The power of positive emotions

“Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.” That’s a memorable line from the 2013 tune “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams – a song that reached No. 1 in the charts in over 20 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada and was the most played song of the 2010s.

One truth about happiness: It’s among the many positive emotions that people can use to counter stress, which affects thoughts, feelings, behaviors and physical health. Unchecked stress can lead to myriad health problems like hypertension, heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes.

Sarah Pressman, UC Irvine professor of psychological science, has made examining the health benefits of positive emotions her life’s work. In this episode of The UC Irvine Podcast, Pressman explains how researchers analyze the protective properties of positivity, relates their findings and suggests simple steps people can take to improve their own happiness.

“High Life,” the music for this episode, was provided by The Mini Vandals, featuring Mamadou Koita and Lasso, via the audio library in YouTube Studio.

To get the latest episodes of The UC Irvine Podcast delivered automatically, subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Video above: UC Irvine professor of psychological science Jason Schiffman led a “flashmob,” assisted by students from his winter quarter classes and open to anyone who wanted to participate, to promote mental health awareness on Thursday, March 13 during the 2025 UCI Happiness Week.

TRANSCRIPT

The UC Irvine Podcast/Cara Capuano

From the University of California, Irvine, I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to The UC Irvine Podcast. Our guest today is Sarah Pressman, UC Irvine professor of psychological science, director of the Stress, Emotion, and Physical Health Laboratory, and an associate dean in the division of undergraduate education.

Her research examines how stress, psychological well-being and physical health all interact, paying close attention to the role that positive emotions and behaviors play in all three of those aspects of life.

Since 1949, May has been nationally recognized as Mental Health Awareness Month – established, in part, to increase awareness of the importance of mental health and wellness in American’s lives. So today, we’re talking about happiness, one of her specialties and an emotion with a proven track record for improving mental health and wellness. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today, Professor Pressman.

Sarah Pressman:

Thank you for having me.

Capuano:

I think when many people think of academia, their minds drift to psychologists and physiologists who study what makes people frown, not what makes people smile – or things that are going wrong, not the effects of what’s going right. Why did you choose to focus on positive emotions and behaviors?

Pressman:

So, I started out my career being one of those people. And so, I went into health psychology really thinking that I was going to be studying the harmful effects of stress.

As a kid, I was one of those people who got sick all the time. Every time there was a test, every time there was an exam – mono, strep throat, whatever it was going around, I would catch it. And so, I got interested – it’s called “me-search,” right? You want to study what’s true about yourself. And so, my me-search was, “Okay, stress must be affecting the immune system.” And so, for graduate school, I went into the laboratory of basically the world’s expert on stress and immune function. But within a very short time of being there, I realized how much we already knew about that topic. And so, we really know the ins and outs of all of the ways that stress damages our health.

And you know, some people say, “You know, stress is responsible for 99% of illnesses.” I mean, I don’t know if there’s any truth to that statistic, but certainly we know that it affects deeply our physiology, our immune function, our cardiovascular function. But my question then became, “Well, what do we do about that? Right? How can we help people? If we know that stress is so harmful, how can we buffer the damage that it’s causing?”

And at the time of my graduate education, the field of positive psychology was really starting to grow. It was sort of launched in around 2000, and I said, “Hey, you know, there might be something here that we can take advantage of to help people with their stress.” You know, could our positive emotions somehow help protect us against the harms of stress?

Capuano:

Such an important question. How do you define happiness?

Pressman:

Yeah, it’s hard. And, you know, if you talk to a philosopher, they’ll give you a very complicated (laughs) description. You know, for psychologists, there’s even infighting on how do we define different positive emotions? But I like to think of it as anything that signals pleasurable engagement with the environment. And so, this could be feeling happy, like you mentioned, it could be feeling calm and peaceful. It could be feeling excited and enthusiastic. All of those are different kinds of positive emotions, but they all reflect the same thing: that things are going well.

Capuano:

We always hear about the “power of positivity.” I don’t know, though, that many folks assume that that’s even something that can be measured and – to your point – so many different varieties of what positive emotions look like. How can a researcher chart or analyze a subject’s positive emotions?

