Sharing Positive Emotions With a Partner Is Good for Health

Washington — Sharing happy moments with a partner may be good for older people’s health, lowering the level of the stress hormone cortisol in their bodies, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“We know from lots of research that positive emotions like happiness, joy, love and excitement are good for our health—they’ve even been linked to living longer. But most of this research looks at people’s emotions as if they happen in isolation,” said study lead author Tomiko Yoneda, PhD, of the University of California Davis. “In real life, though, our most powerful positive emotions often happen when we’re connecting with someone else. We wanted to understand how often older couples share positive emotional moments in their everyday lives, and whether these shared moments affect the body in meaningful ways.”

To study this, Yoneda and her colleagues looked at levels of cortisol in older adults. They examined data from three studies with a total of 642 participants (321 cohabitating couples) in Canada and Germany. All the participants were between ages 56 and 89. In all three studies, participants provided background and demographic information, then answered short electronic surveys about their emotional state between five and seven times per day for one week. The surveys focused on positive emotions, asking participants how happy, relaxed and interested they felt at that moment. After each short survey, participants collected a saliva sample using a saliva test strip. The researchers collected 23,931 separate measurements in all.