All right.
So positive emotions broaden our creativity, our thinking, we just talked about that.
But positive emotions do other things too.
They build valuable resources.
So positive emotions help us to have stronger relationships, to have greater resilience.
They even can lead to better health.
And I wanna talk to you about the build aspect of positive emotions as well.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, when you're feeling joyful or happy, it creates in you a desire to play, right?
It certainly does in kids.
And when people play, we develop more social skills,
we develop connections to other people, so it's building those resources.
Let's take interest.
When you're feeling interest, again, that's a positive emotion.
Maybe your word is curiosity.
When you're feeling interest or curiosity, those emotions spark a desire to,
you know, explore you know, explore the world around you, to explore the Internet,
and that can build really important intellectual resources.
So, positive emotions are building.
What about serenity?
So when you're experiencing serenity, maybe you think of it as contentment,
that's helping you to take a breather and slow down and build physical resources
that can help you to rest and recharge.
Now, just like the previous research I talked about,
Dr. Fredrickson has done some really cool laboratory studies
to help us understand the effects of positive emotion.
Now, one set of studies is around understanding how positive emotions build resources
through helping to undo all of the physiological effects of anxiety or anger.
So I wanna talk to you about what anxiety and anger,
what they do to your body, and then how positive emotions can help.
So, we already heard from Dr. Baime how anxiety affects our bodies.
And we know that when you're angry or anxious, what happens to your heart, right?
It increases.
Your heart rate goes up.
And what Dr. Fredrickson and her colleagues looked at was but what happens
if we can help people to feel a positive emotion
when they're already revved up from a negative emotion, like anxiety or anger.
So here's what she did.
She brings subjects into the lab and, first, she induces negative emotion.
So, she induced a state of fear, which brought cardiovascular arousal.
So how did she do this?
Well, she showed the subjects video, and some of the clips were
of a person who had a fear of height, and shows this person, this guy on a ledge
of a high-rise building, and he loses his footing and grasp,
you know whatever he can, but it certainly looks like this guy's going to fall.
And so, that video induces fear and cardiovascular arousal in the people watching it.
All right.
That's part one.
Everyone's in that fear state.
But part two, now she randomly assigns subjects
to watch a few different types of video clips.
So, some subjects then watched a video clip of waves.
And that induced the emotion, the positive emotion of contentment.
Other subjects watched a video clip of a puppy playing with a flower.
It made people laugh, that induced the positive emotion of amusement or happiness.
Other subjects watched sticks, and that induced no emotion.
That was sort of a neutral state.
And then, lastly, another group of subjects watched a video of a boy crying
as his father was passing away.
And that induced, of course, sadness.
So just bear with me.
Everybody first is in this fear state.
Then, some subjects get induced into a state of contentment.
Others, amusement.
Others, neutral.
And others, sadness.
So, now we're gonna look at what effect do those emotions
have on their cardiovascular arousal.
OK.
So here's what she finds.
What she found is that the people who were induced into a positive emotion,
remember that was contentment or amusement, their physiology, all of that cardiovascular,
you know, high heart rate, returned to baseline more quickly
than those induced to feel sadness or in a neutral emotion.
So, having that positive emotion - contentment,
amusement - allowed their heart rates to return to baseline faster.
OK.
In another study, people were told
that they had 60 seconds to deliver a three-minute impromptu speech on a topic
that they didn't know.
They didn't know what the topic was gonna be.
It was random.
So just again, think about this.
You walk into a lab, you're told that you have to deliver a three-minute speech
and it's on a topic that you weren't prepared to speak on.
So what does that induce?
Well, that induces, for most people, anxiety.
And in this study, what she found was that people who were higher on trait resilience,
so these are people who she assessed
and they scored high on resilience, those people - people high on trait resilience -
felt just as much anxiety when they were told they had to give this impromptu speech
as those people that were low on trait resilience.
But, their physiology returned to baseline much more quickly.
So again, some people are high on resilience, some people were lower.
Everyone was told that they're gonna have to give a speech.
That induced anxiety in everyone.
But what happened was the people that were higher on resilience,
their bodies calmed down faster.
And when she looked at what was driving that effect,
it was that the people that were high on trait resilience
were experiencing more positive emotion.
So, just like the other study,
positive emotion helps us to lower our cardiovascular responsiveness,
so that we can calm down and then, maybe,
take more purposeful action, handle the situation more effectively, and also importantly,
not having all of that stress on our bodies
that lots and lots of cardiovascular responsiveness can lead to.
Karen Reivich, Ph.D.Director of Resilience Training Services