Pressman:

It’s a good question. So, in psychology, most of us do it fairly simply, which is essentially we just ask you: “How do you feel?” You should be a fairly good judge of how you’re feeling.

And so, in some research studies, it’s as simple as: “Hey, how happy are you feeling right now? How happy have you been over the last month?” You know, more emotion-focused studies will ask you a whole series of questions. And so, like I said earlier, we’ll track different adjectives. So, we don’t want to just know about happiness, we want to know excitement or love or awe or calm or peacefulness. And so, it kind of depends on the research questions that someone has.

But what we’ve also realized over time is that asking people is potentially fraught, right? I mean, it’s a useful technique, but there’s problems with it. And, you know, certainly some people – especially depending on the country you live in or who you are, your demographics – you may want to present yourself as more happy than you actually are. And so many of us have turned to other techniques.

And so, I do a lot of work on coding facial expression as another way of telling how positive someone is. And so, if you look at photographs of a person, are they smiling? Are they not smiling? Are they sincerely smiling with like what we call a “Duchenne smile,” which is your eyes are crinkling and your cheeks are activated – in research, it’s been shown to signify true positive emotion. And then there’s other techniques too. We can code your writing; we can look at how you speak and the words that you use. And we can even ask a friend, right? “Call a friend.” And you can ask someone, “How happy is your friend? How happy is your partner?” And those are also useful ways of finding out someone’s positive emotions.

Capuano:

It’s super layered measurement.

Pressman:

Yeah. All these different techniques represent you know, something a little bit different about positive emotion, but, you know, they’re all part of this broader construct of positivity that we’re trying to get at.

Capuano:

You’ve been at UC Irvine since 2013. During your tenure here, I know that your research team has pursued several different projects. Which of your investigations and findings for your team stand out most for you?

Pressman:

Probably my favorite was a study that came out during the pandemic. And it was essentially taking advantage of an area of research called the facial feedback hypothesis. And this is just the idea that if you fake an emotion, you’ll actually feel it. And so, actors have known this for ages, right? “You fake it till you make it.”

And so, in research – it’s been a bit controversial recently – but there is good evidence that if you smile, it sends a backwards message to your brain that says, “Oh, you’re actually happy.” And from my perspective, as a health psychologist, what we’ve really seen is that that also has physiological benefits. In multiple studies, even one that just came out a few months ago, we see that smiling seems to calm us down. It seems to relax our bodies. We think it’s activating what’s called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our “rest and digest” part of our body. And we think it’s happening because smiling has always been seen as this social signal where I can communicate to you from far away that, “I’m not a threat. I’m a friendly, happy person who won’t attack you.” And if that’s the signal that we’ve kind of evolved over time, it should also mean that we calm down when we smile because otherwise, we won’t have these positive social interactions.

And so, I wanted to take advantage of that in a very relevant study, or a very relevant topic, which is vaccinations, and see whether or not if you smile when you’re getting a vaccine – or in this case a “sham vaccine” – if that could actually offer any benefits. A sham vaccine just means we’re not actually giving you any kind of active ingredients. So, it was just salt water, but it was the same size as a flu shot, so we wanted it to be realistic.

And what we found is that if even just for a few seconds while you’re getting the shot, you just do a big toothy grin with your eyes crinkling and just the biggest smile ever, not only does it reduce your pain by 40% – so almost half, you have almost half the pain by smiling – but physiologically, your heart rate is lower all throughout the entire procedure. And so, I just love that because it’s such a simple, small thing that we can do to make ourselves feel better in the moment and potentially have these physiological benefits repeatedly over our lifetime.

Capuano:

How do you measure the pain in that moment?

Pressman:

We repeatedly asked them, “On scale of zero to a hundred, how bad do you think this needle is going to feel?” Then right after they got it, “On a scale of zero to a hundred, how bad is your pain?” And then about 10, 15 minutes later, we asked them that again. And at every time point the smilers reported lower levels and substantially lower than the control group.

Capuano:

That’s amazing!

Pressman:

Yeah!

Capuano:

How timely!

Pressman:

Right. The study came out during, I think, right when the COVID vaccine was being rolled out. So, the timing was really perfect.

