The University of Michigan
News Service
412 Maynard
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1399
May 9, 2000 (12)
Contact: Diane Swanbrow
(734) 647-4416
[email protected]
http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Releases/2000/May00/r050900a.html
Largest psychology prize in history goes to U-M researcher for work on happiness, joy, and other positive emotions.
FOR RELEASE AT 11 a.m. EDT, TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2000.
ANN ARBOR---The pursuit of happiness has benefits that the founding fathers may not have foreseen, according to a University of Michigan psychologist who has just been awarded $100,000---the largest psychology prize in history---by the American Psychological Association (APA).
"Cultivating positive emotions produces an upward spiral that broadens habitual modes of thinking and acting, and builds personal resources for coping," says Barbara L. Fredrickson, an assistant professor of psychology at the U-M who received the top Templeton Positive Psychology Prize for her innovative "broaden-and-build" theory of positive emotions. APA created the award with funds from the John Templeton Foundation to promote a science of human strengths.
"But the possible benefits of positive emotions seem undervalued in cultures like ours that endorse the Protestant ethic, which casts hard work and self-discipline as virtues and leisure and pleasures as sinful," Fredrickson maintains in an article titled "Cultivating Positive Emotions to Optimize Health and Well-Being," published in the current issue of Prevention & Treatment (www.journals.apa.org/prevention).
One of those benefits, Fredrickson documented in a series of laboratory experiments, is the ability of positive emotions to counteract or undo accelerated pulse rates and other cardiovascular aftereffects of anxiety or fear.
Negative emotions narrow a person's repertoire of thoughts and actions, Fredrickson explains, an effect that is clearly adaptive in life-threatening situations that require quick action to survive. In contrast, positive emotions broaden and expand this thought-action repertoire. Rather than preparing a person for quick action, this broadening builds enduring personal resources that, in the long run, also promote survival. "Positive emotions also loosen the hold that negative emotions gain on an individual's mind and body by undoing the narrowed psychological and physiological preparation for specific action," she says. Over time, the broadening sparked by positive emotions creates an upward spiral that builds personal strength, resilience, and well-being.
In the article, Fredrickson, a faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), the world's largest academic survey and research organization, describes how her broaden-and-build theory applies to three distinct positive emotions---joy, interest, and contentment. "Joy creates the urge to play and be playful in the broadest sense of the word," she writes, "encompassing not only physical and social play, but also intellectual and artistic play." Even though it is often aimless, play strengthens friendships and attachments, and develops physical and cognitive skills.
"Joy, then, not only broadens an individual's momentary thought-action repertoire through the urge to play," Fredrickson proposes, "but also, over time as a product of recurrent play, can have the incidental effect of building an individual's physical, intellectual, and social resources. Importantly, these new resources are durable, and can be drawn on later, long after the instigating experience of joy has subsided."
Fredrickson also reviews a range of intervention and coping strategies, including relaxation therapies, behavioral therapies aimed at increasing rates of pleasant activities, cognitive therapies aimed at teaching optimism, and coping strategies marked by finding positive meaning in life. She analyzes how these therapies work in light of her theory.
Relaxation therapies, including imagery exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, and meditation, are effective, she maintains, because they cultivate the positive emotion of contentment. "The changes contentment sparks are more cognitive than physical," she notes. "It carries the urge not only to savor the moment but also to integrate those momentary experiences into an enriched appreciation of one's place in the world."
Fredrickson calls for additional research to confirm, modify, or discard her theory, noting that while the scientific literature includes many studies on fear, anger, sadness, and other negative emotions, work on positive emotions is much more rare. "Positive emotions are more than the absence of negative emotions," she says. "A clearer understanding of how to cultivate positive emotions could help people overcome negative emotions faster and build their resilience to future adversities."
# # # # # #
RSS