Barbara Fredrickson

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Barbara Lee Fredrickson (born June 15, 1964) [1] is an American professor in the department of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology. She is also the Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (PEPLab) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Barbara Fredrickson at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2019 Barbara Fredrickson 2019.jpg
Barbara Fredrickson at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2019

Fredrickson is a social psychologist who conducts research in emotions and positive psychology. Her main work is related to her broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which suggests that positive emotions lead to novel, expansive, or exploratory behavior, and that, over time, these actions lead to meaningful, long-term resources such as knowledge and social relationships. She is the author of Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life (2009), a general-audience book that draws on her own research and that of other social scientists. The book's thesis is largely drawn from her work with Marcial Losada, claiming a mathematical ratio for happiness. The ratio, however, was, "based on a series of erroneous and, for the most part, completely illusory 'applications' of mathematics." [2] [3] Fredrickson was unable to reproduce the math behind her research published with Losada and in a later response the mathematical models for the paper were formally withdrawn. [4]

Research

Broaden-and-build

Central to many existing theories of emotion is the concept of specific-action tendencies – the idea that emotions prepare the body both physically and psychologically to act in particular ways. For example, anger creates the urge to attack, fear causes an urge to escape and disgust leads to the urge to expel. From this framework, positive emotions posed a puzzle. Emotions like joy, serenity and gratitude don't seem as useful as fear, anger or disgust. The bodily changes, urges to act and the facial expressions produced by positive emotions are not as specific or as obviously relevant to survival as those sparked by negative emotions. If positive emotions didn't promote our ancestors’ survival in life-threatening situations, then what good were they? How did they survive evolutionary pressures? Did they have any adaptive value at all? Barbara Fredrickson developed the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions [5] to explain the mechanics of how positive emotions were important to survival.

Positivity/negativity ratio and prominent criticism

Fredrickson's 2005 paper, co-authored with Marcial Losada, argued that there exist precise values of an individual's emotional positivity-to-negativity ratio, outside of which they will fail to flourish. [6] Fredrickson and Losada's use of nonlinear dynamics modelling, taken from fluid dynamics, to derive these values, has been strongly criticised by Nicholas Brown, Alan Sokal, and Harris Friedman, who point out numerous fundamental mathematical errors in the article (see Losada line). [7] Fredrickson has agreed that the mathematical modelling is "questionable", but stands by the more general idea that a high emotional positivity-to-negativity ratio is beneficial. [8] The whole theory of the critical positivity ratio was discredited by Nicholas Brown, Alan Sokal, and Harris Friedman, in a 2013 article published in American Psychologist, [7] the same journal in which Fredrickson's original findings were published in 2005. Brown et al. argue that Losada's conclusions in previous papers using modelling from fluid dynamics, and those in his paper co-authored with Fredrickson, [6] are not only based on poorly-reported experiments – they argue that it is difficult to draw any conclusions from some previous studies by Losada because critical details are omitted, and "interpretations of results are made with little or no justification" (p. 5) – but are based on elementary errors in the use of differential equations.

The undoing effect

Fredrickson and others hypothesize that positive emotions undo the cardiovascular effects of negative emotions. When people experience stress, they show increased heart rate, higher blood sugar, immunosuppression, and other adaptations optimized for immediate action. If individuals do not regulate these changes once the stress is past, they can lead to illness, such as coronary disease, and heightened mortality. Both lab research and survey research indicate that positive emotions help people who were previously under stress relax back to their physiological baseline. [9]

Past research has shown that anger, fear and sadness each elicit distinct responses in the autonomic nervous system. In direct contrast, the positive emotions appeared to have no distinguishable autonomic responses. Positive emotions do not themselves generate cardiovascular reactivity, but instead quell any existing cardiovascular reactivity caused by negative emotions. Put differently, a prior state of negative emotional arousal may be a necessary backdrop to illuminate the cardiovascular impact of positive emotions. Assuming (as most emotion theorists do) that the cardiovascular reactivity sparked by certain negative emotions prepares the body for specific actions, the broaden-and-build theory suggests that positive emotions can speed recovery from—or undo—this cardiovascular reactivity and return the body to mid-range levels of activation suitable for pursuing a wider range of behavioral options. [10] According to this view, positive emotions have a unique ability to down-regulate lingering negative emotions and the psychological and physiological states they generate. In one of the studies, [9] they gave participants an acute stressor – the possibility of giving a public speech. As participants prepare for this speech their bodies exhibit increased sympathetic nervous system activation (sweaty palms, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure). After a minute or so of this heightened state of arousal, participants learn that they don't have to give the speech after all and instead view a randomly assigned video clip that generates a positive or negative emotion, or a state of neutrality. Fredrickson and colleagues measured the amount of time it took each person to recover from the anxiety about the possible speech. Results indicated that positive emotions led to a quicker return to a resting state than neutral or negative emotions. This is called the undoing effect.