Capuano:

So, we know smiling is one way… what are some steps that someone can take to try to find or improve their own happiness and positive emotions?

Pressman:

Yes. Such an important question and something that I think people don’t… they don’t work on enough, they don’t worry about enough. And I think oftentimes the messaging we get on how to be happy is not always accurate. There’s a lot right now on self-care, you know, “Stay home, watch Netflix, order in.” And yeah, that feels good, but that actually won’t help your happiness as much as many other things.

And so, one of the important things I teach my students about happiness, right off, is how easy it is to miss positive emotions and not dwell on them. And so, the way we talk about it in positive psychology is that negative emotions are very sticky. And so, when something goes wrong, it’s easy to dwell on it and ruminate about it. You know, your boss yells at you, you get a weird email from your significant other, you can’t stop thinking about it. It just happens.

But when something good happens, we don’t do that. We don’t ruminate about the positive things nearly as much. And so, if someone says, “Hey, you look really nice today,” you feel good in the moment, and then you immediately move on to something different.

And so, one of the things is just teaching people to ruminate on positivity, on the positive events that are happening. And so, we call that “savoring.” It can look like a lot of different things. It could be a meditation on something positive.

So, there’s something called a “chocolate meditation” that I like to do with my students where I have them eat a piece of chocolate the way they normally would, which takes about a millisecond, right? Just gulp it down. But then I have them stretch out that moment for multiple minutes, right?

And so, they have to look at the wrapper, they have to smell the chocolate, they have to just look at how beautiful the light is hitting it, you know, then when they’re finally allowed to put it in their mouth, they can like move it around their tongues so they get all the different flavors, you know, really let it melt before swallowing it.

And it’s just such a perfect example of how we could do that in our day-to-day life, right? The coffee we drink in the morning, the walk to work, we’re not usually paying attention. And just by, you know, take a photo of the really pretty tree you pass, or tell someone about the beautiful bird song you heard – just trying to lengthen out those positive experiences is such a simple thing that has real benefits because positive things are constantly happening to us, we just don’t realize it. And so that’s one that I like. Do you want me to tell you some more?

Capuano:

Absolutely!

Pressman:

I can go on.

Capuano:

Yes!

Pressman:

And so, I mean, I think many different positive psychology interventions are different versions of that, where we’re just trying to get you to pay more attention to all the good things that happen, which our brain is missing.

One that has really spread like wildfire has been gratitude exercises. And so, actually one of my former teaching assistants for Positive Psych at UCI has like a bestselling gratitude journal. And essentially all the gratitude journals are – it’s what it sounds like – it’s just a place to remind you to write down things that you’re grateful for.

And so, it might just be before you go to bed at night, instead of thinking about all the bad things that happened that day, you write down three good things that happened, or you write about all the good things that you’re grateful for and why you’re grateful for them. And just doing that practice helps you sleep better at night. It’s been tied to reduced pain in people with pain conditions and obviously huge amounts of positive emotions. Many interventions have been done where they have people do that just a couple of times a week, and you see really long-lasting benefits – so, that’s another one.

I mean, one that I think has been especially good, especially at a time right now where I think people are very worried about the future, is there are many interventions that are a little bit more future-oriented. Optimism, hope are really important parts of positive psychology, and I think right now many people don’t have a lot of hope. There’s just so many existential threats to the world.

One activity that’s been very successful is writing about your best future self. And so, just spending some time writing down all the things you hope to gain in your life, or, you know, 10, 20 years from now, what do you hope your life looks like? What is your day like? What are you doing? Who’s with you? And having that kind of vision can really help motivate us to find more purpose in our life, find motivation and really kind of draw a path for how we should be spending our time in a way that’s going to have meaning for us.

Capuano:

Lately, I’ve seen that you’ve been in the media noting how vacations lead to positive emotions. Where does proper time off play into keeping stress at bay?

Pressman:

Yeah, such an important and timely topic because what we know is that Americans do not use their time off at all. And, we have vacation days we just don’t spend because we’re so work-obsessed and stressed, and we just don’t think it’s important. But what research has shown for more than a decade is that people who take vacations live longer. And so, it’s extremely important to health.

