Authors: Barbara L. Fredrickson
18
think of emotions as largely private events:
I qualify this statement as referring to those of us raised in Western culture because scientists who have studied emotions across cultural boundaries challenge this view. They find that people in other cultures don’t necessarily subscribe to the notion that emotions belong to specific individuals. In cultures that originate in East Asia or the Middle East, for instance, people are more likely to say “
We’re
angry” rather than “
I’m
angry.” See work by Batja Mesquita (2001). “Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
80(1): 68–74. Relatedly Rimé (2009) contends that “an individualist view of emotion and regulation is untenable” (p. 60).
19
love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people:
My conceptualization of positivity resonance has parallels to the idea of “resonant leadership” as described by Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in their 2005 book by the same name (Harvard Business School Press). Yet one place where my conceptualization differs from theirs concerns where resonance is located. Boyatzis and McKee locate the origin of resonance in leaders and suggest that followers depend on leaders to move and inspire them. By contrast, I view resonance as a property of the pair or group. For a related perspective, see Wilfred Drath’s 2006 book review of
Resonant Leadership
in
Personnel Psychology
59(2): 467–71.
19
It can even energize whole social networks:
See work by James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis (2009). “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large
social network: Longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study.”
British Medical Journal
338(7685): 1–13. See also the book these two wrote about their research for a general audience: Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (2009).
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.
New York: Little, Brown.
19
Your innate threat detection system even operates outside your conscious awareness:
See work by Joseph LeDoux, as described in his 1998 book,
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
20
The main mode of sensory connection, scientists contend, is eye contact:
Newborns show an immediate preference for eye contact, as well as innate skills for establishing it with the adults who come within their visual range, leading scientists to describe eye contact as the “main mode of establishing communicative context between humans.” This quote is drawn from page 9602 of Teresa Farroni, Gergely Csibra, Francesca Simion, and Mark H. Johnson (2002). “Eye contact detection in humans from birth.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA)
99(14): 9602–5. I learned of Farroni and colleagues’ work through a fascinating article by Paula Niedenthal and her colleagues, who build the case that because eye contact automatically triggers embodied emotional simulations, infants’ prescient skills for making eye contact can be viewed as evolved adaptations that help infants wordlessly and accurately convey their ever-shifting emotional needs to engaged caregivers. See Paula M. Niedenthal, Martial Mermillod, Marcus Maringer, and Ursula Hess (2010). “The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) model: Embodied simulation and the meaning of facial expressions.”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
33(6): 417–80.
21
can substitute for eye contact:
Voice only, such as over the telephone, seems to offer another avenue for positivity resonance to emerge. Unlike other forms of mediated communications, voice-only conversations carry real-time bodily information through acoustic properties. See Klaus R. Scherer, Tom Johnstone, and Gundrun Klasmeyer (2009). “Vocal expression of emotion.” In
Handbook of Affective Sciences
, edited by Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and Hill H. Goldsmith, pp. 433–56. New York: Oxford University Press. See also Jo-Anne Bachorowski and Michael J. Owren (2008). “Vocal expressions of emotion.” In
The Handbook of Emotions
, 3rd ed., edited by Michael Lewis, Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, pp. 196–210.
And for classic experiments with monkeys on the importance of touch, or contact comfort, for love and healthy development, see Harry F. Harlow (1958). “The nature of love.”
American Psychologist
13(12): 673–85.
21
A smile, more so than any other emotional expression, pops out and draws your eye:
D. Vaughn Becker, Uriah S. Anderson, Chad R. Mortensen, Samantha L. Neufeld, and Rebecca Neel (2011). “The face in the crowd effect unconfounded: Happy faces, not angry faces, are more efficiently detected in single- and multiple-target visual search tasks.”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
140(4): 637–659.
21
fifty different types of smiles:
Paul Ekman (2001).
Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage.
3rd ed. W. W. Norton. In the early 1990s, Paul Ekman codirected (with the late Richard Lazarus) the NIMH-funded postdoctoral program in which I was first trained as an emotions scientist. He’s since gone on to become one of the most influential psychologists of all time. See
http://www.paulekman.com/
.
21
disadvantage in trying to figure out what she really feels or means:
Niedenthal et al. (2010).
21
allows you to simulate:
Franziska Schrammel, Sebastian Pannasch, Sven-Thomas Graupner, Andreas Mojzisch, and Boris M. Velichkovsky (2009). “Virtual friend or threat? The effects of facial expression and gaze interaction on psychophysiological responses and emotional experience.”
Psychophysiology
46(5): 922–31.
21
You become more accurate, for instance, at discerning what her unexpected smile means:
Marcus Maringer, Eva G. Krumhuber, Agneta H. Fischer, and Paula M. Niedenthal (2011). “Beyond smile dynamics: Mimicry and beliefs in judgments of smiles.”
Emotion
11(1): 181–87.
24
certain facial movements universally express a person’s otherwise unseen emotions:
Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Sonia Ancoli (1980). “Facial signs of emotional experience.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
39(6): 1125–34. See also the 2005 volume edited by Paul Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg,
What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press.
24
evoked a positive emotion in the person who meets the smiling person’s gaze:
Michael J. Owren and Jo-Anne Bachorowski (2003). “Reconsidering the evolution of nonlinguistic communication: The case of laughter.”
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
27(3): 183–200. See also Schrammel et al. (2009).
24
an implicit understanding—or gut sense—of the smiling person’s true motives:
Niedenthal et al. (2010).
24
and other evolutionary accounts:
Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson (2005). “The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach.”
