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16 different positive emotions
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You might be asking yourself, what are the 16 different positive emotions?! There’s a lot more to just “happiness” and “joy”; there are many more positive emotions that can trigger the anti-inflammatory response. Some are: being active, alert, amused, at ease, attentive, calm, cheerful, determined, enthusiastic, excited, happy, inspired, interested, proud, relaxed, and strong.
In a study to determine emotional diversity, researchers enlisted 175 participants to self-report their experience of the 16 different positive emotions at the end of each day. They also had the participants rate their experience of 16 negative emotions which included feeling afraid, ashamed, blue, distressed, drowsy, guilty, hostile, irritable, jittery, nervous, sad, scared, sleepy, sluggish, tired, and upset. The degree that someone had experienced any of the 32 positive or negative day-to-day emotions was rated on a scale of "not at all" to 1 (very slightly) up to 5 (extremely). Emodiversity was measured over a 30-day period and categorized by the number of times and degree to which each emotion was experienced.
After the experiment was completed, blood samples were taken and tested for three biomarkers of inflammation: IL-6, CRP, and fibrinogen. Researchers concluded that greater diversity of day-to-day positive emotions was correlated with significantly lower systemic inflammation. As for the negative emotions, it was evident that stress and inflammation greatly increased.
Anthony Ong, professor of Human Development and Gerontology at Cornell University says, "There is growing evidence that inflammatory responses may help explain how certain emotions get under the skin, so to speak, and contribute to disease susceptibility. Our findings suggest that having a rich, spontaneous, and diverse positive emotional life may benefit health by lower circulating levels of inflammation.” (R)
A somewhat recent systematic analysis of over a decade's worth of mind-body interventions (MBIs) found that practices such as yoga and meditation reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines (in other words, they become like anti-cancerous practices!) and down-regulate inflammation-related genes. This analysis was published several years ago in the journal, Frontiers in Immunology. The systematic review of 18 different MBI studies by researchers at Coventry University concluded that mind-body practices such as mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and tai-chi all appear to have the similar effect of reversing the molecular signature caused by chronic stress and the expression of pro-inflammatory genes.
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