Emotion and biological health: the socio-cultural moderation (original) (raw)

2017, Current Opinion in Psychology

Prior evidence shows that positive and negative emotions are associated with better and worse health, respectively. However, the emotion-health relationship may be conflated since this evidence is based nearly exclusively on subjective measures of health. Here, we reviewed more recent evidence focusing on biological health and showed that the emotion-health link is more complex. First, whereas negative emotional states such as negative affect and anger expression are inversely linked to biological health among Americans, this relationship is either not present (negative affect) or even reversed (anger expression) for Japanese. Second, whereas a meaningfulness aspect of happiness (eudaimonia) is linked consistently to better biological health, the relationship between its pleasantness aspect (hedonia) and biological health is uncertain. Moreover, a contextualized sense of meaningfulness in a work setting is strongly associated with better biological health among Japanese. Altogether, the initial evidence reviewed here underscores a need to conceptualize the biological dynamics of health and wellbeing as inherently intertwined with socio-cultural processes. Is emotion linked to health? The answer to this question would appear straightforward. Whereas positive emotions are good for health, negative emotions are bad for it [1-3]. In their review of relevant empirical evidence, Cohen and Pressman [1] observed that negative emotions including anxiety, depression, and hostility predict increased risk for illness and mortality and further noted that there also likely exists a reliable association between trait positive affect and better health as indexed by lower morbidity and decreased symptoms and pain. Nevertheless, there is an important qualification to this apparently straightforward conclusion. As Cohen and Pressman noted in the same review, the evidence is 'more complex (page 122)' when more objective measures of health, most notably mortality, are used. In the current paper, we will go a step further and suggest that when objective indicators of health are utilized, the link between emotion and health could be systematically moderated by certain social contextual factors including global cultural context and more local work context.