Positive affect – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Why Feeling Good is Harder than Not Feeling Bad

For decades, the mental health field has operated on a half-truth: that curing depression means removing sadness. A new study argues that the most dangerous part of depression isn’t negative emotion, it’s the absence of positive emotion, known as anhedonia. Affecting 90% of patients, anhedonia is a primary predictor of suicide and chronic illness. The researchers have introduced Positive Affect Treatment (PAT), a 15-session therapy that ignores “fixing” sadness and instead focuses exclusively on rebuilding the brain’s capacity for joy, motivation, and reward. ….[READ]