Last week's leadership colloquium at work was given by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, professor of Psychology at North Carolina university on "Positivity: How to Embrace it and Overcome Negativity.”
She emphasized on the scientific aspects of her research and supporting data indicating how positive emotions affect people's behavior, perceptions, and interactions, and that positivity is far beyond happiness and includes many feelings such as joy, gratitude, interest, etc. In particular, her experiments showed that positivity fuels resiliency and people with positive emotions respond better to crisis.
She mentioned we as humans cannot ignore or eliminate negative emotions. They are essential for our survival and learning experiences. However, if the negative feelings linger over time, and we get stuck in them, we will end up depressed.
An interesting fact she mentioned that made me pause and think was that one percent of our body cells are renewed everyday. That is 30% of our body is reborn in a month and we get a whole new self in a little over three months*. Maybe that is why it takes us at least three months to master a new skill, she wondered. In the same way, our health can be changed for better or worse depending on emotions we go through.
Thus, she introduced the concept of the positivity ratio, the number of times we experience positive emotions over the number of times we experience negative ones during a fixed period of time. Depending on how large or small this ratio is we can flourish or languish as water lilies do in response to sunshine. Positivity opens us and expands our horizons to new learning experiences, and consequently we feel energized and up-lifted. Since we cannot eliminate the denominator of this ratio, we need to increase the quantity of our positive experiences to feel positive. She and her colleagues had done studies to find the tipping point for this ratio: what would it take for individuals, businesses, and married couples to be happy?
Here are their magic numbers: experimental results indicate the positivity ratio to live a happy life is at least 3:1 for individuals, and 5:1 for marriages. I forgot the ratio for businesses but I think it was 7:1. In other words, it takes much more positive experiences and emotions to be happy in a marriage. They found for divorced couples this ratio was 1-1 or even zero and surprisingly they did not find many examples in between: people were either happily married with a 5:1 positive experiences over negative experiences or were depressed/divorced because they had a 1:1 or zero positivity ratio in their relationships. They also found another tipping point of 11:1, that is being too positive/happy is not good either. This is where the value of negative feelings as a survival and defense mechanism shows itself. Only 20% of people in the U.S. have a positivity ratio of 3 or more in their lives (i.e. feel good and do good).
Finally, she mentioned in order to create the mindset of positivity, one needs exercise being open, approachable, curios, kind, and above all real. Faking positivity is more dangerous than negative emotions, she stated.
To learn more about her work please visit:
http://www.unc.edu/peplab/home.html
http://www.PositiveEmotions.org
http://www.PositivityRatio.com
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* If we accept that people can change so periodically, how would it affect our perception of them? Do we keep judging, punishing, or rewarding individuals for what they once did without re-evaluating them often? Do we give others a chance to be forgiven or prove themselves in different contexts, or do we constantly judge them by their past behavior?
Saturday, December 12, 2009
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4 comments:
how do they measure the # of times we experience positive/negative emotions? i think happy/sad feelings are mostly for a continuous period of time, as opposed to countable incidents.
also, for couples i imagine the ratio is computed for their mutual experiences, and not for their individual ones, right?
Great points. I made a mistake in the way I wrote the definition of the positivity ratio. It is not # of times, rather how much or how intense we experienced those emotions.
She describes the whole methodology in her book. But in a snapshot this is how it works. She has a detailed list of positive emotions such as feeling amused, awe, hopeful, inspired, grateful, proud, interested, joyful, serene, etc. and a list of negative emotions such as feeling angry, ashamed, contemptuous, disgust, embarrassed, guilty, hate, sad, scared, and stress. Then, on a scale of 0-4 one needs to answer the question of how intense they felt these emotions over say the past 24 hours. I quickly browsed her book online and apparently she has methods of reducing the bias and error by zooming in and out of the time period (an hour, a week, vs 24 hours). Here is an example of their quick test:
http://www.positivityratio.com/single.php
No, I would think they still ask the same questions from people in a relationship and they find out that the ratio needs to be higher for them to not be medically depressed or sad (classifying the results based on whether you are single or in a relationship instead of changing the test). I am not sure though.
The * point that you made at the end of your piece is what couples need to know and go by in their relationships if they want them to be flourishing and not suffocating. If you keep judging your partner for something they did in the past and that is resolved between you, you might be wrong in your judgment and harm your partner's emotions, because they have definitely changed and think differently as time goes by.
Sorry, if I just found myself interested to comment on the last part! That's because I have had more real experiences with it than the rest of the piece. I think that's the same for everybody who comments. They comment according to their experiences and their mindsets.
Good point Mehrnaz. I appreciate the comment. I can never learn enough about relationships.
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