The impact of anticipating positive events on responses to stress

The few studies examining the impact of positive emotions on discrete stressors suggest that positive emotions improve stress responding. We hypothesized that merely anticipating a positive event would be sufficient to harness these benefits. In Study 1, we found that the anticipation of funny (relative to unfunny) cartoons increased positive emotions immediately following the offset of a social stressor. In Study 2, we found that the post-stress mood elevation was greater when anticipating a positive event than when having experienced the same positive event prior to the stressor, but that both positive emotion groups reported more adaptive thoughts during the stressor itself compared to participants receiving a neutral emotion induction. In Study 3, we found that this boost in post-stress positive emotion predicts decreases in concurrent negative emotion. In sum, these findings suggest that anticipating a positive event is uniquely able to induce positive emotions both during and after stress, and that this boost subserves improved coping and recovery.