And then, just in terms of thinking about what can help us manage our stress, what can help us improve our well-being, having time to focus on the leisure activities that you love – we know engagement in positive leisure reduces stress hormones. We know that it is tied to healthier body mass indexes. We know that it makes people, as you said, feel better – so, happier, they’re more positive, they have less negative emotions and their blood pressure is lower just by doing the leisure activities that they love.

And so, having the opportunity to go somewhere and just focus on that leisure for a few days, and to hopefully disconnect from stress and disconnect from whatever is bothering you, and foster social relationships. These things are all such important ingredients for well-being and just giving ourselves a break from the usual drudgery of our day-to-day lives.

Capuano:

But what’s the response to some people’s interpretation that traveling – the act of it, itself – is stressful?

Pressman:

And it can be. And, from a health psych perspective, when you go to an airport, you’re exposed to all sorts of new germs and, you know (laughs), you might miss a plane, you might have a difficult time crossing a border, you might not have the right document with you. So, yes, there’s so many things – and the cost and the possibility of things going wrong. And so importantly, I mean, even staycations have been shown to have well-being benefits. And so, we’ve seen in our own work that that absolutely is tied to feeling better. And so, a staycation is just intentionally taking some time where you engage in enjoyable activities, but you don’t leave your house necessarily, or you don’t leave your city. And so, that’s one thing.

And I think people could really do a lot of good for themselves by reducing the expectations they have for vacations. I think that you can gain a lot of positive emotion in anticipating a vacation, planning it, thinking about all the great things you’re going to have. And certainly, a little bit of planning is good, but I think where things go wrong is when people expect it to be absolutely perfect and then get devastated because their expectations are not met. And so, trying to balance that, right? Where hoping for the best but expecting the worst is a helpful strategy so that you’re not, you know, just like when it rains on your wedding, right? Like, you have to roll with the punches and just be okay with that so that you don’t destroy the benefit of the vacation.

Capuano:

So, managing expectations might be another way to protect positive emotions.

Pressman:

Absolutely. And then also savoring your vacation when you come home. You know, I think so many people feel guilty showing people pictures of their vacations and talking about all the great things that they did, but that’s another way of keeping that positive experience lasting for a longer time. As long as you’re not obnoxious about it, I think your friends will be happy for you. And maybe you’ll give them advice on going to that great vacation location as well and it can help promote good relationships.

Capuano:

Great tip. That’s exactly why we’re having this podcast conversation right now, because I do think that I want people at home to savor and think about positive emotions and positivity. Brings me to March of 2024, when you created and launched UC Irvine’s inaugural “Happiness Week.” What was the genesis for that and how did it play out?

Pressman:

The idea came out of nowhere, which is I was interviewing a prospective graduate student for UCI, and she was saying that at another UC their psychology department had – I believe it was just like a “happiness day” – where they presented their research on anything in psychology, but it was kind of mental health broadly. And I was like, “Huh, you know, we could do that, but we could do more.” (laughs)

Every year I teach about 400 students how to be happy in my positive psychology class on campus and part of that has always included a research project. And so, the research project during COVID involved finding ways to give people well-being during that dark time. Since then, it had been more focused on, “Hey, find a way to make UCI happier.”

And so even before Happiness Week, I was having all these students go out and just do mini research-based, science-based interventions that were supposed to improve well-being: playing hopscotch, handing out flowers, having an affirmation board that people could write on. And so, those students were all doing that work, and I said, “Hey, like, we could make a whole week around this.”

In my role as associate dean in the division of undergrad education, I was able to ask Dean Dennin, “Hey, could I do this? Right? Like, what do I need to do to make this a ‘UCI Happiness Week?’” And he said, “You just do it.” He was so kind and gave us his social media team to help create a website.

I had a wonderful volunteer undergraduate from psychology who was willing to help me reach out to people all over campus. And so, we just started emailing people and saying, “Hey, week 10 of winter quarter is always dark and rainy, and students are stressed. It’s the middle of the school year – just in general, people are stressed around that time of the year, are you willing to do something?”

