Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become

by Barbara Fredrickson

  Germer, Christopher K. and Siegel, Ronald D. (eds.) (2012). Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy: Deepening Mindfulness in Clinical Practice. New York: Guilford.

  Lyubomirsky, Sonja (2008). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: Penguin.

  Neff, Kristin (2011). Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind. New York: William Morrow.

  Nhat Hahn, Thich (2007). Living Buddha, Living Christ (10th anniversary ed.). New York: Riverhead Books.

  Salzberg, Sharon (2002). Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience. New York: Riverhead Books.

  Salzberg, Sharon (2011) Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation. New York: Workman.

  Index of Practices

  Micro-moment Practices

  Reflect on Your Social Connections 98

  Create Three Loving Connections 101

  Narrate Your Day with Acceptance and Kindness 132

  Use Your Own Suffering as a Cue to Connect 143

  Create Compassion in Daily Life 151

  Create Celebratory Love in Daily Life 158

  Reconstruct Your Yesterday to Uncover Opportunities

  for Love 166

  Redesign Your Job Around Love 177

  Meditation Practices

  Loving-Kindness 107

  See Yourself as the Target of Others’ Love 120

  Self-Love 123

  Compassionate Love 149

  Celebratory Love 156

  Loving All 163

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  3 The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow: Margaret Atwood (1972). Surfacing. New York: Simon and Schuster.

  5 having at least one close relationship like this is vital to your health and happiness, to be sure: James S. House, Karl R. Landis, and Debra Umberson (1988). “Social relationships and health.” Science 241(4865): 540–45. See also Ed Diener and Martin E. P. Seligman (2002). “Very happy people.” Psychological Science 13(1): 81–84.

  8 the two anchor points for my broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions: I first introduced the broaden-and-build theory to the scientific community in 1998. It has since become the most widely cited scientific explanation for why we humans have positive emotions in the first place. Barbara L. Fredrickson (1998). “What good are positive emotions?” Review of General Psychology 2: 300–319; see also Barbara L. Fredrickson (2001). “The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory.” American Psychologist 56: 218–226.

  8 my first book, Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive (2009). New York: Crown.

  9 lies within momentary experiences of connection: My focus on connection is inspired in part by the work of my colleague Jane Dutton, who has persuasively highlighted the importance of “high-quality connections” within organizations. She and I share the view that good interpersonal connections have vital physical correlates that contribute to health, although she and I differ on whether it’s fruitful to identify such moments as instances of love. See her 2003 book, Energize Your Workplace. Jossey-Bass. See also Emily D. Heaphy and Jane E. Dutton (2008). “Positive social interactions and the human body at work: Linking organizations and physiology.” Academy of Management Review 33(1): 137–162.

  10 casting love as shared positive emotion doesn’t go nearly far enough: In Positivity (2009), I only scratched the surface by identifying love as any positive emotion shared within a safe interpersonal connection.

  10 crosses emotions science with relationship science: From emotions science, I draw the view that love, like all emotions, is a momentary, biobehavioral response to changing circumstances, whether real or imagined. In other words, love is not lasting. I depart from traditional emotions science, though, by elevating love above other emotions, calling it our supreme emotion. There is no precedence for this in emotions science, which takes specific, discernable emotions—fear, anger, joy, pride—as roughly equal-status categories, each holding value for human survival in its own unique way. Under this democratic logic, no emotion is set apart as on an altogether different plane or scale of importance, not even love. That’s an idea I draw from relationship science, which unabashedly positions love relationships as larger, more special than ordinary relationships. Yet as I’ve suggested already, I part company with traditional relationship scientists by not defining or confining love to enduring or intimate relationships.

  10 invested in this other person’s well-being: Kevin E. Hegi and Raymond M. Bergner (2010). “What is love? An empirically-based essentialist account.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 27(5): 620–36. Not all attention paid to others is so benevolent. Earlier in my career, I articulated and investigated the damage caused by a very different form of other-focus, one I now see as the polar opposite of love. This was sexual objectification, which you could describe as investment in the physical appearance and sexuality of another person for one’s own sake, one’s own pleasure. See Barbara L. Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts (1997). “Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 21(2): 173–206. See also Barbara L. Fredrickson, Lee Meyerhoff Hendler, Stephanie Nilson, Jean Fox O’Barr, and Tomi-Ann Roberts (2011). “Bringing back the body: A retrospective on the development of objectification theory.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 35(4): 689–96.

  11 a yearlong interdisciplinary faculty seminar on integrative medicine: This was spearheaded by Dr. Rita Benn, director of education at the University of Michigan’s Integrative Medicine Program. Encouraged by my friend and colleague Professor Jane Dutton, I joined the Integrative Medicine Faculty Scholars Program in 2004–5. It was through this program that I was introduced to the work of Sandra Finkel, a longtime meditation instructor who eventually became my research collaborator.

  12 warmed their connections with others: Barbara L. Fredrickson, Michael A. Cohn, Kimberly A. Coffey, Jolynn Pek, and Sandra Finkel (2008). “Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95(5): 1045–1062.

  12 these connections that most affected their bodies, making them healthier: Bethany E. Kok and Barbara L. Fredrickson (2010). “Upward spirals of the heart: Autonomic flexibility, as indexed by vagal tone, reciprocally and prospectively predicts positive emotions and social connectedness.” Biological Psychology 85: 432–36. See also Bethany E. Kok, Kimberly A. Coffey, Michael A. Cohn, Lahnna I. Catalino, Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk, Sara B. Algoe, Mary Brantley, and Barbara L. Fredrickson (in press). “How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone.” Psychological Science.

  12 a steady diet of love influences how people grow and change: See the randomized controlled trial that my colleagues and I presented in Fredrickson et al. (2008).

  13 Your upward spirals lift you higher and faster: Lahnna I. Catalino and Barbara L. Fredrickson (2011). “A Tuesday in the life of a flourisher: The role of positive emotional reactivity in optimal mental health.” Emotion 11(4): 938–50. Stay tuned also for Lahnna Catalino’s emerging doctoral dissertation work on prioritizing positivity.

  14 age, measured as time since birth, provides no guarantees for maturity or wisdom: See work by Paul B. Baltes and Ursula M. Staudinger (2000). “Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.” American Psychologist 55(1): 121–136.

  Chapter 2

  15 Love is brief, but frequently recurring: François de la Rochefoucauld (1959). Maxims. Translated by Leonard Tancock. London: Penguin Books.

  16 you can revive them later through conversation: Bernard Rimé (2009). “Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review.” Emotion Review 1(1): 60–85.

  17 or cheer at a
football game: Some scholars have singled out experiences of mass euphoria as unique. Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, for instance, suggest that such experiences reveal that humans, similar to hive creatures like bees, at times follow a “hive psychology” in which they benefit from losing themselves within a much larger social organism, like the crowd at a football game, music festival, or religious revival. While I share Haidt’s appreciation of the self-transcendence that can emerge from the “group love” experienced in small or large crowds, unlike Haidt, I see this as an extension of the oneness that also emerges within micro-moments of positive connection experienced within pairs. For additional descriptions of “group love” see the 2006 book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Metropolitan Books.

  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 21s
t 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.