关键词: 正性生活事件, 情感反应, 行为选择, 多重加工假说

Abstract: Positive life events bring the cheerful affection to people, which is beneficial for people's physical and mental health. It is generally believed that more positive events are better. But studies have inconsistent conclusions: more positive events were worse when these events had different affective intensities (Seta, Haire, & Seta, 2008). This study adopts the method of experimental research, through a series of experiments to discuss how the different characteristics of positive life events affect individual process, and try to reveal the influencing mechanism and rule of positive life events on college students. This study applied the experimental paradigm from Seta, Haire, & Seta (2008), the experimental materials for Chinese college students' positive life events. 144 college students participated in three experiments. First of all, the 10 groups of experimental materials were selected from questionnaire survey on Chinese college students who experienced positive life events. Subjects rated the positive life events from - 10 (very negative) to + 10 (very positive), the high positive event was rated at + 6.5 or so, low positive event was rated at + 3.5 or so. Then, in the normal experiments, the participants were told that the experimenter was interested in their reactions to different events (one highly positive event condition and a mixed condition that contained two events—a highly positive and a mildly positive one). They were then given materials that contained the experimental manipulations. In the mixed condition, the order of the positive stimuli was counterbalanced using a Latin-Square design. After reading the information, participants were asked how positive thinking about the event(s) made them feel on a 101-point scale where 0 represented ‘‘not at all’’ and 100 represented ‘‘extremely positive’’. And participants were asked to make a choice between two events which one is prefer to experience in life. The results found that the processing of different positive life events is a discriminant model of processing in general. Experiment 1 found that participants had a more intense positive affective reaction when they were exposed to a highly positive life experience rather than exposed to two positive events（a highly positive and a mildly positive life event）, which supports averaging effect. There were no significant order effects. Experiment 2, when positive life events in mixed condition had different affection intensity, if these events were different type, the processing of life events emerged the averaging effect; while these life events belong to the same type, the summation effect will appear. Experiment 3 found that the processing conformed to the hypothesis of peak-end rule if these events of mixed condition had obvious temporal sequence. Finally, according to the results of this study, the author attempts to explain by the multiple-processing hypothesis of life events——in which individuals’ processing may be averaging or summation according to the different attribution of positive life events.

Key words: positive life events, affective reactions, behavior selection, multiple-processing hypothesis