People are better at maintaining positive than negative emotional states

Determining how people maintain positive and negative emotional states is critical to understanding emotional dynamics, individual differences in emotion, and the instrumental value of emotions. There has been a surge in interest in tasks assessing affective working memory that can examine how people maintain stimulus-independent positive and negative emotional states. In these tasks, people are asked to maintain their emotional state that was induced by an initial stimulus in order to compare that state with the state induced by a subsequent stimulus. It is unclear, however, whether measures of accuracy in this task actually reflect the success of maintaining the initial emotional state. In a series of studies, we introduce an idiographic metric of accuracy that reflects the success of emotional maintenance and use that metric to examine whether people are better at maintaining positive or negative emotional states. We demonstrate that people are generally better at maintaining positive emotional states than they are at maintaining negative emotional states (Studies 1-3). We also show that this effect is not due to decay or to spontaneous interference processes (Studies 2-3), retroactive interference processes (Studies 4-5), or reduced engagement with the initial emotional state (Study 5). Although the mechanism underlying this effect is not yet clear, our results have important implications for understanding emotional maintenance and the possible functions of positive and negative emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).