"Emodiversity" - a life containing a balance of different emotions - is good for you. So say psychologists Jordi Quoidbach and colleagues in a rather cool new paper (pdf).
In two large surveys (with a total of over 37,000 responders), conducted in France and Belgium, Quoidbach et al. show that
emodiversity is an independent predictor of mental and physical health – such as decreased depression and doctor’s visits – over and above mean levels of positive and negative emotion.
They defined emodiversity as follows: the survey asked participants to rate how often they experienced each of 9 positive and 9 negative emotions (or 10 in the second study). Each emotion was rated on a 5 point scale of 0 = never and 4 = most of the time. Emodiversity was calculated using this formula
What this means is that someone who reported only ever feeling one positive emotion would have ...
