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The Broaden-and-Build 85 Theory of Positive Emotions 85 has plagued psychology more generally (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000), is the traditional focus on psychological problems alongside remedies for those problems. Negative emotions—when extreme, prolonged, or contextually inappropriate—produce many grave problems for individuals and society, ranging from phobias and anxiety disorders, aggression and violence, depression and suicide, eating disorders and sexual dysfunctions, to a host of stress-related physical disorders. Although positive emotions do at times pose problems (eg, mania, drug addiction), these problems have often assumed lower priority among psychologists and emotion researchers. So, due in part to their association with problems and dangers, negative emotions have captured the majority of research attention.

Another reason that positive emotions have been sidelined is the habit among emotion theorists of creating models of emotions in general. Such models are typically built to the specifications of those attention-grabbing negative emotions (eg, fear and anger), with positive emotions squeezed in later, often seemingly as an afterthought. For instance, key to many theorists’ models of emotion is the idea that emotions are, by definition, associated with specific action tendencies (Frijda, 1986; Frijda, Kuipers, & Schure, 1989; Lazarus, 1991; Levenson, 1994; Oatley & Jenkins, 1996; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Fear, for example, is linked with the urge to escape, anger with the urge to attack, disgust with the urge to expel, and so on. No theorist argues that people invariably act out these urges when …