Distances and Directions: An Emotional Journey Into the Recovery Process

Positive emotions stemming from leisure activities are often promoted as a way to achieve a state of recovery, in particular by counteracting negative emotions experienced throughout the workday. Yet the recovery literature frequently takes an undifferentiated view of both the positive emotions employees experience as well as the negative emotions employees are recovering from; This implicitly assumes that all positive emotions are equally effective in facilitating recovery from all negative emotions. Drawing from theory treating emotional movements as a metaphorical journey, we develop a framework for understanding recovery that highlights the importance of the distance and direction that individuals "travel" when moving from negative emotions to positive emotions during the recovery process. We argue that the negative emotions that people start with from work-that is, their emotional origin-as well as the positive emotions that people end with following leisure activities-that is, their emotional destination-jointly influence the state of being recovered. Across two studies using experience-sampling methodologies, we find that "shorter" journeys consisting of emotional destinations that match the activation level of emotional origins (e.g., experiencing high activation positive emotion [HAP] to counter high activation negative emotion) are effective in promoting recovery, while "longer" journeys consisting of mismatches (e.g., experiencing HAP to counter low activation negative emotion) are ineffective for recovery.