Authors: Barbara L. Fredrickson
A compelling pattern of differences emerged. While it’s too soon to say exactly what this pattern of differences means, it is consistent with the more general hypothesis that my team has been testing: that certain biomarkers, like cardiac vagal tone, inflammation, gene expression patterns, and perhaps even body mass index, can either amplify or muffle the good feelings you get when you try to cultivate love. To the extent that love in turn reshapes these biomarkers—a prediction we’re poised to test in the coming year—upward spiral dynamics ensue, in
which love and health dynamically cocreate each other. How, then, your DNA gets translated into your cells next season may to some degree be up to you. By practicing healthy patterns of emotional expression, you may be able to sculpt healthy patterns of gene expression. Countless times in this book I’ve suggested that your body was designed for love’s positivity resonance and indeed cries out for it. My team is currently homing in on ever more precise statements about which of your genes, differentially expressed in your cells, contribute to this cry the loudest.
Pilot Yourself
How can you tune in to your body’s cravings and hear its subtle cries for love? It hardly sounds possible. Actually, becoming attuned to these cellular messages may be easier than you think. By nature’s design, you come equipped with a ready indicator of whether or not you’re meeting your body’s basic needs. Feeling good is that indicator. What’s more, the biochemistry of your brain has been carefully orchestrated by natural selection to keep close track of the contexts in which your good feelings arise, even when you’re busy thinking of other things. That’s because good feelings trigger a cascade of neurochemicals that makes you like whatever caused it. It’s as if feeling good sets off a localized firework that comes to cover the people and objects in its radius with enduring glitter dust. The new sparkle draws your eye and pulls you back toward them, impulses that operate even outside your conscious awareness. Think of this as your innate and automatic positivity-fueled navigation system. If you follow it, you’ll find yourself enticed back, time and again, to circumstances that enliven you most, including those life-giving micro-moments of positivity resonance.
You do, of course, need to keep your wits about you as you tune in
to positivity’s navigation system. Sure enough, peddlers are forever standing by to tempt you to find your bliss in commercial goods and services, both legal and illegal. Such commerce is often carefully engineered to set off the emotional fireworks that create brand loyalty, and even addictions. With conscious effort, you can override these impulses. If you couldn’t, you’d be a hapless product of past conditioning. Yet overriding hedonist impulses isn’t always a wise move. Discerning which pleasure-seeking urges actually represent healthy pursuits, like the age-old cellular cry to connect, is foundational to emotional intelligence. All it may take is to step out of the marketplace, and to trust the wisdom inherent in your body to draw you to connect with others in meaningful ways.
Infants and toddlers follow their positivity instincts as a matter of course. Yet once impulse control becomes possible, all bets are off as to when and whether people of any age will tune in to and prioritize their own good feelings. Evidence suggests that it isn’t until midlife or beyond that people develop true wisdom about positivity’s quiet cues. This delay may well reflect the strong supporting role that families and educational institutions play in the lives of younger people. Many families and schools are organized around ways to help younger people find ready sources of positivity resonance. Parents and teachers, coaches and resident assistants, provide scaffolding to support positive connections between and among young people. When you were growing up, for instance, far beyond providing you shelter, meals, and clothing, your parents likely stoked your opportunities to share positivity-laced moments with them and others. At first it was simply through tickles and grins, and later it was through setting up playdates and creating family rituals around mealtime, bedtime, weekends, and holidays. Many schools, colleges, and universities strive to provide similar structural support. Through icebreakers and other experiential activities, both within and outside classrooms, through sporting and artistic events, these places create entire webs of people, institutional
practices, and rituals that may have provided additional external support for the positivity resonance that nourished you through your youth.
Jeremy, whose story I told in
chapter 8
, likened all this structural support to an external navigation system
.
As he put it, “Your path up through college is kind of decided for you and then it is like the navigation system turns off and you have to pilot yourself and that’s when it gets scary.” Being released into the so-called real world, absent the scaffolding to support ready connection, can leave recent graduates wondering why their life suddenly seems less sparkly, their days more life-draining than life-giving.
