"It's no surprise that because I've been thinking about positive emotions and feelings for a long time, often focusing on play behavior, I began thinking about different reasons why joy has evolved-what's it good for-rather than if it has evolved. Some hardline skeptics still aren't sure, but this simply means they're not keeping up with comparative scientific research on joy and having fun, a topic to which an entire issue of the journal Current Biology was devoted."
"To keep it simple, Allen and his colleagues have focused on a strict definition of joy as an intense, brief, positive emotion triggered by some event, such as encountering a favorite food or a reunion with a friend. That kind of 'woohoo!' moment seemed easier to assess than, say, ongoing mild contentment. Even with a strict definition, the researchers are contending with variations in joy triggers and responses from one animal to the next, including within the same spe"
Bursts of intense, brief positive emotion—joy—act as a unifying principle linking multiple disciplines and behavioral categories across species. Joy commonly appears in play, reunions, and encounters with preferred stimuli, motivating exploration, social bonding, and reward-seeking. Excessive joy can promote risky, maladaptive behaviors that may be life-threatening. Measurement of joy is challenging because triggers and responses vary widely between and within individuals, complicating comparative assessment. Ongoing research seeks operational definitions and observable markers to reliably assess joy across humans and nonhuman animals.
Read at Psychology Today
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