Abstract:
A growing body of research supports the enduring notion that emotions and health are linked. Emotion-health research has however primarily adopted an affect-based approach. Recently, several advantages to utilising a discrete emotions approach to guide exploration into the relations between emotions and health have been identified. In addition to suggesting that different emotions may have different links to health, the discrete emotions approach suggests that the three core constituents of emotional experience – frequency, duration, and intensity – may be differentially important to a variety of health outcomes. These three core (and distinguishable) constituents of emotional experience have been overlooked in the affect-based health literature. It has been proposed that thoroughly testing whether and how these constituents may differentially relate to health may facilitate a better understanding of the mechanisms linking emotions and health. In examining these issues two studies were conducted. In Study One 231 students recruited from the University of Auckland pilot tested a novel graphical measure of emotional intensity with the aim of refining this graphical methodology, and providing preliminary data regarding the discriminant and predictive utility of an array of emotional experience metrics. In Study Two, a cross sectional design 121 age-diverse individuals completed a questionnaire containing metrics designed to comprehensively assess the frequency, duration and intensity of anger, happiness, fear and sadness, graphical measures of these four emotions, and additional measures of health and health behaviour. The study was designed to investigate whether the three core constituents differentially predicted health outcomes across four of the most commonly experienced discrete emotions: anger, happiness, fear and sadness.