Introduction to Emotion

Emotion: Arousal, Behavior, and Cognition

LOQ: How do arousal, expressive behavior, and cognition interact in emotion?

Emotions are a mix of

• bodily arousal

• expressive behaviors

• conscious experience and feelings

Historical Emotion Theories

James-Lange Theory: Arousal Comes Before Emotion

William James, this commonsense view of emotion had things backwards

• We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble

• Believed that emotions result from attention to our bodily activity

• This theory was also proposed by Carl Lange

James-Lange Theory: the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to an emotion-arousing stimulus.

Cannon-Bard Theory: Arousal and Emotion Occur Simultaneously

Walter Cannon disagreed with the James-Lange theory

• Cannon and Philip Bard concluded that our bodily responses and experienced emotions occur separately but simultaneously

• The emotion-triggering stimulus traveled to my sympathetic nervous system, causing my body’s arousal

  • At the same time, it traveled to my brain’s cortex, causing my awareness of my emotion

Cannon-Bard Theory: the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion.

Some researchers to view feelings as “mostly shadows” of our bodily responses and behaviors

• Brain activity underlies our emotions and our emotion-fed actions

• our emotions also involve cognition

Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory: Arousal + Label = Emotion

LOQ: To experience emotions, must we consciously interpret and label them?

Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer showed that how we appraise our experiences also matters

• Our physical reactions and our thoughts (perceptions, memories, and interpretations) together create emotion

• Emotional experience requires a conscious interpretation of arousal

• This was their two-factor theory

  • emotions have two ingredients: physical arousal and cognitive appraisal.

Schachter and Singer injected college men with the hormone epinephrine to explore the spillover effect

• The discovery of this can be interpreted many different ways

• Arousal fuels emotions; cognition channels it

Two-Factor Theory: the Schachter-Singer theory that to experience emotion one must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.

Zajonc, LeDoux, and Lazarus: Does Cognition Always Precede Emotion?

Robert Zajonc didn’t think we always interpreted our arousal before we can experience the emotion

• Supposed that we actually have many emotional reactions apart from, or even before, our conscious interpretation of a situation

Neuroscientists are charting the neural pathways of emotions

• emotional responses can follow two different brain pathways

  • Complex feelings travel on the “high road” and would be sent through the cortex and analyzed and labled before the response is sent

  • Joseph LeDoux called the other part the “low-road”: neural shortcut that bypasses the cortex and allows the emotional response before our intellect stops it and we develop a conscious feeling of fear occurs as we become aware of the danger we have deteced

• Amygdala sends more neural projections up to the cortex than it receives back, which makes it easier for our feelings to hijack our thinking than for our thinking to rule our feelings

  • These experiences support Zajonc’s and LeDoux’s belief that some of our emotional reactions involve no deliberate thinking

Richard Lazarus believed that our brain processes vast amounts of information without our conscious awareness, and that some emotional responses do not require conscious thinking

• Thought most of our emotional life operates via the automatic, speedy low road

  • Wondered “How would we know what we are reacting to if we did not in some way appraise the situation?”

• Said that emotions arise when we appraise an event as harmless or dangerous

  • Ex. We appraise the sound of the rustling bushes as the presence of a threat. Later, we realize that it was “just the wind.”

Together, automatic emotion and conscious thinking weave the fabric of our emotional lives

Embodied Emotion

Emotions and the Autonomic Nervous System

LOQ: What is the link between emotional arousal and the autonomic nervous system?

During a crisis the sympathetic division of your autonomic nervous system (ANS) mobilizes your body for action

• directs your adrenal glands to release the stress hormones epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline)

Once the crisis is over, the parasympathetic division of your ANS gradually calms your body, as stress hormones slowly leave your bloodstream

• With no conscious effort, your body’s response to danger is wonderfully coordinated and adaptive—preparing you to fight or flee.

The Physiology of Emotions

LOQ: Do different emotions activate different physiological and brain-pattern responses?

