Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions serve a distinct evolutionary function. What is it?

A: Positive emotions signal that the environment is safe and suppress the stress response, conserving energy

B: Positive emotions momentarily broaden attention, cognition, and behaviour, and over time build durable personal resources (social, cognitive, physical, psychological)

C: Positive emotions reinforce behaviours that led to reward, increasing their frequency through operant conditioning

D: Positive emotions serve primarily to maintain social bonds by communicating happiness to others through facial expression

Correct: Positive emotions momentarily broaden attention, cognition, and behaviour, and over time build durable personal resources (social, cognitive, physical, psychological)

Fredrickson proposed that while negative emotions narrow the thought-action repertoire (fear → escape, anger → attack), positive emotions broaden it — joy promotes play and exploration, interest promotes learning, contentment promotes integration. Over time, these broadened states build lasting resources that persist after the emotion fades: stronger social bonds, broader knowledge, greater physical capabilities, and more resilient coping strategies. This explains why positive emotions have long-term adaptive value beyond their pleasant immediate experience.

What is the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing?

A: Hedonic wellbeing refers to long-term satisfaction; eudaimonic wellbeing refers to momentary pleasure

B: Hedonic wellbeing is pleasure and absence of pain (positive affect, low negative affect, life satisfaction); eudaimonic wellbeing is meaning, purpose, authentic self-expression, and personal growth

C: Hedonic wellbeing is a psychological construct; eudaimonic wellbeing is a philosophical concept with no empirical measurement

D: Hedonic wellbeing focuses on social relationships; eudaimonic wellbeing focuses on individual achievement

Correct: Hedonic wellbeing is pleasure and absence of pain (positive affect, low negative affect, life satisfaction); eudaimonic wellbeing is meaning, purpose, authentic self-expression, and personal growth

The hedonic tradition (tracing to Bentham) defines wellbeing as the balance of pleasure over pain — measured as high positive affect, low negative affect, and life satisfaction (Diener's subjective wellbeing model). The eudaimonic tradition (tracing to Aristotle's eudaimonia) defines wellbeing as flourishing through meaning, purpose, authentic self-expression, personal growth, mastery, and self-determination. The two are correlated but predict different outcomes independently — eudaimonic wellbeing, for example, predicts slower cognitive decline in old age even when hedonic wellbeing is controlled for.

What is the "impact bias" in affective forecasting, as described by Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson?

A: The tendency to underestimate the emotional impact of negative events while overestimating the impact of positive ones

B: The tendency to overestimate both the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions to future events, both positive and negative

C: The systematic bias toward predicting that negative events will impact us less than they actually do

D: The tendency to assign too much importance to the emotional impact of events that are temporally distant

Correct: The tendency to overestimate both the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions to future events, both positive and negative

The impact bias is the systematic tendency to overestimate both the intensity (how strong the emotion will be) and the duration (how long it will last) of our future emotional reactions. People overestimate how happy they will be after positive events (getting a promotion, winning a prize) and how miserable they will be after negative events (a relationship ending, losing a job). This occurs because of focalism (we focus on the focal event and underestimate how much everything else in life will continue to demand attention) and immune neglect (we underestimate the effectiveness of our psychological defence mechanisms that facilitate recovery).

Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell's "hedonic treadmill" concept proposes that:

A: Happiness increases linearly with achievement, as each new goal met produces lasting satisfaction

B: After major life events — positive or negative — people tend to adapt and return toward a personal happiness baseline, requiring ever-increasing stimuli to maintain the same level of wellbeing

C: Negative events permanently lower the happiness baseline, while positive events restore it to its original level

D: Happiness adaptation occurs for material goods but not for social or relational outcomes

Correct: After major life events — positive or negative — people tend to adapt and return toward a personal happiness baseline, requiring ever-increasing stimuli to maintain the same level of wellbeing

Brickman and Campbell (1971) proposed the hedonic treadmill: people adapt to new levels of circumstance — positive or negative — and their subjective wellbeing returns toward a personal set point. Their famous 1978 study compared lottery winners (expected to be much happier) and accident survivors who became paraplegic (expected to be much less happy) and found smaller differences in daily happiness than predicted, and evidence of adaptation in both groups. The implication is that obtaining what we desire — money, status, achievements — produces less lasting happiness than we anticipate because we quickly adapt to the new baseline.

Twin studies by David Lykken and Auke Tellegen found that approximately what proportion of the variance in stable happiness levels is attributable to genetic factors?