Sex differences in self-objectification

Prior to her work on positive emotions, Fredrickson researched social and environmental cues that can carry sexist messages and enhance stereotypical gender differences. She found that when women are randomly assigned dress in a way that calls attention to their bodies, they show impaired performance on a math task and were literally more likely to "throw like a girl". This research suggested that drawing attention to women's bodies also activated stereotypical beliefs about their gender. [11] She has also contributed to research for the Objectification Theory which posits that women internalize an outsider's point of view when viewing themselves and their bodies. [12] She argues that this objectification of women's bodies may have contributed to the high prevalence of mental health risks that plague women.

Loving-kindness meditation

As a means to test the build hypothesis, central to the broad-and-build theory, Fredrickson and colleagues assessed the impact of learning to self-generate positive emotions by learning loving-kindness meditation (LKM), an ancient Buddhist mind-training practice. A paper published in 2008 showed that LKM produces enduring increases in positive emotions, which in turn builds a range of consequential personal resources that augment life satisfaction and curb depressive symptoms. [13] A paper published in 2013 also shows that LKM, by increasing positive emotions and perceived positive social connections, improves cardiovascular health. [14]

Recognition

Fredrickson received the American Psychological Association's inaugural Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2000 for her work on the broaden-and-build theory, which included a $100,000 grant to fund her work. Her work has been supported continuously for the past 16 years by grants from the National Institutes of Health. She also received the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's Career Trajectory Award in 2008. She was awarded the inaugural Christopher Peterson Gold Medal in 2013. In November 2017, Fredrikson was awarded the Toronto-based TANG Foundation's Prize for Psychology, including a $100,000 (Canadian) grant. [15]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Positive psychology</span> Approach of psychological scientific study

Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that studies the conditions that contribute to the optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions. It studies "positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions... it aims to improve quality of life." It is a field of study that has grown as individuals and researchers look for common ground on better well-being.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexual objectification</span> Treating a person primarily as a sexual object

Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Objectification is most commonly examined at the level of a society, but can also refer to the behavior of individuals and is a type of dehumanization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Sokal</span> American physicist and mathematician (born 1955)

Alan David Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.

In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire, is a subset of objectification, as is self-objectification, the objectification of one's self. In Marxism, the objectification of social relationships is discussed as "reification".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amusement</span> Positive emotion related to humor

Amusement is the state of experiencing humorous and entertaining events or situations while the person or animal actively maintains the experience, and is associated with enjoyment, happiness, laughter and pleasure. It is an emotion with positive valence and high physiological arousal.

The critical positivity ratio is a largely discredited concept in positive psychology positing an exact ratio of positive to negative emotions which distinguishes "flourishing" people from "languishing" people. The ratio was proposed by psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada, who believed that they had identified an experimental measure of affect whose model-derived positive-to-negative ratio of 2.9013 defined a critical separation between flourishing and languishing individuals, as reported in their 2005 paper in American Psychologist. This concept of a critical positivity ratio was widely embraced by academic psychologists and the lay public; Fredrickson and Losada's paper had been cited more than 320 times by January 2014, and Fredrickson wrote a popular book expounding the concept of "the 3-to-1 ratio that will change your life". In it she wrote, "just as zero degrees Celsius is a special number in thermodynamics, the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology."

The word complexor was coined by Marcial Losada derived from the words "complex order", to refer to chaotic attractors that are strange and thus have fractal structure.

Meta-learning is a branch of metacognition concerned with learning about one's own learning and learning processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affect (psychology)</span> Experience of feeling or emotion

Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood.

Undoing is a defense mechanism in which a person tries to cancel out or remove an unhealthy, destructive or otherwise threatening thought or action by engaging in contrary behavior. For example, after thinking about being violent with someone, one would then be overly nice or accommodating to them.

Dispositional affect, similar to mood, is a personality trait or overall tendency to respond to situations in stable, predictable ways. This trait is expressed by the tendency to see things in a positive or negative way. People with high positive affectivity tend to perceive things through "pink lens" while people with high negative affectivity tend to perceive things through "black lens". The level of dispositional affect affects the sensations and behavior immediately and most of the time in unconscious ways, and its effect can be prolonged. Research shows that there is a correlation between dispositional affect and important aspects in psychology and social science, such as personality, culture, decision making, negotiation, psychological resilience, perception of career barriers, and coping with stressful life events. That is why this topic is important both in social psychology research and organizational psychology research.

Marcial Losada (1939–2020) was a Chilean psychologist, consultant, and former director of the Center for Advanced Research (CFAR) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is known for his work in academia and business focusing on the development of "high performance teams", and having participated in partially retracted collaborative work with Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina, a retraction for which he has been assigned the culpability.

The broaden-and-build theory in positive psychology suggests that positive emotions broaden one's awareness and encourage novel, exploratory thoughts and actions. Over time, this broadened behavioral repertoire builds useful skills and psychological resources. The theory was developed by Barbara Fredrickson around 1998.