The first year it started, I think, reasonably. I mean, I think we probably had about 10 to a dozen units who were like, “Sure, we’ll do something.” So, dining had a sundae bar for students, and the a capella group did like an activity where they sang around campus – just wonderful little things in conjunction with my students doing their activities.

And then this year was the second year, and it just exploded. I think we had double the units involved, you know, making stickers, handing out gratitude notes, handing out flowers. We had puppies on campus for petting – you know, “pet a puppy to reduce your stress” events. And it’s just been really beautiful to see it grow and see how excited people are. And I expect next year will be even better. And the most exciting thing was that somehow the California Senate found out about it and invited UCI to go and talk about this activity with them to really think about how do we promote well-being on college campuses and in general.

Capuano:

Has that happened?

Pressman:

Yeah, so that happened. I unfortunately wasn’t able to go, but Doug Everhart, who’s in charge of student wellness on campus, he was able to go and speak with them.

Capuano:

That’s fantastic. I love the tagline: “Discover Joy, Conquer Stress.” (Pressman laughs.) Did you come up with that?

Pressman:

Yeah. (laughs)

Capuano:

Brilliant.

Pressman:

Yeah, because you know what my research shows – and this is kind of why I went into this field – is that one of the things that does help conquer stress is happiness. It’s hard to feel really stressed and happy at the same time, right? And so, what we’ve seen in research is that even people who are bereaved, who have just lost someone, they will have these moments where they laugh about something, and it just helps them feel so much better in the moment. And research has shown that smiling briefly while you’re going through discomfort, people do this very naturally when they’re shy and embarrassed and uncomfortable giving like a speech, and that absolutely improves recovery. You feel better in the moment. You’re telling your brain you’re happier and your body gets more relaxed. And so, we know that feelings of happiness really help us undo stress and recover from it better.

Capuano:

Also in 2024, you co-authored an updated version of the American Psychological Association’s Activities for Teaching Positive Psychology. It was published in October. Your book is called “More Activities for Teaching Positive Psychology.”

Pressman:

Very creative (laughs).

Capuano:

I mean, it gets the job done. What does this book offer its readers?

Pressman:

In this book, what we were really hoping to do was find new ways for people to bring happiness into classrooms. We knew that students now have decreased attention spans. They really learn so much more when you can actively engage them in the classroom. And so, we really wanted a bunch of activities that professors could bring in to bring concepts and theories and positive psychology to life.

What we did is we gathered 30 teams of experts in the field and said, “Hey, what do you do to teach the thing you’re an expert on? What’s the magic ingredient that you would do if you want to teach someone this? And they came up with so many creative ideas, none of them take a long time. And I now have completely changed my class on campus. I don’t use a textbook anymore. I just go through these activities and the students are having the best time.

I think that when you are able to collect your own data on something, you try, for example: “I’m going to compare the benefit to my well-being of being kind to myself versus being kind to other people.” And so, this is what I was talking about before with self-care. I think all the students going in, if I had to ask them a hypothesis, “What’s going to make you more happy?” They would all say, “Self-care,” right? I’m going to get a manicure. I’m going to buy myself a bubble tea. I’m going to watch my favorite Netflix. And you know, I ask them like, “What’s going to make you happier?” That’s what they all say.

But then, when we actually collect the data as part of the activity, and they spend one day doing three kind acts for someone else versus themselves, it’s very clear what works better when they look at their self-reported happiness. They’re much happier on the days that they’re helping other people. And it’s small things like cooking a meal for my roommate, buying my mom her favorite flowers, calling my grandmother and having a long chat with her, right? And those moments of social connection are so important for well-being and what research shows time and time again for positive psychology, which we haven’t really talked about yet, is that social relationships matter. It’s hard to have well-being without having at least a few good positive social connections.

The book’s been so fun. There are so many great activities in it and hopefully it’s really helping teachers during a time of burnout and exhaustion just bring some life back into their classrooms.

Capuano:

To follow up on something you just said, you did such a great job listing ways that we can protect ourselves from the harms of stress. It sounds like interconnected relationships and cultivating those is another important endeavor.

Pressman:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, there’s great experimental research where they show that even just having someone in the room who you love holding your hand reduces stress. Even having your dog in the room, you know, reduces stress, right? That’s a relationship as well.

