Social power may be associated with health through positive emotion

AbstractIncreased social power—defined as one's influence on another's behavior—guides activation of one's behavioral activation system which, in turn, elicits greater positive emotion. Positive emotion has also been linked to greater health. The current research assessed whether power and positive emotion are related to health. In Study 1, participants (N = 403; Mage = 48.33 years) wrote a narrative about a time in which they felt powerful or powerless. Greater self-reported feelings of power, concurrent with more frequent use of positive emotional words within the narrative, was associated with fewer references to health within the narrative. In Study 2, participants (N = 401; Mage = 33.05 years) primed with the concept of power (vs. powerlessness) reported greater health competency through enhanced positive emotion. Findings provided preliminary data supporting the continued study of power to better understand the link between positive emotion and health. Future research should elucidate the long-term relationships between these variables to examine whether increased power can produce downstream positive effects on health and health behavior.Keywords: Healthhealth competencysocial powerpositive emotionlinguistic inquiry and word count analysis (LIWC) Ethics approvalThe Institutional Review Board at Angelo State University provided approval for this research.Consent formAll participants provided consent.Author contributionsTL: conceptualization, methodology, software, formal analysis, resources, writing, review, editing, project administration, visualization; CC: conceptualization, methodology, writing, review, editing; JS: conceptualization, review, editing.Data availability statementData are available via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/rufxq/?view_only=b09c8ebe92fa48968d41fb8f99860493) or by contacting the corresponding author (TL).Notes1 Participants responded to fewer measures than in Study 1 and did not write a personal narrative; thus, compensation was commensurate with study completion time (median = 3 min).Additional informationFundingThis research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.