The feeling of joy can come from many sources. Maybe you’re staring at one of your favourite works of art, lost in its brushstrokes as your imagination takes over. Was that a face you saw in the waterfall—an optical illusion that the artist planted there on purpose?
For some reason, this floods you with a really good feeling. You might also feel joy when the people you love most in the world are around you, all enjoying a raucously noisy Sunday night dinner. Your heart swells within you, and you can’t imagine anything else ever feeling quite as good.
As one of the basic emotions, joy holds a special place in psychology as well as in people’s lives. Yet it also remains one of the least understood. We know plenty about depression and fear, the stuff of psychological disorders, but those positive emotions remain elusive. While it’s true that treatment for psychological disorders requires an understanding of these negative emotions, much less is known about what happens when positive emotions take over.
1. The Science of Joy
As pointed out by Northumbria University’s Maria Roberts and Richard Appiah (2025), joy has the unique potential, compared with happiness, to foster the kind of well-being “derived from living in alignment with one’s values, purpose, and personal growth.” The Broaden-and-Build Theory proposes that even a fleeting sense of joy can be enough to negate the effects of negative emotions, and, according to one source, serve as “a powerful antidote to hate and division.”
Despite all these glowing commendations for the value of joy, its study remains left by the wayside even in the field of positive psychology. It would be nice if joy could be subjected to the kind of experimental studies reserved for negative emotions that would advance its empirical study, but, for the moment, Roberts and Appiah believe they need to begin with a more qualitative, interview-based approach.
2. The Language of Joy
Using what they call a “critical realist” approach, the Northumbria U. authors developed a series of questions intended to elicit the ways that..READ FULL ARTICLE>>
𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁𝘀𝗔𝗽𝗽 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹 𝗧𝗼 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗔𝘀 𝗜𝘁'𝘀 𝗗𝗿𝗼𝗽!