Quarterly Review of Biology
80(4): 395–430.
27
more stress, gaining more weight, and being diagnosed with more chronic illnesses year by year:
See a special report released in January 2012 by the American Psychological Association entitled “Stress in America: Our Health at Risk.” For a dynamic and sobering visual graph of obesity trends in the United States, visit
http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
.
27
life expectancies have actually declined for kids today:
S. Jay Olshansky, Douglas J. Passaro, Ronald C. Hershow, Jennifer Layden, Bruce A. Carnes, Jacob Brody, Leonard Hayflick, Robert N. Butler, David B. Allison, and David S. Ludwig, D.S. (2005). “A potential decline in life expectancy in the United States in the 21st century.”
New England Journal of Medicine
352(11): 1138–1145.
27
reflect the deeply encoded ancestral knowledge embedded within your DNA:
My perspective on the evolution of positivity resonance, as well as the positive social behaviors it inspires, is most compatible with multilevel selection theory as articulated by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson (2007). “Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology.”
Quarterly Review of Biology
82(4): 327–48.
28
strong bonds that they’d forged with those with whom their genetic survival was yoked:
Stephanie Brown and R. Michael Brown (2006). “Selective Investment Theory: Recasting the functional significance of close relationships.” Target Article in
Psychological Inquiry
17(1): 1–29.
28
trigger biochemical changes that reshape the lenses through which those others are seen, increasing their allure:
Kent C. Berridge (2007). “The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: The case for incentive salience.”
Psychopharmacology
191(3): 391–431.
32
Under the right prenatal conditions:
Bridget R. Mueller and Tracy L. Bale (2008). “Sex-specific programming of offspring emotionality after stress early in pregnancy.”
Journal of Neuroscience
28(36): 9055–65. See also work by Frances A. Champagne (2009). “Epigenetic influences of social experiences across the lifespan.”
Developmental Psychobiology
52(4): 299–311. See also Elysia Poggi Davis, Laura M. Glynn, Feizal Waffarn, and Curt A. Sandman (2011). “Prenatal maternal stress programs infant stress regulation.”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
52(2): 119–29.
33
it coordinates biological synchrony as well:
Ruth Feldman, Ilanit Gordon, and Orna Zagoory-Sharon (2010). “The cross-generational transmission of oxytocin in humans.”
Hormones and Behavior
58: 669–76.
33
developmental problems can persist for decades:
Lucy Le Mare, Karyn Audet, and Karen Kurytnik (2007). “A longitudinal study of service use in families of children adopted from Romanian orphanages.”
International Journal of Behavioral Development
31(3): 242–51.
33
estimated to affect 10–12 percent of postpartum moms:
Vivian K. Burt and Kira Stein (2002). “Epidemiology of depression throughout the female life cycle.”
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
63(7): 9–15.
34
a disorder of the positive emotional system:
Aaron S. Heller, Tom Johnstone, Alexander J. Shackman, Sharee N. Light, Michael J. Peterson, Gregory G. Kolden, Ned H. Kalin, and Richard J. Davidson (2009). “Reduced capacity to sustain positive emotion in major depression reflects diminished maintenance of fronto-striatal brain activation.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA)
106(52): 22445–50.
34
less behavioral contingency between the two of you, and less predictability:
Adena J. Zlochower and Jeffrey F. Cohn (1996). “Vocal timing in face-to-face interaction of clinically depressed and nondepressed mothers and their 4-month-old infants.”
Infant Behavior and Development
19(3): 371–74.
34
When synchrony does emerge, odds are it’s laced not with positivity, but negativity:
Ruth Feldman (2007). “Parent-infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing: Physiological precursors, developmental outcomes, and risk conditions.”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
48(3/4): 329–54.
34
long-lasting deficits that can derail kids well into adolescence and beyond:
Lynne Murray, Adriane Arteche, Pasco Fearon, Sarah Halligan, Tim Croudace, and Peter Cooper (2010). “The effects of maternal postnatal depression and child sex on academic performance at age 16 years: A developmental approach.”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
51(10): 1150–59.
34
skills vital to developing supportive social relationships:
Feldman (2007).
35
Couples who regularly make time to do new and exciting things together … have better quality marriages:
Arthur Aron, Christina C. Norman, Elaine N. Aron, Colin McKenna, and Richard E. Heyman (2000). “Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
78(2): 273–84.
Chapter 3
39
The soul must always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience:
Emily Dickinson (1960).
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Edited by Thomas Johnson. Boston: Little Brown.
40
the
social engagement system
:
Stephen W. Porges (2003). “Social engagement and attachment: A phylogenetic perspective.”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1008: 31–47.
43
the degree to which your brains lit up in synchrony with each other, matched in both space and time:
Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson (2010). “Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA)
107(32): 14425–30. See also Uri Hasson (2010). “I can make your brain look like mine.”
Harvard Business Review
, December.
43
voice can convey so much emotion:
Scherer et al. (2009) and Bachorowski and Owren (2008).
44
Your knowing is not just abstract and conceptual; it’s embodied and physical:
Niedenthal et al. (2010).
45
Brain coupling, Hasson argues, is the means by which we understand each other:
You might be wondering how Hasson and his team can be so sure they’ve captured communication, a true transfer of information from one brain to another, and not simply matched responses to listening to the same sounds, like hearing your own voice, or the incomprehensible dialogue from a foreign-language film. They ruled this out by having listeners also hear a story in Russian (which none of them understood). In that case, virtually no neural coupling emerged.