A: About 10–20%

B: About 30–40%

C: About 50–80%

D: About 90%

Correct: About 50–80%

Lykken and Tellegen's (1996) Minnesota twin study found that approximately 50% of variance in stable happiness is heritable. A follow-up analysis suggested the proportion influencing the stable baseline could be as high as 80%. Importantly, this does not mean happiness is fixed — it means the set point around which wellbeing oscillates is strongly genetically influenced. Life circumstances (income, marital status, geographical location) accounted for surprisingly little variance (8–10%) in stable wellbeing. Within the range defined by genetic factors, intentional activities (how one uses time, the quality of relationships, engagement with meaningful work) are the most modifiable determinants.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" is best described as:

A: A relaxed state of contentment produced by the completion of demanding tasks

B: A state of complete absorption in a suitably challenging activity, characterised by loss of self-consciousness, distorted time perception, and intrinsic reward

C: The positive emotion arising from social connection and shared laughter with others

D: The gradual accumulation of small pleasures that together produce significant wellbeing

Correct: A state of complete absorption in a suitably challenging activity, characterised by loss of self-consciousness, distorted time perception, and intrinsic reward

Csikszentmihalyi described flow as the state of optimal experience — complete absorption in an activity that is challenging enough to engage all one's skills but not so difficult as to produce anxiety. Characteristics include: loss of self-consciousness (the self recedes), time distortion (hours can feel like minutes), clarity of goals and immediate feedback, and autotelic reward (the activity is rewarding in itself). Flow typically occurs when skill and challenge are balanced at a high level; too easy a task produces boredom; too difficult a task produces anxiety. Flow contributes more to eudaimonic than hedonic wellbeing.

True or False: Research consistently shows that above a moderate income threshold, additional income has no relationship to wellbeing of any kind.

Answer: False

This is a more nuanced picture than the often-cited "plateau at £75,000" claim. Killingsworth's (2021) experience sampling study of over 33,000 people found that experienced wellbeing (moment-to-moment positive affect) continued to rise with income well above the earlier threshold, especially among people who were very unhappy at lower incomes. Kahneman and Deaton's (2010) finding of a plateau applied specifically to emotional wellbeing (day-to-day affect) and was not found for life evaluation (overall satisfaction). The consensus is that money continues to matter for life evaluation across the income range, while its effects on moment-to-moment emotional experience are more complex.

Which of the following is an empirical finding from research on positive emotion and health that supports broaden-and-build theory?

A: Positive emotions prevent all chronic illness by suppressing cortisol throughout the lifespan

B: Positive emotions expressed in early adulthood predicted longevity decades later — as demonstrated in Danner's analysis of nuns' autobiographical writings

C: Positive emotions reduce physical pain by releasing endogenous opioids, eliminating the need for analgesic medication

D: People who experience more positive emotions are immune to the negative effects of major stressors

Correct: Positive emotions expressed in early adulthood predicted longevity decades later — as demonstrated in Danner's analysis of nuns' autobiographical writings

Danner, Snowdon, and Friesen (2001) coded the emotional content of autobiographical essays written by 180 Catholic nuns in their early twenties and then examined mortality records decades later. Nuns who expressed more positive emotional content in their early essays lived approximately 10 years longer on average than those who expressed less positive emotion. This naturalistic prospective finding provided powerful support for Fredrickson's claim that positive emotions build lasting personal resources — including physical health — that outlast the momentary emotion.

What is "focalism" and how does it contribute to affective forecasting errors?

A: The tendency to focus only on the worst-case outcome when imagining future events, producing systematic pessimism

B: The tendency to focus exclusively on the anticipated event when forecasting its emotional impact, ignoring the many other life events that will also be occurring and demanding attention

C: The tendency to focus on focal (central) rather than peripheral details of an event, leading to overconfidence in emotional predictions

D: The tendency to focus on the immediate rather than the long-term emotional consequences of a decision

Correct: The tendency to focus exclusively on the anticipated event when forecasting its emotional impact, ignoring the many other life events that will also be occurring and demanding attention

Focalism (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003) is the tendency to focus on the single event being predicted when making affective forecasts, while neglecting all the other events, demands, and activities that will also be occurring in life at that time. When we imagine how happy we'll be after a promotion, we envision the promotion in isolation — not the traffic, the difficult colleague, the upcoming dental appointment, and the hundred other neutral and negative experiences that will fill the day. This "fill in the background" error inflates the predicted emotional impact of both positive and negative focal events.

Ed Diener's model of subjective wellbeing (SWB) includes which three components?

A: Life satisfaction, physical health, and positive social relationships

B: Frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and high life satisfaction

C: High self-esteem, optimism, and sense of personal control

D: Meaning, engagement, and accomplishment

Correct: Frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and high life satisfaction

Diener's tripartite model of subjective wellbeing (SWB) distinguishes three empirically separable components: (1) positive affect — the frequency of pleasant emotional experiences; (2) negative affect — the frequency of unpleasant emotional experiences (happiness is high SWB when this is infrequent, not merely absent); and (3) cognitive life satisfaction — a reflective judgment about how one's life is going overall, measured by scales such as the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). The hedonic balance (positive minus negative affect) and life satisfaction are correlated but dissociable and are differentially predicted by life circumstances.