For example, my doctoral research concerned anger management. And in the anger literature there's a contrast between state anger and trait anger. State anger is the emotion of anger and is triggered by angering events. Something happens, like someone cutting you off in traffic, and your anger flashes out. Trait anger is your predisposition to anger, sometimes called hostility. If you have hostility toward someone or something you might not be feeling state anger at the moment, but your hostility will make you quick to anger when you are exposed to or think about that to which your hostility is directed.
State experiences, like emotions, are temporary and situational. Traits are more consistent and enduring. Anger can come and go throughout the day, but hostility can persist for years, decades, and a lifetime.
Closely related to the state/trait contrast is the distinction between emotions and dispositions. Emotions are transitory affective states. Dispositions are habitual tendencies that create a proneness toward certain emotional experiences. Where "trait" can refer to genetic tendencies, like with the Big Five personality traits, dispositions highlight volitional and attitudinal aspects, like what we see with virtues. You might be born with given traits but you can work on changing your disposition.
Of course, the lines here get blurry. Is hostility, for example, a genetic trait or an acquired disposition? Obviously, it can be a bit of both. All of us possess innate emotional tendencies and those tendencies are affected by how we live our lives, pushing against these tendencies or allowing them to etch deeper grooves into our attitudes and emotions.
Okay, back to positive psychology. Many of the things positive psychologists study can be examined as either a state or a trait, as an emotional response or an enduring disposition. Some of the big emotions psychologists have looked at are gratitude, awe, hope, and joy. We can feel grateful, hopeful, joyful, and struck with wonder and awe. As emotions, psychologists study the environmental and situational triggers of these states. For example, what triggers gratitude (receiving a positive benefit from another) is different from what triggers awe (an encounter with something vast, a reality larger than oneself). Psychologists also study the phenomenological content of these emotions, making distinctions between them. For example, sometimes awe can be elating and wondrous, but sometimes awe can be tinged with terror and fear. Joy can feel peaceful, calm, and serene but also exhilarating, exuberant, and ecstatic.
Lots of research is devoted to these sorts of emotional investigations. But given positive psychology's interest in virtues, attention has also been devoted toward how these emotions can become dispositions. For example, what about dispositional gratitude, dispositional joy, dispositional hope, and dispositional awe? That is, who are those people who are predisposed to feeling grateful, joyful, hopeful, and interrupted by wonder? And the critical piece to note here, like with my example of anger and hostility, is how dispositions bring more of the emotion into you life. You feel more grateful, more joyful, more hopeful, and more interrupted by wonder.
And so it's here, with this question of emotional dispositions, where a conversation shows up about virtue and spiritual formation. Spiritual formation needs to focus upon this emotion-to-disposition shift. Spiritual formation must engage with our emotional lives, helping us make holy affections less fleeting and situational and more stable, constant, and enduring.
Gratitude, joy, hope, and awe, to name a few examples, must become habits of the heart.