Hugging releases stress-reducing hormones and there’s a whole area of research on social support, which just shows all of the tangible ways that relationships can help us during difficult times, right? It might be getting advice on something you don’t know how to do. It might be tangible, like, “My car broke down, I need someone to drive me. I need a drive to the mechanic.” It might be getting money lent to you, and it might just be a hug, right? Like sometimes emotionally we just need someone to talk about a problem with, or we just need that tender touch. And all of those things have been shown to be beneficial in reducing the harmful effects of stress.

Capuano:

That makes perfect sense.

Pressman:

Yeah.

Capuano:

So, you mentioned a lot of different expert groups contributed their ideas and activities to the book. What are some that stand out for you?

Pressman:

I have a bit of bias coming in because I’m a health psychologist who studies positive factors and I had one amazing health psychologist contribute to the book. And she really flipped my research area a bit on its head, where I mostly focus on how positive emotions influence physiology and health and she wanted to look at how health impacts how you feel. And so, she designed us an activity where students had to up their fruit and vegetable intake by about 30% over the course of a week and then look at how it was changing their mood day to day. And it worked so well, especially with college students who are eating ramen every day and eating french fries and such carb-heavy things.

She has a list of like the top happiness-promoting fruits and vegetables – things like kiwis are really good for you, and carrots and apples – and had people try to eat more of those and then see tangibly how it was changing how they felt. And I think that was just such a powerful message because I think we don’t think that much about how what we’re putting into our body is affecting how we feel. So, I really, really love that one as a useful activity and a useful behavior for all of us, really.

Capuano:

You’re the director of the Stress, Emotion and Physical Health Laboratory. What questions are currently being asked in the STEP lab?

Pressman:

Oh, good question. We just wrote a small grant for internal funding from UCI focused on something relatively new, which I’ve kind of always wanted to try out, but there was no research to say it would necessarily work, but are you familiar with a TENS unit? It’s used in physiotherapy a lot.

Capuano:

Oh, I love a TENS unit.

Pressman:

Yeah. So, it’s – for those of you who don’t know – it’s like electrical stimulation of your muscles and it’s very helpful for a lot of injuries to recover. And so, in facial feedback research, one of the hardest things is to get people to make the facial expression you want. Because what we often do is we show them a picture and have them mimic it or we have them hold something in their mouth, so like a chopstick or a pen, in a way that should activate the muscles. But people’s faces get tired. They’re not looking at a mirror oftentimes, so they don’t know if they’re doing it correctly. And so, the literature has been very messy because of adherence problems. People just can’t make the face you want them to make and hold it for as long as you need them to. And so, I had always said, “Hey, what if I could just put a TENS unit on your face and activate the sincere smiling muscles? Could I make you happier and also improve your health?”

Amazingly enough, in the last couple of years, there have been a few pilot studies showing you can actually do this. You can stimulate people’s facial muscles and change emotion. And so, we’re really hoping to try that in the context of stress and see whether or not if you get your face stimulated while you’re going through stressors, whether or not that reduces stress. And so, we’re hoping to run that this summer or in the coming year. So that’s exciting.

The other thing that I’m really interested in right now is the question of what kinds of positive emotions are helpful in what stressful circumstances. And so we have one paper that came out a few years ago that was looking at, “Okay, if I make you feel different, positive emotions – so I make you write about the time that you were the most excited, or the time that you were the happiest, or the time that was just this like peaceful, relaxing memory, you know, so maybe you’re comparing getting married to writing about a time you were sitting on a beach and watching the ocean.” So, very different experiences, and we want to know which is going to be helpful for stress.

And so we had people going through what’s called a cold pressor task, and that’s where you put your hand in a bucket of ice water for a few minutes and it’s very painful and you have to just keep it there and your heart starts racing and you really want to take it out, and it’s very painful, which is a very arousing feeling. And what we found is that not all the positive emotions helped.

So, feeling excited – in that context – not so great, right? And it’s easy to imagine like, why would it help you? But if we made you feel calm ahead of time, that almost completely wiped out the stress response from this painful, painful task on your heart. And so, we really want to break that down more, because I think there are probably times when feeling calm is not helpful.

