Authors: Barbara L. Fredrickson
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resilience can be normative, or standard:
Sara B. Algoe and Barbara L. Fredrickson (2011). “Emotional fitness and the movement of affective science from lab to field.”
American Psychologist
66(1): 35–42. See also Ann S. Maston (2001). “Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development.”
American Psychologist
56(3): 227–38.
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can be improved through experience and training:
In recent years, the great promise of the new science of resilience—and of positive psychology, more generally—has translated into massive efforts to increase resilience in people who perhaps need it most: those in the U.S. military who have faced an unprecedented number of repeat deployments across two extended wars. Increasingly, military personnel have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems, including depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicidal tendencies. These problems compromise not only their own health and well-being but also the health and well-being of their spouses, their children, and other military family members. To address those pernicious problems and to raise the resilience and emotional fitness of
all
enlisted soldiers, the U.S. Army has collaborated with behavioral scientists to launch a multifaceted Comprehensive Soldier Fitness initiative. That effort, while noble, faces considerable challenges, to be sure. Yet to the extent that behavioral scientists are willing to translate and test theories of resilience within the crucible of military service and international conflict, both the military population and behavioral science itself will see mutual benefit. See Martin E. P. Seligman (2011).
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being.
New York: Free Press.
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Even as kids, they were especially adept at using humor to get others to smile or laugh along with them:
Emmy E. Werner and Ruth S. Smith (1992).
Overcoming the Odds: High Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood.
Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
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more sensitive and attuned parents help their children to develop their own store of self-soothing techniques:
Jennifer A. DiCorcia and Ed Tronick (2011). “Quotidian resilience: Exploring the mechanisms that
drive resilience from a perspective of everyday stress and coping.”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
35: 1593–1602.
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requires precisely that suite of personal and collective resources that micro-moments of positivity resonance serve to build:
John T. Cacioppo, Harry T. Reis, and Alex J. Zautra (2011). “Social resilience: The value of social fitness with an application to the military.”
American Psychologist
66(1): 43–51.
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John Gottman, perhaps the world’s leading scientific expert on emotions in marriage:
For more infomation, see
http://www.gottman.com
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“expertise in the fundamental pragmatics of life”:
Paul B. Baltes, Judith Gluck, and Ute Kunzmann (2002). “Wisdom: Its structure and function in regulating successful life span development.” In
Handbook of Positive Psychology
, edited by C. Rick Snyder and Shane J. Lopez, pp. 327–47. Oxford University Press. See also Robert J. Sternberg (1998). “A balance theory of wisdom.”
Review of General Psychology
2(4): 347–65.
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Spend just ten minutes in pleasant conversation with someone else and your performance on a subsequent IQ test gets a boost:
Oscar Ybarra, Eugene Burnstein, Piotr Winkielman, Matthew C. Keller, Melvin Manis, Emily Chan, and Joel Rodriguez (2008). “Mental exercising through simple socializing: Social interaction promotes general cognitive functioning.”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
34(2): 248–259. See also Oscar Ybarra, Piotr Winkielman, Irene Yeh, Eugene Burnstein, and Liam Kavanagh (2010). “Friends (and sometimes enemies) with cognitive benefits: What types of social interactions boost executive functioning?”
Social Psychological and Personality Science
2(3): 253–61.
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you’d be considerably more pragmatic and discerning if you could first discuss these dilemmas for a few minutes with someone whose perspective you really value … and then think about the situation a bit more on your own:
Ursula M. Staudinger and Paul B. Baltes (1996). “Interactive minds: A facilitative setting for wisdom-related performance?”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
71(4): 746–62.
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positivity resonance unlocks collective brainstorming power:
David Sloan Wilson, John J. Timmel, and Ralph R. Miller (2004). “Cognitive cooperation: When the going gets tough, think as a group.”
Human Nature
15(3): 225–50.