Different emotions can share common biological signatures

• A single brain region can also serve as the seat of seemingly different emotion

  • The insula has many different emotions

    • activated when we experience various negative social emotions, such as lust, pride, and disgust

• our varying emotions feel different to us, and they often look different to others

• Some of our emotions also differ in their brain circuits

  • When you experience negative emotions such as disgust, your right prefrontal cortex tends to be more active than the left

  • Positive moods tend to trigger more left frontal lobe activity. People with positive personalities have also shown more activity in the left frontal lobe than in the right

We can’t easily see differences in emotions from tracking heart rate, breathing, and perspiration. But facial expressions and brain activity can vary with the emotion

Expressing Emotion

Detecting Emotion in Others

LOQ: How do we communicate nonverbally?

Our brain is an amazing detector of subtle expressions, helping most of us read nonverbal cues well

• also excel at detecting nonverbal threats

  • readily sense subliminally presented negative words, such as snake or bomb

• Hard-to-control facial muscles can reveal emotions you may be trying to conceal

• we find it difficult to discern deceit

  • The behavioral differences between liars and truth tellers are too minute for most people to detect

Some of us more than others are sensitive to the physical cues of various emotions

• Gestures, facial expressions, and voice tones, which are absent in written communication, convey important information

Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior

LOQ: How do the genders differ in their ability to communicate nonverbally?

Women’s skill at decoding others’ emotions may also contribute to their greater emotional responsiveness and expressiveness

• women to express more complex emotions: “It will be bittersweet; I’ll feel both happy and sad.”

• More likely to express empathy

• Tend to experience emotional events

Perception of women’s emotionality also feeds—and is fed by— people’s attributing women’s emotionality to their disposition and men’s to their circumstances

• There are multiple factors that influence our attributions

  • This includes cultural norms and gender differences

Cultural and Emotional Expression

LOQ: How are gestures and facial expressions understood within and across cultures?

The meaning of gestures varies with the culture

• Ex. President Richard Nixon learned this after making the North American “A-OK” sign before a welcoming crowd of Brazilians, not realizing it was a crude insult in that country.

Facial expressions do convey some nonverbal accents that provide clues to one’s culture

• There is no culture where people frown when they are happy.

• People blind from birth spontaneously exhibit the common facial expressions associated with such emotions as joy, sadness, fear, and anger

• facial muscles speak a universal language

  • Their shared expressions helped them survive

  • We have adapted to interpret faces in particular contexts

  • Facial language differs in how much emotion they express

    • These differences also exists within nations

The Effects of Facial Expressions

LOQ: How do our facial expressions influence our feelings?

Expressions not only communicate emotion, they also amplify and regulate it

• Facial feedback effect has been found many times, in many places, for many basic emotions

  • some researchers question the reliability of the facial feedback effect

Other researchers have observed a similar behavior feedback effect

• Going through the motions awakens the emotions

• Our natural mimicry of others’ emotions helps explain why emotions are contagious

Facial Feedback Effect: the tendency of facial muscle states to trigger corresponding feelings such as fear, anger, or happiness.

Behavior Feedback Effect: the tendency of behavior to influence our own and others’ thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Experiencing Emotion

LOQ: What are some of the basic emotions?

Carroll Izard isolated 10 basic emotions (joy, interest-excitement, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, and guilt), most present in infancy

• Believed that pride and love are also basic emotions

• Argued that other emotions are combinations of these 10, with love, for example, being a mixture of joy and interest-excitement.

Anger

LOQ: What are the causes and consequences of anger?

Individualist cultures do encourage people to vent their rage

• People who keenly sense their interdependence see anger as a threat to group harmony

• The Western vent-your-anger advice presumes that aggressive action or fantasy enables emotional release, or catharsis

  • Experimenters report that sometimes when people retaliate against a provoker, they may calm down if they direct their counterattack toward the provoker, their retaliation seems justifiable, and their target is not intimidating

  • Expressing anger can be temporarily calming if it does not leave us feeling guilty or anxious.

catharsis usually fails to cleanse our rage

• Usually expressing anger breeds more anger

• Expressing anger can also make us feel angrier

  • those who vented their anger became even more aggressive

There are a few ways you can manage anger:

• Wait. Doing so will reduce your physiological arousal. “What goes up must come down,” noted Carol Tavris

• Find a healthy distraction or support. Calm yourself by exercising, playing an instrument, or talking things through with a friend. Brain scans show that ruminating inwardly about why you are angry serves only to increase amygdala blood flow

• Distance yourself. Try to move away from the situation mentally, as if you are watching it unfold from a distance or the future. Self-distancing reduces rumination, anger, and aggression

Anger that expresses a grievance in ways that promote reconciliation rather than retaliation can benefit a relationship

• Without forgiveness we sometimes need to distance ourselves from an abusive person—forgiveness may release anger and calm the body

Catharsis: in psychology, the idea that “releasing” aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.

