A NEW study shows that experiencing a range of positive emotions may help protect your health.

In the study, to be published June 22 in the aptly named journal Emotion, researchers looked at diary data from 175 adults aged 40 to 65 who logged their positive and negative emotions over 30 days. The study participants reported whether they experienced 16 various positive emotions — enthusiastic, interested, determined, excited, amused, inspired, alert, active, strong, proud, attentive, happy, relaxed, cheerful, at ease, calm — over that month-long period.

The researchers then tallied the number of different emotions the study participants reported, along with the number of times they felt those emotions. They found that having a greater diversity in day-to-day positive emotions was associated with lower circulating levels of inflammation from type 2 diabetes to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), as well as an elevated risk of dying prematurely. This was independent of mean levels of the following: positive and negative emotions, body mass index, anti-inflammatory medications, medical conditions, personality and demographics, according to the study. High levels of inflammation have been associated with chronic disease.

“There is growing evidence that inflammatory responses may help to explain how emotions get ‘under the skin’ to influence disease susceptibility,” the authors noted.

So how, exactly, do our moods affect our health?

“Researchers are just beginning to explore the notion that the range and variety of emotions that individuals experience — their so-called emodiversity — may be conducive to health and well-being,” said Anthony Ong, lead author of the study and professor of human development at Cornell University.

Although more research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms of how emotions affect our health, it may be that experiencing a diversity of emotional states, in this case positive emotions, might reduce vulnerability to psychopathology by preventing an overabundance or prolonging of any one emotion from dominating an individual’s emotional life.

In other words, variety really is the spice of life — even if you’re already leading a happy one.

Why would having a variety of positive emotions versus feeling content overall be more beneficial? Positive emotional experiences that are broad in range and differentiated may guide adaptation by helping people prioritize and regulate behavior in ways that optimize an individual’s adjustment to situational demands.

And experiencing a range of positive emotions may boost your coping skills when you do get stressed out. According to the study authors, “emodiversity may act to reduce negative appraisals of stress and facilitate adaptive coping.”

Although Ong said that the real-world implications of the research have yet to be determined, the study does show that finding ways to experience a range of feel-good emotions in your daily life can be a boon for your health. (SD-Agencies)