Secret to old age: Happy nuns live longer according to research from the University of Kentucky - but why is that, and what can we learn to benefit from it?
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Bouncing back
In a second experiment, Fredrickson and Tugade first gave a group of students a battery of questions designed to measure how well they normally handled stress. Next, these students were given the speech-preparation task, then — as with the first group — were told that they wouldn't actually be delivering their speeches. In an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Tugade and Fredrickson reported that even those who normally were slow to bounce back could be coached to recover more quickly by being told to view the experiment as a challenge, rather than a threat.
The 'undo effect', however, doesn't explain why our distant ancestors needed positive emotions. After all, very few people in primitive societies lived long enough to die of heart attacks, no matter how badly they abused their cardiovascular systems. Also, positive emotions often occur in situations where there are no negative emotions to undo. If these carried any survival value at all, it must have involved something other than the "undo" effect.
For years, anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists have argued that this 'something' was related to family bonding – valuable because it would have facilitated the survival of the most tightly knit clans. But while that might explain emotions like love, Fredrickson says, it does nothing to explain other positive emotions, such as joy, playfulness, and humour.
Flexible and creative
Fredrickson believes that a critical clue lies in psychological studies demonstrating that positive emotions make people more flexible and creative than do negative or neutral feelings.
Negative emotions, she says, give us a heightened sense of detail that makes us hypersensitive to minute clues related to the source of a threat. But that hypersensitivity also produces a form of tunnel vision in which we ignore anything unrelated to the danger. Many people experience something similar in automobile accidents: they can recall the tiniest details of the accident, but have only vague recollections of whatever else was going on at the time. Or, Fredrickson's preferred example is the mugging victim might be able to describe the gun in detail but has no idea what kind of clothes the mugger was wearing.
Fredrickson speculated that just as positive emotions can undo the cardiovascular effects of negative ones, they may also reverse the attention-narrowing effects of negative feelings: broadening our perspectives, rather than limiting them.
To verify this, she assembled another group of students and showed them film clips. Some saw frightening clips, some saw humorous ones, anger-inducing ones, or peaceful ones. Then she gave them a matching test in which they were shown a simple drawing and asked which of two other drawings it most resembled. The drawings were designed so that people tend to give one answer if they focus on the details, and another answer if they focus on the big picture.
The results, published in the journal Cognition and Emotion, confirmed Fredrickson's suspicion that positive emotions indeed affect our perceptions. Students who had seen the humorous or peaceful clips were more likely to match objects according to gestalt impressions.
In a variation on the same experiment, the students were also asked to contemplate the emotion generated by the film clip and to jot down a list of "things you would like to do, right now."
Those who saw the pleasant film clips averaged 14 activities on their lists, compared to nine activities for those who saw the more disturbing clips. Students who saw an abstract, emotionally neutral clip of computer-generated sticks assembling themselves into a pile split the difference, listing an average of about 11 activities that they would like to do.
Building resources
All of this fits perfectly with the role that positive emotions might have played in pre-human tribes, Fredrickson says. The focusing effect of negative emotions was important for surviving in life-or-death situations, but the ability to feel happiness, joy, and humour were of long-term value because they opened the mind to new ideas. "The more you do that, the more tools you have in the tool bag the next time you face threats," she says. "The emotions are transient, but the resources are durable. If you build a friendship through being playful, that friendship is a lasting resource."
On an individual level, Fredrickson's theory also says that taking times to do things that make you feel happy isn't simply self-indulgent frivolity, she says. Not only are joy and playfulness good for the heart, but they're also good for society. "That opens up a different window on the value off positive emotions," Fredrickson says.
Other researchers are intrigued by Fredrickson's findings. Susan Folkman, a professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, has spent two decades studying how people cope with long-term stresses such as bereavement or caring for a chronically ill child.
Contrary to one might expect, she says, these people frequently experience positive emotions. "These emotions aren't there by accident," she adds. "Mother Nature doesn't work that way. I think that they give a person time out from the intense stress to restore their resources and keep going. This is very consistent with Barbara [Fredrickson]'s work."
Richard A. Lovett is a writer based in the U.S. city of Portland, Oregon, and regular contributor to Cosmos.