Happiness

LOQ: What is the feel-good, do-good phenomenon, and what is the focus of positive psychology research?

People aspire to, and wish one another, health and happiness. And for good reason.

• Our state of happiness or unhappiness colors everything

• Happy people look at the world as safer an are drawn toward emotionally positive information

• When we are happy, our relationships, self-image, and hopes for the future also seem more promising.

• Moods matter. When you are gloomy, life as a whole seems depressing and meaningless—and you think more skeptically and attend more critically to your surrounding

Happiness doesn’t just feel good, it does good

• Researchers did a study where people experience such as recalling a happy event has made people more likely to give money, pick up someone’s dropped papers, volunteer time, and do other good deeds

  • Psychologists call this the feel-good, do-good phenomenon

  • This is also true for the opposite: doing good promotes good feeling

Feel-Good, Do-Good Phenomenon: people’s tendency to be helpful when in a good mood.

Positive Psychology

The humanistic psychologists were interested in advancing human fulfillment in the 1960s

• Martin Seligman used positive psychology and used scientific methods to study human flourishing

  • This subfield of studies included subjective well-being

The second pillar is positive character

• It focuses on exploring and enhancing creativity, courage, compassion, integrity, self-control, leadership, wisdom, and spirituality.

The thor pillar is positive groups, communities, and cultures

• It looks to create a positive social ecolog

  • Ex. healthy families, communal neighborhoods, effective schools, socially responsible media, and civil dialogue.

Combing the satisfaction from the past and happiness from the present and optimistic outlooks define positive well-being; psychology’s first pillar

• Selgman viewed happiness as a by-product of a pleasant, engaged, and meaningful life.

Positive Psychology: the scientific study of human flourishing, with the goals of discovering and promoting strengths and virtues that help individuals and communities to thrive.

Subjective Well-Being: self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with measures of objective well-being (for example, physical and economic indicators) to evaluate people’s quality of life.

The Short Life of Emotional Ups and Downs

LOQ: How do time, wealth, adaptation, and comparison affect our happiness levels?

Adam Kramer did a study where he tracked the frequency of positive and negative emotion words by day of the week

• Excluded days such as holidays

• The results came back that Friday and Saturday are the days with the best moods

Emotional ups and downs tend to balance out, even over the course of the day.

• Positive emotion rises over the early to middle part of most days and then drops of

• A stressful event can trigger a bad mood

  • More significant events such as losing a job can create a longer period of a lower mood

We overestimate the duration of our emotions and underestimate our resiliency and capacity to adapt.

Wealth and Well-Being

Money does buy happiness, up to a point, especially for people during their midlife working year

• people in rich countries are happier than those in poor countries

  • They have enough money for all of their needs and have a sense of control in their life and the ability to treat yourself

  • As we get more money for comfort and security, more money matters less and less

• Economic growth in affluent countries has provided no apparent boost to people’s morale or social well-being

  • those who strive hardest for wealth have tended to live with lower well-being, especially when they seek money to prove themselves, gain power, or show off rather than support their families

Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison

Happiness is Relative to Our Own Experience

The adaptation-level phenomenon describes our tendency to judge various stimuli in comparison with our past experiences

• Harry Helson explained that we adjust our neutral levels based on our experience and then react to variations that are different levels

  • After an initial surge of pleasure, improvements become our “new normal,” and we then require something even better to give us a boost of happiness.

Adaptation-Level Phenomenon: our tendency to form judgments (of sounds, of lights, of income) relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience.

