[2] For example, curiosity about a landscape becomes navigational knowledge, pleasant interactions with a stranger become a supportive friendship, and aimless physical play becomes valuable exercise.
Later theorists give more weight to the importance of psychological narrowing in addition to broadening when building personal resources.
The creative process is often studied in relation to this, as it involves a widening of the mind, building of personal resources, and both sides of the emotional spectrum.
Too much time on either side can be detrimental: excessive positive emotions without an appropriate counterbalance can make people aloof and unfocused.
Participants who experience positive emotions show heightened creativity, inventiveness, and "big picture" perceptual focus.
Longitudinal intervention studies show that positive emotions help develop long-term resources such as psychological resilience and flourishing.
[6] Positive emotions do not just signify current thriving: they can also create broader thought-action repertoires, which lead to increased resources and more satisfied lives.
The study was performed over a nine-week period, which let researchers see that loving-kindness meditation did not develop positive emotions immediately, but over time.
[3] According to a 2002 study, people who participate in certain religious practices enjoy benefits similar to those from experiencing positive emotions.
As a result, people are able to find meaning in anything from chance occurrences, such as running into an old friend in the store, to extreme hardships, such as losing a spouse.
A 2010 study by Gable and Harmon-Jones found that exposing subjects to certain negative emotions increased the breadth of their attention,[10] rather than decreasing it.
[10] However, the validity of the motivational dimensional model has recently been seriously challenged due to an overwhelming degree of overlap with valence (questioning whether it is a distinct concept at all) and confounded operationalisations in the literature.