Feeling good about the bad: Making positive appraisals of predominantly negative stressors.

Abstract

People often experience positive emotions during predominantly negative stressors, and we hypothesize that one way this occurs is that people make positive appraisals of some elements of the stressors. Further, we hypothesized that people can use these positive appraisals to spontaneously and/or strategically regulate their stress responses. In several studies with online and subject pool convenience samples, participants were able to generate unambiguously positive appraisals (as defined in pilot Studies 2 and 3) of elements of predominantly negative stressors both when instructed to generate positive appraisals (Study 1) and when instructed to just list elements of their stressors with no instruction on what valence they should be (Studies 3-6). Further, just generating these positive appraisals helped participants feel better about a prolonged life stressor (Studies 4 and 6) and an acute laboratory stressor (Study 5). We successfully distinguished the emotion regulation strategy of positive "up-appraisal" (elaborating and focusing on positive appraisals) from that of positive "alt-appraisal" (reframing and changing a negative appraisal to be more positive) and showed that positive up-appraisal was more effective at improving stress-related emotions (Studies 1 and 4). Last, individual differences in positivity and negative emotionality were the most reliable predictors of generating positive appraisals of stressors. These studies demonstrate that sometimes, people can cope successfully with stressors because they are able to separate elements of that stressor, recognize that some of those elements are positive, and then elaborate and focus on those positive appraisals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).