Happiness is Relative to Others’ Success

We always compare ourselves to others

• We feel good or bad when we compare

  • When we sense that we are worse off than others with whom we compare ourselves, we experience relative deprivation

When expectations soar above attainments, we feel disappointed.

Inequality in Western countries has increased

• Places with great inequality have higher crime rates, obesity, anxiety, and drug use, and lower life expectancy

Relative Deprivation: the perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself

What Predicts Our Happiness Levels?

LOQ: What predicts happiness, and how can we be happier?

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Genes matter in happiness

• Researchers are looking into how specific genes influence our happiness

• personal history and our culture matter too for our happiness

  • our emotions tend to balance around a level defined by our experience

Stress and Illness

Stress: Some Basic Concepts

LOQ: How does our appraisal of an event affect our stress reaction, and what are the three main types of stressors?

Stress is the process of appraising and responding to a threatening or challenging event

• It arises less from events themselves than from how we appraise them

• Momentary stress can mobilize the immune system for fending off infections and healing wounds

  • also arouses and motivates us to conquer problems

• extreme or prolonged stress can harm us

  • Stress can trigger risky decisions and unhealthy behavior

Behavioral medicine research provides a reminder of one of contemporary psychology’s overriding themes

• Mind and body interact; everything psychological is simultaneously physiological

Stress: the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.

Stressors—Things That Push Our Buttons

Catastrophes

Catastrophes are unpredictable large-scale event

• After events damage our emotional and physical health significantly

• Responders who move to help catastrophes might experience 2x as much stress

  • trauma of uprooting and family separation may combine with the challenges of adjusting to a new culture’s language, ethnicity, climate, and social norms

  • This acculturative stress declines over time, especially when people engage in meaningful activities and connect socially

Significant Life Changes

Some psychologists study the health effects of life changes by following people over time

• A cluster of crises—losing a job, home, and partner—puts one even more at risk

Daily Hassles and Social Stress

Stress also comes from daily hassles

• Some people can handle things small stress well, others cannot

• These stressors can add up and take a toll on health and well-being

The Stress Response System

LOQ: How do we respond and adapt to stress?

Psychologists have identified an additional stress response system

• The cerebral cortex sends out orders to the adrenal glands and secretes glucocorticoid stress hormones such as cortisol.

Hans Selye researched animals’ reactions to various stressors

• He proposed that the body’s adaptive response to stress is so general that, like a burglar alarm, it sounds, no matter what intrude

  • Named this response the general adaptation syndrome (GAS) and saw it as a 3 phase process:

• Phase 1, you have an alarm reaction, as your sympathetic nervous system is suddenly activated. Your heart rate zooms. With your resources mobilized, you are now ready to fight back.

• Phase 2, resistance, your temperature, blood pressure, and respiration remain high. Your adrenal glands pump hormones into your bloodstream. As time passes, with no relief from stress, your body’s reserves begin to dwindle

• Phase 3, exhaustion. With exhaustion, you become more vulnerable to illness or even, in extreme cases, collapse and death.

Seley’s basic idea was that : Although the human body copes well with temporary stress, prolonged stress can damage it

• Severe childhood stress gets under the skin, leading to greater adult stress responses and disease risk

  • severely stressed Welsh children were three times more likely as adults to develop heart disease

  • It also seems to age people

There are other ways we respond to stress

• One response is to withdraw. This is common after a loved one’s death. We pull back and conserve energy and become paralyzed with fear

• Another is to give and receive support. This is often seen in women. This is called the tend-and-befriend response

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS): Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive response to stress in three phases—alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

Tend and Befriend: under stress, people (especially women) often provide support to others (tend) and bond with and seek support from others (befriend).

Stress and Vulnerability to Disease

LOQ: How does stress make us more vulnerable to disease?