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The more frequently older adults connect with others, the lower their risks for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease:
Robert S. Wilson, Kristin R. Krueger, Steven E. Arnold, Julie A. Schneider, Jeremiah F. Kelly, Lisa L. Barnes, Yuxiao Tang, and David A. Bennett (2007). “Loneliness and
risk of Alzheimer disease.”
Archives of General Psychiatry
64(2): 234–40. See also Teresa A. Seeman, Tina M. Lusignolo, Marilyn Albert, and Lisa Berkman (2001). “Social relationships, social support, and patterns of cognitive aging in healthy, high-functioning older adults: MacArthur studies of successful aging.”
Health Psychology
20(4): 243–55.
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physician can use knowledge of your vagal tone to forecast with some accuracy your likelihood of heart failure, as well as your odds of surviving such a catastrophic health event:
Steve Bibevski and Mark E. Dunlap (2011). “Evidence for impaired vagus nerve activity in heart failure.”
Heart Failure Reviews
16(2): 129–35.
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Your vagal tone also reflects the strength of your immune system, with a particular tie to chronic inflammation:
Richard P. Sloan, Heather McCreath, Kevin J. Tracey, Stephen Sidney, Kiang Lui, and Teresa Seeman (2007). “RR interval variability is inversely related to inflammatory markers: The CARDIA study.”
Molecular Medicine
13(3/4): 178–84. See also Thayer and Sternberg (2006).
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Past work discovered that chronic loneliness—a persistent yearning for more positivity resonance—compromises the ways a person’s genes are expressed, particularly in aspects of the white blood cells of the immune system that govern inflammation:
Cole, et al. (2007).
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people who have diverse and rewarding relationships with others are healthier and live longer:
Lisa F. Berkman and S. Leonard Syme (1979). “Social networks, host resistance, and mortality: A nine-year follow-up study of Alameda County residents.”
American Journal of Epidemiology
109(2): 186–204. See also Sheldon Cohen and Denise Janicki-Deverts (2009). “Can we improve our physical health by altering our social networks?”
Perspectives in Psychological Science
4(4): 375–78. For a recent meta-analysis of 148 studies, see Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, and J. Bradley Layton (2010). “Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review.”
PLoS Medicine
7(7): e1000316. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed
.1000316.
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more damaging to your health than smoking cigarettes:
Holt-Lunstad, et al. (2010).
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fewer colds:
Sheldon Cohen, Cuneyt M. Alper, William J. Doyle, John J. Treanor, and Ronald B. Turner (2006). “Positive emotional style predicts resistance to illness after experimental exposure to rhinovirus or influenza A virus.”
Psychosomatic Medicine
68: 809–15. See also Sheldon Cohen,
William J. Doyle, David P. Skoner, Bruce S. Rabin, and Jack M. Gwaltney, Jr. (1997). “Social ties and susceptibility to the common cold.”
Journal of the American Medical Association
277(24): 1940–44.
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lower blood pressure:
Andrew Steptoe and Jane Wardle (2005). “Positive affect and biological function in everyday life.”
Neurobiology of Aging
26(1): 108–12.
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less often succumb to heart disease and stroke:
Julia K. Boehm and Laura D. Kubzansky (2012). “The heart’s content: The association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health.”
Psychological Bulletin.
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diabetes:
Judith Tedlie Moskowitz, Elissa S. Epel, and Michael Acree (2009). “Positive affect uniquely predicts lower risk of mortality in people with diabetes.”
Health Psychology
27(1): S73–S82.
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Alzheimer’s disease:
Wilson et al. (2007). See also Seeman et al. (2001).
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and some cancers:
Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser, Lynanne McGuire, Theodore F. Robles, and Ronald Glaser (2002). “Emotions, morbidity, and mortality: New perspectives from psychoneuroimmunology.”
Annual Review of Psychology
53: 83–107.
Chapter 5
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Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new:
Ursula K. Le Guin (1971).
The Lathe of Heaven: A Novel.
New York: Scribner.
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Study after study shows that making concrete “if … then” plans like this dramatically increases people’s success at self-change:
Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran (2006). “Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes.”
