A Psychological Flexibility Perspective on Well-Being: Emotional Reactivity, Adaptive Choices, and Daily Experiences

According to psychological flexibility theory, fully experiencing one's emotions, even when they involve negative reactions, can enhance psychological well-being. In pursuit of this possibility, procedures capable of disentangling reaction intensities from reaction durations, in response to affective images, were developed and variations of this paradigm were applied in understanding variations in happiness and adaptive behavior. Consistent with psychological flexibility theory, three studies showed that more intense emotional reactions, irrespective of valence, were associated with higher levels of well-being. Two additional studies showed that happy individuals, relative to less happy individuals, exhibited more functional approach/avoidance behavior in behavior-focused tasks. Together, the results are consistent with the idea that adaptive emotion generation systems are those that flexibly adapt emotion output to concurrent emotion-related stimulation. The program of research adds to our understanding of the relationship between emotion reactivity and well-being while highlighting specific processes through which emotion and well-being interact.