Psychologists and physicians study how stress influences health and illness created the interdisciplinary field of behavioral medicine

• Health psychology provides psychology’s contribution to behavioral medicine

  • psychoneuroimmunology focuses on mind-body interactions

There are Four types of cells are active in these search-and-destroy missions:

• B lymphocytes, which release antibodies that fight bacterial infections

• T lymphocytes, which attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances

• macrophage cells (“big eaters”), which identify, pursue, and ingest harmful invaders and worn-out cells

• natural killer cells (NK cells), which attack diseased cells (such as those infected by viruses or cancer)

When your immune system doesn’t function properly, it can go in two directions:

• It can respond too strongly and may attack the body’s own tissues, causing an allergic reaction or a self-attacking disease, such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, or some forms of arthritis

• It can also underreact and may allow a bacterial infection to flare, a dormant virus to erupt, or cancer cells to multiply

Human immune systems react similarly

• Surgical wounds heal more slowly in stressed people. In one experiment, dental students received punch wounds

• Stressed people are more vulnerable to colds. Major life stress increases the risk of a respiratory infection

• Stress can hasten the course of disease. As its name tells us, AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) is an immune disorder, caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Health Psychology: a subfield of psychology that provides psychology’s contribution to behavioral medicine.

Psychoneuroimmunology: the study of how psychological, neural, and endocrine processes together affect the immune system and resulting health.

Stress and Cancer

Stress does not create cancer cells

• It may affect their growth by weakening the body’s natural defenses against multiplying malignant cells

Stress and Heart Disease

LOQ: Why are some of us more prone than others to coronary heart disease?

Stress and personality also play a big role in heart disease

• The more psychological trauma people experience, the more their bodies generate inflammation

  • This is associated with heart and other health problems, including depression

Coronary Heart Disease: the clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart muscle; the leading cause of death in many developed countries

The Effects of Personality, Pessimism, and Depression

Meyer Friedman, Ray Rosenman, and their colleagues tested the idea that stress increases vulnerability to heart disease

• They measured the blood cholesterol level and clotting speed of 40 U.S. male tax accountants at different times of year

• For these men, stress predicted heart attack risk

Some other researches started a longitudinal study

• Interviewed 3000 men between 35 and 39 and collected their work and eating patterns and other factors

  • Oe group called Type A was a group of men in the study who seemed the most reactive, competitive, hard-driving, impatient, time-conscious, super-motivated, verbally aggressive and who get angered easily

  • There was another group with an equal amount of men and were called Type 8 who were more easygoing

Type A: Friedman and Rosenman’s term for competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people.

Type B: Friedman and Rosenman’s term for easygoing, relaxed people.

Stress and Inflammation

Depressed people tend to smoke more and exercise less

• stress itself is also disheartening

  • Work stress, involuntary job loss, and trauma-related stress symptoms increase heart disease risk

Stress can affect our health

• An unstressed life would hardly be challenging or productive.

Health and Coping

Coping With Stress

LOQ: In what two ways do people try to alleviate stress?

We need to cope with the stress in our lives

• With problem-focused coping we can address the stressors directly

• We turn to emotion-focused coping when we believe we cannot change a situation

Coping: alleviating stress using emotional, cognitive, or behavioral methods.

Problem-Focused Coping: attempting to alleviate stress directly—by changing the stressor or the way we interact with that stressor.

Emotion-Focused Coping: attempting to alleviate stress by avoiding or ignoring a stressor and attending to emotional needs related to our stress reaction

Perceived Loss of Control

LOQ: How does a perceived lack of control affect health?

We may feel helpless, hopeless, and depressed after experiencing a series of bad events beyond our personal control

• Martin Seligman showed that a series of uncontrollable events creates a state of learned helplessness

Personal Control: our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless.

Learned Helplessness: the hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or person learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.

Internal Versus External Locus of Control

Julian Rotter called an external locus of control, the perception that chance or outside forces control their fate

• People who perceive an internal locus of control

External Locus of Control: the perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate.

Internal Locus of Control: the perception that we control our own fate.

Building Self-Control

LOQ: Why is self-control important, and can our self-control be depleted?

When we have a sense of personal control over our lives, we are more likely to develop self-control

• Self-control predicts good health, higher income, and better school performance

Researchers disagree about the factors that deplete self-control. Selfcontrol varies over time

• It is like a muscle, it tends to weaken after use, recover after rest, and grow stronger with exercise

  • Ex. e the temptation of studying versus partying, remember that delaying a little fun now can lead to bigger future rewards.