Flourishing, or human flourishing, is the complete goodness of humans in a developmental life-span, that somehow includes positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning, along with other basic goods. The term has gained more usage and interest in recent times, but is rooted in ancient philosophical and theological usages. Aristotle’s term eudaimonia is one source for understanding human flourishing. The Hebrew Scriptures, or the Old Testament, also speak of flourishing, as they compare the just person to a growing tree. Christian Scriptures, or the New Testament, build upon Jewish usage and speak of flourishing as it can exist in heaven. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas drew from Aristotle as well as the Bible, and utilized the notion of flourishing in his philosophical theology. More recently, the Positive Psychology of Martin Seligman, Corey Keyes, Barbara Fredrickson, and others, have expanded and developed the notion of human flourishing. Empirical studies, such as those of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, and practical applications, indicate the importance of the concept and the increasingly widespread use of the term in business, economics, and politics. In positive psychology, flourishing is "when people experience positive emotions, positive psychological functioning and positive social functioning, most of the time," living "within an optimal range of human functioning." It is a descriptor and measure of positive mental health and overall life well-being, and includes multiple components and concepts, such as cultivating strengths, subjective well-being, "goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience." In this view, flourishing is the opposite of both pathology and languishing, which are described as living a life that feels hollow and empty.

Positive affectivity (PA) is a human characteristic that describes how much people experience positive affects ; and as a consequence how they interact with others and with their surroundings.

Savoring is the use of thoughts and actions to increase the intensity, duration, and appreciation of positive experiences and emotions. It is a topic commonly studied in the domain of positive psychology. It can also be referred to simply as the up-regulation of positive emotions. Traditional psychology attempts to develop methods of coping and dealing with negative emotions. Positive psychology uses the concept of savoring as a way to maximize the potential benefits that positive experiences and emotions can have on peoples' lives. The opposite of Savoring is known as dampening. Dampening is a method of dealing with positive affect by trying to feel worse, or down-regulate positive emotions.

Elevation is an emotion elicited by witnessing actual or imagined virtuous acts of remarkable moral goodness. It is experienced as a distinct feeling of warmth and expansion that is accompanied by appreciation and affection for the individual whose exceptional conduct is being observed. Elevation motivates those who experience it to open up to, affiliate with, and assist others. Elevation makes an individual feel lifted up and optimistic about humanity.

Well-being is a topic studied in psychology, especially positive psychology. Related concepts are eudaimonia, happiness, flourishing, quality of life, contentment, and meaningful life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coaching psychology</span> Field of applied psychology

Coaching psychology is a field of applied psychology that applies psychological theories and concepts to the practice of coaching. Its aim is to increase performance, self-actualization, achievement and well-being in individuals, teams and organisations by utilising evidence-based methods grounded in scientific research. Coaching psychology is influenced by theories in various psychological fields, such as humanistic psychology, positive psychology, learning theory and social psychology.

F. Gregory Ashby is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is known for his work in mathematical psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

References

  1. ↑ U.S. Public Records Index Vol 1 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.), 2010.
  2. ↑ ""Positivity Ratio" Debunked". The Scientist Magazine®.
  3. ↑ "The Mathematics of Happiness Turns Out to Be a Fraud". Psychology Today.
  4. ↑ "APA PsycNet". psycnet.apa.org. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  5. ↑ Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218-226.
  6. 1 2 Fredrickson, B. L. & Losada, M. F. (2005). Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist, 60, 678–686.
  7. 1 2 Brown, N. J. L., Sokal, A. D., & Friedman, H. L. (2013). The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking: The Critical Positivity Ratio. American Psychologist. Electronic publication ahead of print.
  8. ↑ Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Updated thinking on positivity ratios. American Psychologist, 68, 814-822.
  9. 1 2 Fredrickson, B. L., Mancuso, R. A., Branigan, C., & Tugade, M. M. (2000). The undoing effect of positive emotions. Motivation and Emotion, 24, 237-258.
  10. ↑ Fredrickson, B. L. & Levenson, R. W. (1998). Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 12, 191-220.
  11. ↑ Fredrickson, B. L. Roberts, T., Noll, S. M., Quinn, D. M., & Twenge, J. M. (1998). That swimsuit becomes you: Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating and math performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 269-284.
  12. ↑ Fredrickson, B.L.; Roberts, T-A. (June 1997). "Objectification Theory". Psychology of Women Quarterly. 21 (2): 173–206. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00108.x. S2CID   145272074.
  13. ↑ Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1045-1062.
  14. ↑ Kok, B. E., Coffey, K. A., Cohn, M. A., Catalino, L. I., Vacharkulksemsuk, T., Algoe, S. B., Brantley, M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Psychological Science, 24, 1123-1132.
  15. ↑ "Fredrickson receives TANG Prize for Positivity Research".

Sources

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