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
38: 69–119. See also Peter M. Gollwitzer, Paschal Sheeran, Roman Trotschel, and Thomas L. Webb (2011). “Self-regulation of priming effects on behavior.”
Psychological Science
27(7): 901–7.
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positive emotions are what most people feel most frequently:
John T. Cacioppo, Wendi L. Gardner, and Gary G. Berntson (1999). “The affect system has parallel and integrative processing components: Form follows function.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
76: 839–55. See also Ed Diener and Carol Diener (1996). “Most people are happy.”
Psychological Science
7(3): 181–85.
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you can increase your ratio of positive to negative emotions even further by becoming more attuned to the sources of positive emotion in your midst:
I wrote part II of my first book,
Positivity
(2009), to share the science-backed tools that you can use to raise your own day-to-day positivity ratios and thrive. (To learn more, visit
www.positivityratio.com
.)
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Like bees and ants, we humans are ultrasocial creatures:
Jonathan Haidt, J. Patrick Seder, and Selin Kesebir (2008). “Hive psychology, happiness, and public policy.”
Journal of Legal Studies
37(2): S133–S156.
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Some of this tenderness, along with its associated impulse to show care and concern, is even released when you come across a kitten, puppy, or other baby animal:
Studies in fact show that the physical cues of cuteness, which include a large, rounded forehead and large eyes, release people’s affectionate and caregiving impulses. Gary D. Sherman, Jonathan Haidt, and James A. Coan (2009). “Viewing cute images increases behavioral carefulness.”
Emotion
9(2): 282–86.
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Insincere smiles, by contrast, are either flashed more quickly, in less than a second, or worn for longer durations, like makeup or a mask:
Mark G. Frank, Paul Ekman, and Wallace Friesen (1993). “Behavioral markers and recognizability of the smile of enjoyment.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
64(1): 83–93.
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Writing “On Friendship” Cicero made the case that without virtue, friendship is impossible:
Marcus Tillius Cicero (1884/2010).
De Amicitia (On Friendship) and Scipio’s Dream.
Translated with an introduction and notes by Andrew P. Peabody (1811–1893). Charleston: Nabu Press.
95
“for there are not so many possessed of virtue as there are that desire to seem virtuous
:” Cicero (1884/2010), p. 67.
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“false statements . . . framed purposely to satisfy and please:”
Cicero (1884/2010), p. 67.
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Feigned positivity resonance creates a toxic insincerity that is damaging perhaps most severely to the person who initiates it:
Erika L. Rosenberg, Paul Ekman, Wei Jiang, Michael Babyak, R. Edward Coleman, Michael Hanson, Christopher O’Connor, Robert Waugh, and James A. Blumenthal (2001). “Linkages between facial expressions of anger and transient myocardial ischemia in men with coronary artery disease.”
Emotion
1(2): 107–15.
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“Unless you see an open bosom and show your own . . .
”
:
Cicero (1884/2010), p. 66.
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we’d never seen improvements simply due to the act of regularly reflecting on feelings:
For instance, the following two prior studies showed
no upward drift in positive emotions over time in the absence of an intervention: Cohn et al. (2009); Fredrickson et al. (2008).
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increased feelings of social connection forecast changes in the functioning of people’s physical hearts, as registered by increases in their vagal tone:
Kok and Fredrickson (2010).
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Bethany randomly assigned working adults to reflect daily either on their social connections in this manner or on the three tasks on which they spent the most time that day and to evaluate how “useful” and “important” those tasks had felt to them:
Bethany E. Kok (2012). Dissertation research in progress.
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reflecting on social connections with Donna:
This is not her real name.
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the “three good things” exercise commonly used in positive psychology:
Martin E. P. Seligman, Tracy A. Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson (2005). “Positive psychology progress: Empirical validations of interventions.”
American Psychologist
60(5): 410–21. See also Christopher Peterson (2006).
A Primer in Positive Psychology
.
Oxford University Press.