Explanatory Style: Optimism Versus Pessimism

LOQ: How does an optimistic outlook affect health and longevity?

Consider the consistency and startling magnitude of the optimism and positive emotions factor in several other studies:

• When one research team followed 70,021 nurses over time, they discovered that those scoring in the top quarter on optimism were nearly 30 percent less likely to have died than those scoring in the bottom 25 percent (Kim et al., 2017). Even greater optimism longevity differences have been found in studies of Finnish men and American Vietnam-era veterans

• A famous study followed up on 180 Catholic nuns who had written brief autobiographies at about 22 years of age and had thereafter lived similar lifestyles. Those who had expressed happiness, love, and other positive feelings in their autobiographies lived an average 7 years longer than their more dour counterparts (Danner et al., 2001). By age 80, some 54 percent of those expressing few positive emotions had died, as had only 24 percent of the most positive spirited.

• Optimists not only live long lives, but they maintain a positive view as they approach the end of their lives. One study followed more than 68,000 American women, ages 50 to 79 years, for nearly two decades. As death grew nearer, the optimistic women tended to feel more life satisfaction than did the pessimistic women.

Optimisms runs in families

• One genetic marker of optimism is a gene that enhances the social-bonding hormone oxytocin

• Even the most pessimistics people can learn to be more optimistic

Social Support

LOQ: How does social support promote good health?

Social support promotes both happiness and health

• To fight social isolation, we need to do more than collect lots of acquaintances and we need people who actually care about us

Social support calms us and reduces blood pressure and stress hormones

• Social support fosters stronger immune functioning

• Close relationships give us an opportunity for “open heart therapy”—a chance to confide painful feelings

  • Suppressing emotions can be detrimental to physical health

Reducing Stress

Have a sense of control develops more optimistic thinking

• building social support can help us experience less stress and thus improve our health

• We can’t always alleviate stress and simply need to manage our stress

Aerobic Exercise

LOQ: How effective is aerobic exercise as a way to manage stress and improve well-being?

Aerobic exercise is sustained, oxygen-consuming, exertion—such as jogging, swimming, or biking—that increases heart and lung fitness

• moderate exercise adds to your quantity and quality of life, with more energy, better mood, and stronger relationship

• Also helps fight heart disease

A sense of accomplishment and improved physique and body image that often accompany a successful exercise routine may enhance one’s self-image, leading to a better emotional stat

Aerobic Exercise: sustained exercise that increases heart and lung fitness; also helps alleviate depression and anxiety.

Relaxation and Meditation

LOQ: In what ways might relaxation and meditation influence stress and health?

Simple methods of relaxation, which require no expensive equipment, produce many of the results biofeedback once promised

• Over 60 studies have found that relaxation procedures can also help alleviate headaches, hypertension, anxiety, and insomnia

Numerous studies have confirmed the psychological benefits of different types of meditation

• These types include mindfulness meditation, which today has found a new home in stress management programs

• Practicing mindfulness may lessen anxiety and depression

Correlational and experimental studies offer three explanations. Mindfulness:

• strengthens connections among regions in our brain. The affected regions are those associated with focusing our attention, processing what we see and hear, and being reflective and aware

• activates brain regions associated with more reflective awareness. When labeling emotions, mindful people show less activation in the amygdala which aids emotion regulation

• calms brain activation in emotional situations. This lower activation was clear in one study in which participants watched two movies

Mindfulness Meditation: a reflective practice in which people attend to current experiences in a nonjudgmental and accepting manner.

Faith Communities and Health

LOQ: What is the faith factor, and what are some possible explanations for the link between faith and health?

Research points to three possible explanations for the religiosity longevity correlation

• Healthy behaviors: Religion promotes self-control. This helps explain why religiously active people tend to smoke and drink much less and to have healthier lifestyles

• Social support: Could social support explain the faith factor. Faith is often a communal experience. To belong to a faith community is to participate in a support network.

• Positive emotions: Even after controlling for social support, gender, unhealthy behaviors, and pre-existing health problems, the mortality studies have found that religiously engaged people tend to live longer