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If we are happy, content, joyful, calm, and have lots of enthusiasm, does that result in protection from developing health problems? Does being hopeful, optimistic, and cheerful limit the development or worsening of problematic health issues? Does sadness, despair, misery, or being generally unhappy result in the development of health problems? Psychologists have looked at if or how positive feelings, or the opposite, can have any impact on a person's health one way or the other.
One way of studying this question is by asking if people who are positive emotionally live longer than people who are depressed, pessimistic and generally negative. Researchers use mortality as the measure of which group lives longer. Which of the groups being studied tends to live longer, or is there no difference? It is suggested that people who are positive emotionally, and are over 55 years old, have a lower risk of mortality. Positive affect seems to matter more when a person is older than when younger. Younger people have different risks of mortality due to things like getting killed in car accidents, being killed by someone, drug overdose,etc which do not have much or anything to do whether they are happy or not. Older people are more at risk for health issues or some type of chronic illness. Maintaining a positive mood seems to help.
Morbidity is another situation that has been studied. Here the focus is on the impact of positive or negative feelings in people when they are younger. The question is does one group ultimately develop more diseases or health problems than the other group? There are a number of studies that have approached this question in different ways. The people in the young group that have positive feelings generally do better. When older, physical decline, future injury, and basic frailty is more in people in the negative feelings group. As you age, positive feelings and emotions are associated with better health and ability to function physically.
The impact of positive affect on people who are already suffering with an illness is best described as mixed. It looks like if you are in an initial or early stage of an illness, positive feelings are more effective than in a later stage. There seems to be a small effect of maintaining a sense of well-being in patients with a terminal disease. Positive affect may result in less severe cardiovascular disease. A positive sense of well-being has also improved survival in persons who are diabetic.There are small and mixed results in people with cancer. The cancer literature suggests that people with high positive affect and low depression seem to have a better survival rate. It is also noted that people with high prolonged stress have a higher probability of developing cancer and a poorer survival rate.
Overall, positive emotions may help a person to minimize or reduce stress. The thinking is that if you can reduce stress you reduce the negative stress-related damage to the body. Positive affect reportedly can give a person a break from the worry and prolonged distress that can accompany an illness. Lifting that emotional weight can help motivate a person to keep at whatever needs to be done to cope. People who are ill may have to reach deep to find anything to feel good about, but if they can do that there is a possibility that he or she may be one of the people that researchers have identified as having successfully coped with their health issue.