How to Turn the Dial Up on Your Happiness

Thinking back on your day so far, how would you rate it? If it’s early enough in the morning, you may not have enough “data” to judge. However, as the hours pass by, you might accumulate a set of experiences whose emotional value can range from “best ever” to "as bad as bad can be.” At the least, some will rate only a “meh” on a happiness scale.

Thinking back on the positive times and letting them flood your mind is a method known as “amplification.” Relishing those “best-ever” moments and even reliving them could help ease the pain of the bad ones and even add some pizzazz to the “meh” ones.

Amplification as a Way to Combat Depression

In a newly published study, Universitat Jaume I (Spain)’s Desirée Colombo and colleagues (2025) proposed that amplification could be an effective method for helping people with depressive symptoms experience greater happiness on a daily basis. It’s well known that one of the features of depression is its impact on a person’s ability to focus on the positive in their everyday lives. When they remember their experiences, they think not about what went right but what went wrong. Worse, they might take one of those “meh” moments and squeeze as much negativity out of it as possible.

The idea behind the Colombo et al. study was to see if they could help people with depressive symptoms turn their mood around through amplification of positive affect. Amplifying strategies “aim to generate, intensify, and prolong positive emotional experiences” but dampening strategies involve “the tendency to respond to positive states with strategies that decrease their intensity and duration.”

See if you can relate to the case of Jonathan, whose emotional memories are dominated by dampening rather than amplification. He’s just gone out to dinner with some friends and friends of friends, where the conversation was so lively that the evening went on for several hours. When he gets home, all he can think about is how silly he must have seemed when he couldn’t make up his mind on what to order from the menu. Everyone must have been secretly making fun of him.

Were Jonathan to show amplification, in contrast, the menu thing wouldn’t even cross his mind. He’d remember how much everyone laughed at one of his jokes and how fondly the new people seemed to relate to him. These are the parts of the evening that would stick in his mind.

Testing Amplification’s Benefits

Using a method not unlike what you’ve just read about with Jonathan, the Spanish research team used smartphone prompts on their online sample of 155 adults (81 percent female, average age 29) with requests to rate their mood six times every day for 10 days, including at the end of the day.

At the same time, participants rated their use of emotion regulation strategies, divided into amplification and dampening. Here are samples of what they look like:

Amplification strategies:

• Put myself in situations and/or activities that make me feel good.
• Stay focused on pleasant things and get absorbed by them.
• Think about all the good things I have and that are happening in my life.

Dampening strategies:

• Think about things that could go wrong.
• Think my streak of luck is going to end soon.
• Think I don't deserve to feel good.

The findings showed that, as the authors predicted, people who used more amplification and less dampening had higher recalled happiness at the end of each day. What’s more, people who used amplification reported that they actually had more positive daily events. Importantly, it was the retrospective recall of daily events that seemed to be most affected by amplification. Even if the events themselves weren’t always that positive, people using amplification looked back on those that occurred throughout the day as higher in happiness.

Turning to those with higher levels of depressive symptoms, they indeed recalled their daily events with more negativity than their original ratings produced. But for people with higher levels of depression, even these trends could be reversed if they used amplification. It’s not that these individuals didn’t know how to use amplification; it’s just that this wasn’t their go-to mode of recalling past events.

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Turning Your Own Dial Up on Happiness

These findings provide strong evidence for the benefits of finding ways to squeeze positivity out of your daily experiences. One slight caveat, though, is that not all experiences deserve to receive the positivity halo. Jonathan might benefit from a moment’s reflection on his inability to decide on a menu item and that it might have been a bit irritating to his friends. But then, using amplification, he would be better off moving on and shoving the negative thoughts out of his mind.

The amplification strategies provide an excellent way to turn up the benefits of what you often hear about positive reframing as a coping method to deal with negative experiences. You can concretely use these statements, adapted for whatever situation you’re in, to dial up and not dial down your mood as you reflect on your experiences.

Another point that the authors make is that cognitive approaches to emotion regulation talk about reframing negative interpretations of events in your life into more positive terms. But you have to go further than that. Overcoming negative moods doesn’t just mean you neutralize them; it also means you use amplification to bring them into positive focus.

To sum up, experiencing greater happiness in your daily life is a process that can come one reinterpretation at a time. Think back on what has worked, not what is falling short, and your mood and fulfillment will benefit.