Coping Interventions and the Regulation of Positive Affect

Research in the past few decades has demonstrated that positive affect co-occurs with negative affect in the context of stressful life events, has unique beneficial consequences, and may be a useful focus of intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the variety of single-and multiple-component interventions that hold promise for increasing positive affect for people experiencing serious life stress. The research shows that positive affect interventions are feasible, acceptable, and in many cases efficacious and that many different approaches hold promise for increasing positive affect. The field is relatively new, however. Future work should test these approaches in more applied settings to determine whether the findings can be translated into the "real world" with all its attendant constraints, challenges, and complexities.