| Anthony Ong, Cornell University assistant professor of human development, studies positive psychology, believing that people can willfully choose to focus on their positive emotions, which may lead to promoting healing and easing pain.
Dr. Positive Tries to Find What's Right with People When strangers ask Anthony Ong, assistant professor of human development, what he does for a living, he replies he is a psychologist. "So maybe you can tell what's wrong with me?" strangers typically ask.
Even if Ong were a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist (which he's not), he wouldn't even venture a guess. Ong, who is embarking on a new set of experiments to learn how emotional states of mind influence physical and mental well-being, is more interested in what's right with people.
For example, why, Ong wonders, do some people facing terrible stresses -- excruciating pain from cancer, for instance -- keep looking to the sunny side of life? And why do others wallow in self-pity and accept a dreadful fate?
It may have something to do with the complex interplay between our positive and negative emotions. "Our ability to feel contradictory emotions such as happiness and grief, as well as anger and gratitude may reveal a deeper truth about ourselves -- our human capacity for resilience in the face of life's adversities," Ong suggests.
He offers new insights into how positive and negative emotions can influence health and illness across the lifespan. Cheerful and in his 30s, Ong says he got into this line of work "to learn how to age gracefully." He asks those participating in his experiments to keep diaries and respond to standard questions at the same time each day. To gauge social connectedness, for example, Ong asks about the accuracy of a statement like: "I know that I can trust my friends, and they know they can trust me."
Diarists experiencing negative emotions might report their feelings with such words as afraid, ashamed, guilty, hostile, irritable or nervous. In contrast, positive emotions are characterized by such adjectives as active, attentive, determined, enthusiastic, inspired, proud or strong.
People who report feeling distressed and determined in the same day -- or guilty and proud -- are probably on the healthy side of normal because they have achieved what some psychologists call a state of mindfulness. They can be aware of their surroundings and emotions in a nonjudgmental fashion, Ong explains. "Mindful individuals can reconcile and even embrace contradictory emotions in all of their complexity."
Ong believes that people in a healthy state of mindfulness -- recognizing that life is a bowl of cherries but that pits can break your teeth -- can willfully choose to focus on their positive emotions. And maybe even expedite their healing, or at least ease their pain.
"It's not an easy thing to do," Ong admits. "People living with chronic stressors, such as pain, never know when it will hit. It's one of the toughest kind of stresses around ... which is why we're interested in people's emotional states at times like that." Although human beings often feel they must put their needs for happiness aside when coping with stress, Ong believes the ability to sustain a life with quality may depend on doing just the opposite. "It may be in the context of significant life challenges that our true capacity to experience joy, love and gratitude is most dramatically manifested," Ong argues.
In a project with the Weill Cornell Medical College, Ong looks for people who can meet painful adversity with resiliency, positive emotion and even humor. He hopes, ultimately, to discover the biological mechanisms that underlie some brave souls' capacity to thrive and get better -- and how emotions can influence biological processes.
Perhaps the next time he is asked about his line of work, Ong can advise querying strangers: "Figure out what you do that makes you feel great ... and do more of it."
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2007 by AlternativeApproaches.com
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