While the emphasis in recent years has been on positive emotions, health and well-being and how normal people flourish, Lazarus (2003)cautions us about only emphasizing the positive without due regard to the part that negative emotions play: `We need the bad, which is part of life, to fully appreciate the good.
While Lazarus’ theorizing drew on his work with adults, it is not difficult to extrapolate from it to the world of adolescents. This is quite evident in the research related to resilience and coping with difficult circumstances such as illness and trauma in the world of adolescence. In the same article Lazarus comments that creating categories of emotions such as positive and negative fails to take account of the context.