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The previously unstudied emotion of elevation is described. Elevation appears to be the opposite of social disgust. It is triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue. Elevation involves a warm or glowing feeling in the chest, and it makes people want to become morally better themselves. Because elevation increases one’s desire to affiliate with and help others, it provides a clear illustration of Fredrickson’s (2000) broaden-and-build model of the positive emotions.
If interest is a positive emotion that makes a person more open to possibilities and more likely to stop and savor a good new idea, then it was clever of Fredrickson to write such an interesting article. Her broaden-and-build model brings pleasing clarity to an otherwise confusing area of emotion research. The functionalist perspective, a powerful tool for understanding the negative emotions, can now be neatly applied to the positive emotions as well. Fredrickson (2000) shows how the positive emotions of joy, interest, and contentment do useful things, not only from an evolutionary point of view but also from a clinical point of view.
This brief essay applies Fredrickson's model to a new positive emotion that has not been described thus far by academic psychologists: elevation. Elevation is a warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, and compassion (Haidt, Algoe, Meijer, Tam, & Chandler, 2000). It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself. Elevation makes sense when viewed through Fredrickson's broaden-and-build model.
My prior research with Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley focused on the negative emotion of disgust (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994;Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 1993). Disgust is a puzzling emotion — a response to elicitors as diverse as cockroaches, incest, and greed. The disgust response to objects that spread bacterial contamination (e.g., feces, cockroaches, corpses) is easy to understand as an...