic partner are highly negative events. Other events are not that awful. A flat tire on your car, or a
miscommunication with your partner are negative, but not tragic.
The authors of the paper first review evidence on
uncontrollable events, and suggest that there is good reason to think that
having a positive attitude toward uncontrollable events in the past is a good
thing. Classic research by Shelley
Taylor, for example, suggests that a patient with breast cancer will adjust
better and suffer fewer symptoms of depression by being optimistic rather than
by being pessimistic about her disease.
The studies in this paper were particularly interested in
controllable events. To explore this
issue, the studies followed newlyweds for several years. They started by interviewing new husbands and
wives about negative experiences they were experiencing. They also counted the number of symptoms of
depression that the members of the couple experienced.
For each negative experience (which could range from a
miscommunication to emotional abuse), the individual rated how serious they
thought it was. The interviewer also
rated the seriousness of each event.
That allowed the researchers to calculate the difference between how
severe a person considered an event to be and the severity as rated by a more
objective rater. That difference was a
measure of how strongly the person was wearing rose-colored glasses for a past
event.
The researchers then followed couples for several
years. In one study, they also
interviewed the couples a second time 2 years after the initial interview to
find out what kinds of negative events they were experiencing.
So, what happened?
People who thought positively about negative events that
were not that severe generally showed a decrease in symptoms of depression over
time. So, people who did not get that
upset about the small things in life (like miscommunications) tended to feel good
about life over time.
People who thought positively about severe negative events,
though, actually showed an increase in symptoms of depression over time. The reason for this increase is that these
negative events were controllable. By
minimizing the importance of things like emotional abuse, people opened
themselves up to experience more of it in the future. The continued presence of severe negative
events in a person’s life led to more symptoms of depression.
What does this mean?
It is important to be realistic about the controllable but
negative events in life. You cannot find
ways to eliminate the negative in life if you always accentuate the
positive. If you are experiencing stress
or abuse at home or at work, then the first step to changing the situation is
being realistic about how bad it is.
Then, you can work toward making your life better.
On the other hand, life has lots of little stresses. It is easy to get caught up in the details of
who is doing the most housework or the latest nasty thing said by your teenage
child. For those situations, put on your
rose-colored glasses and smile your way through them.
