When do you benefit? Differential boundary conditions facilitate positive affect and buffer negative affect after helping others

Providing help can have positive consequences for those that help, including higher performance evaluations, the development of trusting relationships, social status, and more positive mood states. These effects, however, do not materialize uniformly and the existing literature on the emotions that people experience when they help provides an unclear picture of when helping increases positive affect and decreases negative affect. We distinguish between the unique roles that positive and negative affect play in enabling individuals to navigate potentially rewarding or threatening situations. Specifically, we distinguish between the approach and reward-seeking roots of positive affect and the defence-related roots of negative affect. Using this distinction as a theoretical lens, we identify unique boundary conditions around the relationships between helping and positive and negative affect. We first test our hypotheses in a within-subjects field study of dental clinic employees, showing that the dual pathways between helping and positive and negative affect are uniquely qualified by social support and avoidance temperament, respectively. We then provide additional support for the moderating role of avoidance temperament on the relationship between helping and negative affect in a between-subjects field experiment.