And so, one example of that is giving a speech, doing anything athletic that requires a lot of energy – these are times where people will sometimes say, “Oh, you’re freaking out. Calm down.” And you can’t because you’re so aroused. And you need to keep that energy level up because you need to do the thing that you need to do.

There’s one study, which is one of my favorite studies in psychology, by Alison Brooks, where she wasn’t looking at physiology, but she was having people do karaoke from like an old “Rock Band” karaoke game and she just had the instructions before they started it – and they were being rated, because you always get a score with Rock Band – to either tell themselves to calm down or to tell themselves, “Be excited!” How can you, instead of being scared about this, be excited about this moment? And that simple flip where you’re relabeling your stress as excitement was able to improve their performance on the karaoke task. And they just felt better doing it.

And she’s shown that in a couple of different outcomes that, in a context where you need to have that energy and perform, being excited is probably going to be an easier flip to have better stress outcomes. We’ve been going down that rabbit hole a little bit, looking more physiologically at when do different positive emotions help, which are the ones that are actually going to combat the different kinds of stress in our lives most effectively. And so that’s what I’m really excited about figuring out.

Capuano:

It could end up a how-to book in how to get through challenging situations.

Pressman:

Exactly. And I think too many people want the one magic bullet – it’s just not realistic, right? Yeah, mindfulness is great, but mindfulness is great in certain situations, right? And we need to figure out when. And so really trying to give people science-based precise advice on what to do with which kinds of stressors is a dream.

Capuano:

Totally. What would you tell a student today who aspires to be a research psychologist?

Pressman:

Do it! (laughs) I mean, it’s the best job ever. When I tell people I study happiness, everyone is always so excited and, you know, they want to hear all about it. And having a career where you get to just ask questions and – whatever comes to mind – and then test it out and see if it’s true, and contribute to scientific knowledge, is just the most enriching job I can possibly imagine.

You know, it’s not for everybody. You have to love research, but I think for those people who do, you know, it’s a wonderful career. I mean, I would tell people we need more (laughs). You know, psychology is so important.

There was a great quote from, I believe it was Francis Collins who was the outgoing director of the NIH just after the pandemic. They were asking him some of his deep thoughts about his experience at running the NIH during the pandemic. And one of the things he said is that – and I’m going to butcher this quote and so maybe I’ll have to record it for you later (laughter), because I’m going to really butcher it – but he was so amazed, obviously, at our ability. It was a miracle of science that we were able to come up with vaccines so quickly into the pandemic.

I mean, really, it still astounds me how quickly we were able to do it, but no one – or at least he – hadn’t realized that we would have this vaccine and then people wouldn’t want it. And he regrets not focusing more on behavioral factors and psychological factors, because that ended up being such a key ingredient in protecting the public’s health, right? We needed to understand more about vaccine resistance, about willingness to listen to doctors and listen to public health officials. And so much of that is psychology. And so, we really need people who want to study these psychological questions to make sure that people stay mentally healthy, obviously, but also physically healthy.

Capuano:

There’s really an intersection there.

Pressman:

Yeah. And I think that MDs – unfortunately, psychology is such a small part of most of their medical training, and same thing with public health. And so, I think we just need more intersection. We need more people; we need more crosstalk between these areas. I actually soon after the pandemic put together a webinar with the Association for Psychological Science, where we wanted to kind of get the attention of the public and public health officials more by saying, “Hey, what could psychology have contributed to the pandemic from this perspective of the mind-body connection?” And, you know, hopefully if we just keep working towards this – if we have more people coming into this field of health psychology, positive psychology – we’ll kind of push the envelope and get more integration between these different important areas and better health down the line.

Capuano:

You’re very good at the forward-thinking positive emotion activity, I can tell. Professor Pressman, thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

Pressman:

Thank you. This has been really lovely.

Capuano:

You said some things that I think a lot of us needed to hear about savoring and focusing on the positive, and I hope our listeners take that home. I’m Cara Capuano. Thank you for listening to our conversation. For the latest UC Irvine news, please visit news.uci.edu. The UC Irvine Podcast is production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.