All of Deems's Comments + Replies

I am also very much interested in this. Above states "Studies have found that while talking about one's problems doesn't help one to feel better about them, even if it seems like the talk helped at the time (11), writing about the problem does help." - has this been analysed for the gratitude journal too?

I don't think the journal has to be explicitly write-only. Re-reading the journal has, to my knowledge, never been studied for happiness effects. Anecdotally, though, it seems to work, at least short term.

In my original comment I assumed at minimum that you'd have a (probably discrete) type of emotion, and definitely intensity, and maybe valence (no need for polarity if you just add more types). However, it occurs to me now that the intuition supporting discrete types of emotion (because they may be founded in different physical implementations) would also support a many-dimensional continuous strength-of-activation dimension. That is, I see no evidence that there's only one currently felt emotion. I followed your search advice and I think I do understand what the cited valence/arousal (both real valued) classification is. Maybe those are the two most important factors, but I'm not impressed. I'll postpone thinking/research about how to categorize emotion in favor of more practically useful things. I'll be interested once researchers have an implementation-level argument for why their abstract emotional state space explains what really happens in brains (a simpler model that doesn't have any correspondence to brain-level stuff could still make good predictions, but I'm not going to search for that unless anybody has a specific recommendation).

This is precisely what I"m not understanding: how is intensity of valence different from intensity of arousal. In other words, can I feel intensely ambivalent? If so, then I see why they claim >1 dimension. If not, I don't follow.