The impact of anticipating positive events on responses to stress Samuel S. Monfort a , Hannah E. Stroup b , Christian E. Waugh b, ⁎ a George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 3F5, Fairfax, VA 22030-4422, USA b Wake Forest University, P.O. Box 7778 Reynolda Station, Winston-Salem, NC 27109, USA HIGHLIGHTS • We investigate the effect of anticipating a positive event on mood and stress recovery. • Future positive events increase positive emotion after social stressors. • Anticipating a positive event is uniquely related to decreased negative emotion. • Future positive events elicit more positive emotion than past positive events. abstract article info Article history: Received 22 May 2014 Revised 2 December 2014 Available online 24 December 2014 Keywords: Positive emotion Anticipation Stress Coping Recovery The few studies examining the impact of positive emotions on discrete stressors suggest that positive emotions improve stress responding. We hypothesized that merely anticipating a positive event would be sufficient to har- ness these benefits. In Study 1, we found that the anticipation of funny (relative to unfunny) cartoons increased positive emotions immediately following the offset of a social stressor. In Study 2, we found that the post-stress mood elevation was greater when anticipating a positive event than when having experienced the same positive event prior to the stressor, but that both positive emotion groups reported more adaptive thoughts during the stressor itself compared to participants receiving a neutral emotion induction. In Study 3, we found that this boost in post-stress positive emotion predicts decreases in concurrent negative emotion. In sum, these findings suggest that anticipating a positive event is uniquely able to induce positive emotions both during and after stress, and that this boost subserves improved coping and recovery. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Whether it's a future wedding, birthday, or vacation, people tend to enjoy anticipating positive events. People think more extensively about future positive events relative to past ones, which may prompt more intense emotions during anticipation than during recollection (Van Boven & Ashworth, 2007). The presence of positive emotion in particu- lar has been shown to buffer against the onset of stress and to augment an individual's coping repertoire (Fredrickson, 2001). Here, we propose that anticipating positive events may be a convenient and powerful way to induce positive emotion, both during and after stress. Prolonged experience of stress adversely affects mental and physical well-being (DeLongis, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1988; Trzcieniecka-Green & Steptoe, 1996). Experiencing positive emotions is a powerful way to facilitate successful management of stress. Daily experience of positive emotion has been shown to mitigate the influence of stressful events on next-day anger and depression (Ong, Bergeman, Bisconti, & Wallace, 2006; Viney, 1986). Positive emotions also improve recovery from major life stressors; Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh, and Larkin (2003) found that positive emotions fully mediated the relationship between trait psychological resilience (the ability to recover quickly from a negative emotional experience) and frequency of depressive symptoms in the months following the September 11th terrorist attacks. This suggests that positive emotions are the “currency” that resilient individuals spend to regulate emotions during stress. Although much research has investigated how positive emotion inducing events might influence stress (e.g., Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000; Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998), less research has examined when during the stress process these might do so most powerfully (Waugh, 2014). Although positive emotions often stem from positive reappraisals or from benefit-finding of the stressor itself (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000), in cases where positive emotions are instead induced by some unrelated positive event, the timing of that event may influence its impact on stress responding. Indeed, research suggests that the order in which emotional events are experienced may change the way each is interpreted relative to the others (Brendl & Higgins, 1996; Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995). Positive emotional events that occur before stressors may help people build physical and psychosocial resources that they can later use as coping resources in times of stress (Fredrickson, 2000). Positive Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 58 (2015) 11–22 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: waughce@wfu.edu (C.E. Waugh). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.12.003 0022-1031/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp