Emotions
Beyond Chasing Happiness: Our Rich Emotional Lives
The case for emodiversity: Why the "good life" calls for a range of emotions, not just positive ones.
Posted June 22, 2026 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Maximizing positive emotions and minimizing negative emotions may at times yield to diminishing returns.
- Life satisfaction increases when ideal emotions and what people actually experience align.
- Well-being involves the ability to activate a variety of situation-adequate emotions—positive and negative.
As experts of our own psyches, it’s surprising how much we get wrong about what will truly make us happy. We might believe, for instance, that treating ourselves with kindness and compassion will make us selfish, weak, or complacent. Or that keeping to ourselves will make us happier than talking to strangers. Or that acquiring some coveted material object will finally deliver the lasting well-being we’ve been waiting for.
On a much larger scale, many of us hold tacit expectations about what a good life should look like: an anthology of happy moments (the more the better), while seldom (if ever) interrupted by heartache. Perhaps somewhat like the boundless blue of the summer skies, host only to the passing friendly cloud or a family of birds, unscathed by storms and tumult.
But research challenges all these assumptions.
A good life, it turns out, does not necessarily involve mustering ceiling-levels of positivity and extinguishing all traces of negativity. In fact, after a certain point, maximizing positive emotions and minimizing negative emotions may yield diminishing returns.
In a recent study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies (2026), researchers found that people were “not only uninterested in a life of maximized PA [positive affect] and minimized NA [negative affect], but actively avoid it.” Instead, the study showed that people preferred their days to include a mixture of affective states: both positive and negative emotions, together with some neutral moments. More specifically, on average, the participants' idealized optimal affect was made up of roughly 79 percent positive emotions and 10 percent negative emotions.
When Ideals and Reality Align
There is more to a good life than an optimal blend of emotions. Take, for example, life satisfaction—one of the key variables in a widely used formula for subjective well-being. Similar to previous research, the study found that life satisfaction positively correlates with high levels of positive emotions people experience, and negatively with negative emotions.
However, it was not simply a matter of the more positive emotions and the less negative emotions, the better. According to the study, people who reported the highest levels of life satisfaction were those who were living in closest alignment between their ideal emotions and what they actually experienced—whether positive or negative.
In fact, the association grew weaker when positive emotions exceeded a person’s ideals. Experiencing fewer positive emotions than ideal was also strongly linked to lower life satisfaction, as was experiencing more negative emotions than desired.
The researchers suggest that optimal well-being outcomes are thus less about maximizing positive emotions and minimizing negative ones and more about living in alignment with one’s emotional ideals. In other words, a life where what we experience day-to-day matches what we desire.
“Overall, these results suggest boundaries to the benefits of PA [positive affect] and cost of NA [negative affect], with the poorest life satisfaction observed when individuals fail to reach their desired emotional levels,” write Liu et al. (2026).
What These Findings Might Reveal About Emotions and Well-Being
There are various possible interpretations of these findings on optimal affect and emotional alignment. Here are three that the authors of the study propose.
First, the concept of “life satisfaction” may reflect the degree to which people’s ideals align with their actual day-to-day emotional experiences. The pursuit of happiness, after all, comes with its paradoxes. When we place too much value on maximizing happiness—e.g., when our affective ideals become unattainable—it can backfire and leave us feeling less happy than before.
Second, all emotions serve important functions. Emotional diversity is often both a precondition and an outcome of goal attainment. Solving problems en route to pursuing what matters to us comes with a range of emotional experiences—including challenging ones—and frequently requires sacrificing immediate pleasure in service for values and goals. Placing the pursuit of maximum happiness above our goals might become counterproductive to their attainment. As Liu et al. write, “Well-being does not depend on the maximization or minimization of a single feeling quality, but rather on the ability to activate a variety of situation-adequate emotions.”
Third, in a state of homeostasis, subjective well-being tends to be held “stable and moderately positive.” Any dramatic deviation—including a swing toward an extreme positive emotion—will be regulated back to its “normal” state. According to this framework, a portrait of a “highly content individual” will not necessarily feature maximized happiness, but rather a life of steady, moderately positive emotions.
Insights for Flourishing
These findings offer intriguing insights into the makings of a good life—in particular, challenging our intuitions about maximizing positive emotions and shunning negative ones. Instead of holding ourselves to impossibly high affective standards, we could consider how to construct our experiences in ways that would narrow the gap between our ideal and actual emotional lives.
In other words, we don’t need to exclude negative emotions from our experience. A rich emotional life characterized by breadth, variety, abundance, and evenness of emotions (i.e., emodiversity) is itself a valuable component of a good life.
In fact, experiencing a range of emotions day-to-day brings its own unique benefits, such as wisdom-related characteristics including epistemic humility, self-transcendence, and acknowledgement of diverse perspectives; better mental and physical health; lower circulating levels of inflammation in the body; and even attenuated age-related health decline.
As psychologists Lomas and Ivtzan (2016) write, “Flourishing does not mean being a ‘well-defended fortress, invulnerable to the vicissitudes of life,’ but appreciating and even embracing the complex and ambivalent nature of life.”
And that can become a welcome relief from our perpetual striving for happiness.
References
Liu, J., Nes, R. B., Vittersø, J., Teulings, I. J., & Røysamb, E. (2026). Positively Negative: Why Negative Affect is Linked to Higher Wellbeing. Journal of Happiness Studies, 27(5), 61.
Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-compassion: Theory, method, research, and intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 74(1), 193–218.
Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980.
Gilovich, T., & Gallo, I. (2020). Consumers’ pursuit of material and experiential purchases: A review. Consumer Psychology Review, 3(1), 20–33.
Quoidbach, J., Gruber, J., Mikolajczak, M., Kogan, A., Kotsou, I., & Norton, M. I. (2014). Emodiversity and the emotional ecosystem. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2057.
Grossmann, I., Oakes, H., & Santos, H. C. (2019). Wise reasoning benefits from emodiversity, irrespective of emotional intensity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(5), 805.
Lomas, T., & Ivtzan, I. (2016). Second wave positive psychology: Exploring the positive–negative dialectics of wellbeing. Journal of Happiness Studies, 17(4), 1753–1768.
Ong, A. D., Benson, L., Zautra, A. J., & Ram, N. (2018). Emodiversity and biomarkers of inflammation. Emotion, 18(1), 3.
Hershfield, H. E., Scheibe, S., Sims, T. L., & Carstensen, L. L. (2013). When feeling bad can be good: Mixed emotions benefit physical health across adulthood. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(1), 54–61.
