The Ups and Downs of Feeling Good

Aimed at integrating cutting-edge psychological science into the classroom, columns about teaching Current Directions in Psychological Science offer advice and how-to guidance about teaching a particular area of research or topic in psychological science that has been the focus of an article in the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Ong, A., Dejonckheere, E., & Ram, N. (2025). Positive affect dynamics. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 34(5), 301–308. 

Ezra has spent his entire life chasing happiness. He purchased a Ferrari and summited Mount Everest. On a regular basis, he flaunts his elite educational pedigree. He overindulges in food, parties, and alcohol. His social media posts make it seem as if he’s living the dream. But deep down, he is mentally and physically unwell. He goes to a clinical psychologist, who has a radical approach to understanding how to help Ezra: Examine how his positive-affect dynamics—the literal ups and downs of feeling good—influence his mental and physical health.

Ezra’s experience highlights the importance of not just feeling good but also understanding how those feelings fluctuate over time. To explore this, Anthony Ong, Egon Dejonckheere, and Nilàm Ram (2025) developed a framework to understand positive-affect dynamics. 

Rather than being the opposite of negative affect, positive-affect dynamics enable psychological scientists to examine how people’s joy, contentment, enthusiasm, and other positive emotional states ebb and flow over hours, days, weeks, and months (Kuppens & Verduyn, 2017; Ram et al., 2014). Such fluctuations in positive affect offer key information that psychological scientists can use to predict people’s mental and physical health.

Not all positive-affect dynamics are equal. Ong and colleagues (2025) identify four ways in which positive affect changes over time.

• Variability: The variety and intensity of people’s positive emotional experiences. For example, someone who feels joy, excitement, and contentment all in one day has high variability.
• Instability: The size and frequency of changes in people’s positive emotions. A person whose mood swings rapidly from happiness to neutrality has high instability.
• Inertia: The consistency of positive affect from one time period to the next. Someone whose positive mood remains steady throughout the week shows high inertia.
• Reactivity: How much people’s positive emotions shift in reaction to daily events. A person whose happiness quickly increases after receiving good news demonstrates high reactivity.

Ong and colleagues suggest that understanding how positive emotions change over time is more informative than simply measuring their overall happiness levels. Indeed, they review evidence that positive-affect dynamics can predict mental health outcomes (Ong & Ram, 2016). Other research has shown that positive-affect dynamics predict mortality risk 12 years later (Ong & Steptoe, 2020). Positive-affect dynamics matter mightily.

To bring this cutting-edge research into the classroom, instructors can use the following two activities. The first activity illustrates positive affect’s four dynamic features. The second activity encourages students to use critical thinking to design a scientific study that could examine possible associations between positive-affect dynamics and mental and physical health. Each activity should take less than 10 minutes and can be completed in either face-to-face or online environments.

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Additional References 

Ram, N., Conroy, D., Pincus, A., Lorek, A., Rebar, A., Roche, M., Coccia, M., Morack, J., Feldman, J., & Gerstorf, D. (2014). Examining the interplay of processes across multiple time-scales: Illustration with the intraindividual study of affect, health, and interpersonal behavior (iSAHIB). Research in Human Development, 11, 142–160.  

Kuppens, P., & Verduyn, P. (2017). Emotion dynamics. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 22–26.