Adapting to this stark change can be like learning to cook for yourself. After decades of having your every meal prepared by parents, and then by dining hall staff, you needed to learn to put the right balance of micronutrients on your plate each day. While the effects getting the balance wrong may not have shown up for months, or even years, you’ve felt those effects nonetheless, in terms of unhealthy changes in weight or health. Think of love as another key micronutrient. How long will it take before you learn to put the right amount of it in your daily diet? It can take years, even decades, for people to learn this vital life lesson: That in the “real world” you are responsible for feeding yourself your own recommended daily value of love.
It easily took me two decades to internalize this message, and I still struggle at times to truly live by it. My natural tendencies toward introversion, combined with my socialized tendencies toward workaholism, set me on a life trajectory that was hardly sustainable. By my early forties, my relationships and health began to suffer. I’ve since learned to plan my day and week around love and other opportunities to feel good. I also stay open to those impromptu chances to forge meaningful connections with the people at work and in my community, and even with complete strangers when I’m away from home. Two
decades is a long time. I even had the benefit of seeing the facts about positivity stack up on my desk. My wish for you is that it doesn’t take you this long.
We now know that whether you truly embrace this life lesson—whether you learn to prioritize and kindle your own sources of love each day—matters a lot: It makes you far more likely to flourish, which not only makes your own life more rewarding but also adds value to those around you. Or, as Jeremy put it, “You can work as hard as you want, but if you are not connecting, you are not going to be successful or happy.” Fortunately, you already have what it takes to “pilot yourself.” Your inborn navigation system, running on positivity, is always available for you to consult, even if at times its readout is rather faint. Consult it wisely and you can pilot yourself in the direction of love, health, and happiness.
Love 2.0: The View from Here
Love, I’ve argued, is our supreme emotion. It governs all that you feel, think, do, and become. It lifts you toward the higher spiritual altitudes of oceanic oneness. And from these new and higher vantage points, you can better see and appreciate your connections to the larger fabric of life as well as your place and influence within it.
Love is also deeply personal. It unfurls within and throughout your mind and body like a wave, cresting with each new micro-moment of connection—that smile, that laugh, or that knowing and appreciative glance that you share with another. Yet even as these micro-moments are deeply personal and fleeting, they’ve also been targets of increasing scientific scrutiny. So now, for the first time, you can know and appreciate love not only through a personal, subjective lens but also through a scientific, objective lens. Through this scientific lens, you can better see and appreciate how your body and brain were made for love, and made
to benefit from loving. Learn to seek love out more frequently and it can elevate you, your community, and our world far beyond what you and I can today envision.
Opportunities for love abound. It’s up to you to nourish yourself with them.
Acknowledgments
The ideas about love that you’ll encounter here have been gestating in my mind and heart for years. Fittingly, they first arose through my connections with others. Some of these connections have been fleeting, others long-standing. Some have been mutual connections, with ideas forged through rich conversations and collaborations, others have been more one-sided, as I’ve privately mulled over and expanded on the words of other scholars.
For the foundational idea that love is best seen as any positive emotion shared within a safe, interpersonal connection, I thank Carroll Izard. His 1977 book described love as moments of shared joy and shared interest, and convinced me that any accounting of the positive emotions should not omit love. What little I wrote about love in my first presentation of the broaden-and-build theory owed a great deal to Izard’s influence on my thinking.
A deeper shaping of my views on love comes from the pioneering work on high-quality connections by my friend and University of Michigan colleague, Jane Dutton. I’ve long been inspired by her ways of seeing and describing the connective tissue that binds and energizes
people in long-standing relationships and one-time encounters alike. Apart from her inspiring theoretical work, Jane is also an inspiring person, and I am thankful that our friendship has withstood the strain of my move from Ann Arbor.
