RESEARCH

RELATIONSHIPS / POSITIVE EMOTIONS / HEALTH

OUR RESEARCH

Relationships can bring happiness and protect health.  High quality relationships are important because they are associated with better health and longer life whereas poor relationships or a lack of relationships pose a mortality risk that is comparable to cigarette smoking. At the same time, the relationship patterns of members of sociocultural contexts that emphasize prioritizing others before the self (i.e., U.S. Latinos and East Asians) have been historically problematized as “deficits” in research and policy. The findings of our work, however, show that sociocultural contexts that emphasize prioritizing others before the self (US Latinos and East Asians e.g.) can be beneficial for relationships and protective of health.

In three inter-related lines of research that are united by an overarching theoretical interest in the correlates and consequences of prioritizing others before the self, we study:

people

RELATIONSHIPS

Factors and processes that characterize high quality relationships.

sentiment_very_satisfied

POSITIVE EMOTIONS

Positive emotions and their expressive display.

favorite

HEALTH

Whether sociocultural contexts that emphasize prioritizing others before the self shape relationships in ways that benefit psychological and physical health.

SELECT A TOPIC TO EXPAND THE SECTION

RELATIONSHIPS

High quality relationships, particularly family relationships or relationships with the potential to become family (e.g., dating couples who may go on to marry), often require the highest levels of prioritizing others over self. The work generated by this line of research shows that prioritizing others before self has positive implications for relationships. It stands among the first to show that members of sociocultural contexts that emphasize prioritizing others before the self can experience more positive emotion in their relationships than members of individualist cultures (e.g., Campos, Keltner, Beck, Gonzaga, & John, 2007). The work on dual-earner couples with children challenges U.S. public discourse that increasingly suggests that family life is emotionally negative and may come at the cost of personal happiness (e.g., Campos, Graesch, Repetti, Bradbury, & Ochs, 2009; Campos, Wang, Plaksina, Repetti, Schoebi, Ochs, & Beck, 2013; Ochs & Campos, 2013; Ochs, Shohet, Campos, & Beck, 2010; Wang, Repetti, & Campos, 2011).

POSITIVE EMOTIONS

Positive emotions play an important role in high quality relationships and health. To fully comprehend this role, it is necessary to first understand: (a) the conceptual landscape of positive emotions, (b) the role of positive emotions in motivating and signaling willingness to prioritize others before self, and (c) sociocultural variation in the extent to which expressing positive emotion is encouraged and contributes to the relationships-health link. Our work on the conceptual landscape of positive emotion is establishing criteria and outlining boundaries of the positive emotion domain (e.g., Campos, Shiota, Keltner, Gonzaga, & Goetz, 2012/2013; Shiota, Campos, Keltner, & Hertenstein, 2004), while our studies of specific positive emotions are delineating mechanisms that motivate and signal willingness to prioritize others over the self in relationships (e.g., Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, Campos, & Altemus, 2006).

HEALTH

How does sociocultural context shape the link of relationships and health? Our work on this topic focuses on the unique sociocultural context of U.S. Latinos that emphasizes prioritizing others before the self in the context of warm, close, supportive family relationships. Familism is the term used to describe the cultural emphasis on interdependent family relationships that are warm, close, supportive, and in which family is prioritized over self. The study of familism originated in efforts to describe observed differences in the family relationships of people of U.S. Latino and European cultural backgrounds. For example, Latinos show greater willingness to engage in behaviors that fulfill family obligations and are more likely to regard family members as desirable sources of social support than European background counterparts. Notably, familism was initially viewed as a deficit of U.S. Latino culture that encouraged prioritizing others before the self at the expense of autonomy and individual achievement. Our research challenges this view. Our studies test and show that familism is an element of U.S. Latino sociocultural contexts that may make it easier for Latinos to derive the health benefits that relationships can provide (e.g., Campos, Dunkel Schetter, Abdou, Hobel, Glynn, & Sandman, 2008; Campos, Ullman, Aguilera, & Dunkel Schetter, 2014). Most recently, we have found that the unique benefits of U.S. Latino sociocultural contexts extend to the domain of vulnerable personality traits such that the costs of neuroticism are attenuated in U.S. Latinas (Campos, Busse, Yim, Dayan, Chevez, & Schoebi, 2014).