Other scholars whose work has deeply influenced my thinking about love and related ideas include Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kent Berridge, John Cacioppo, Laura Carstensen, Sy-Miin Chow, Steve Cole, Michael D. Cohen, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, Richie Davidson, Paul Ekman, Ruth Feldman, Shelly Gable, Eric Garland, Karen Grewen, Melissa Gross, Uri Hasson, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, David Johnson, Danny Kahneman, Dacher Keltner, Corey Keyes, Ann Kring, Bob Levenson, Kathleen Light, Marcial Losada, Batja Mesquita, Paula Niedenthal, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Keith Payne, David Penn, Chris Peterson, Bob Quinn, Cliff Saron, Oliver Schultheiss, Leslie Sekerka, Marty Seligman, Erika Rosenberg, Robert Vallerand, George Vaillant, and David Sloan Wilson. Although these people span the spectrum from my dearest friends to those I’ve yet to meet, the theoretical and empirical contributions of each have inspired me to build upon them.
Although I described love as shared positive emotions as early as 1998, I did not take these ideas up empirically until coaxed to do so by the students and post-docs working with me in my Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (aka PEP Lab). Former University of Michigan graduate students Christian Waugh and Kareem Johnson, for instance, were the first to pursue the idea that positive emotions inspire people to think more in terms of “we” than “me,” and my first wave of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have each taken these ideas further in their own signature way. Bethany Kok, for instance, forged her expertise in the vagus nerve and has expanded my appreciation of it. Lahnna Catalino discovered that some people, more than others, lean toward their moments of positivity and positivity resonance and thereby reap more from them. And Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk steadily developed a most compelling research program on
nonverbal behavioral synchrony and helped me see how and why two or more people moving “as one” matters.
My thinking on positivity resonance has also been indelibly marked by two brilliant PEP Lab post-docs, with whom I’ve had countless conversations about ideas of mutual fascination. Stephanie Brown, a former post-doc at Michigan (now faculty member at SUNY Stony Brook), crafted (with her father) one of the most convincing evolutionary accounts of social bonds I’ve read to date. She was also the first to turn me on to the idea that the human body appears to have two basic modus operandi, one centered on
self survival
, often governed by negative emotions and fight-or-flight tendencies, and a second attuned to
species survival
, owing a great deal to positive emotions and calm-and-connect tendencies. Likewise, Sara Algoe, a former post-doc (and current faculty colleague) at Carolina, brought considerable firepower in relationship science to the PEP Lab and helped me to see the profound effects of mutual care (aka mutual perceived responsiveness) within positive relational processes. I am often awed by her ability to unravel complex dyadic processes, and I aspire to continue to learn from her exemplary work.
Other past and present members of the PEP Lab who have shaped my thinking include Carrie Adair, Christine Branigan, Daryl Cameron, Lisa Cavanaugh, Michael Cohn, Anne Conway, Zan Isgett, Keenan Jenkins, Matt Keller, Lindsay Kennedy, Laura Kurtz, Greg Larkin, Yi-Chen Lee, Janna Lembke, Aly Light, Roberta Mancuso, Paul Miceli, Joe Mikels, Keiko Otake, Elise Rice, Tori Schenker, Kandace Thomas, Eddie Tong, Michele Tugade, Patty Van Cappellen, and Tor Wager. Dr. Kimberly Coffey deserves special note, for it is her quantitative talents that make PEP Lab discoveries ever more powerful. I offer special heartfelt thanks to Ann Firestine, for her legendary drive and talent to do whatever it takes to superbly manage our various PEP Lab projects. Since the day she joined us, she has single-handedly elevated PEP Lab productivity to new heights.
Of course, the research that streams out of the PEP Lab would not have been possible without the many people who’ve donated their time and thoughts to science as participants in our studies. I thank each of them for being the bedrock of this book. Nor would this work have emerged without those at the U.S. National Institutes of Health who have found sufficient merit in my hypotheses to award grant funds to support their test. Over the years, my lab has been the fortunate recipient of grants awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Nursing Research, and now also the National Cancer Institute. My work has also been supported by the James Graham Kenan Foundation for Distinguished Professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and, more generally, I am grateful for the support I’ve long received from colleagues, administrators, and staff at UNC–CH. These people are what make Carolina an astoundingly congenial and productive place to work. Go, Heels!