All right, so let's just do a quick summary of where we are. We've talked about anxiety and three different approaches to counteract that catastrophic thinking that can lead to all of that intense physiological, anxious responding. We talked about challenging your thinking directly, taking on those thoughts and challenging them. We've talked about deliberate breathing. Dr. Gloria Park helped us to practice slowing our breath so that we can bring our physiology down. And then Dr. Baime talked to us about mindfulness and how mindfulness, it's not a skill, it's almost like a lifestyle where you learn how to attend to the world in a different way. So that's all really important. Now we're going to sort of change the lens from focusing on managing negative emotion like anxiety to building positive emotion, right? There's more to life than just having less bad stuff. So we're going to turn to the science of positive emotions and the role that positive emotions play in helping us to manage stress, but even more than that, to enrich our lives. So we're going to talk about the science of positive emotion. Now, the leader in this field is a psychologist named Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. She's at the University of North Carolina, and she's really been the one that's led our understanding of the benefits of positive emotion. I strongly recommend you Google Dr. Fredrickson and read her work. She's got fantastic books about the benefits of positive emotions so grab them. And her theory is called the Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotion, I want to talk about it with you. Okay, so before we get into the science of it, let's just start out, here's a simple activity for you. Take a minute and I want you to generate as many different positive emotion words as you can come up with. Go. Okay, so I'm guessing many of you had words like these, love or joy. Maybe you didn't write the word joy, maybe you wrote gleeful, happy, birthful, exhilarated. You probably had a word like gratitude. Maybe you wrote thankful or appreciative. How about contentment? Did you write that one down? Maybe it was tranquility or serenity, the way you wrote it. There's also interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration. My favorite emotion awe, A-W-E, awe. So these are common positive emotions, and psychology has long understood the value of negative emotions. How anger helps us, how anxiety helps us, how sadness even can help us. But we didn't understand what good are positive emotions? That's actually a title of Dr. Fredrickson's, one of her articles, What Good are Positive Emotions? And so, broaden and build. So Dr. Frederiksen helps us to understand that positive emotions, just like the ones I mentioned, joy, contentment, gratitude, so forth, they broaden our attention. They broaden our awareness and they help us to be more creative and more cognitively flexible. Now, remember from the resilient sort of variables what helps with the resilience. Mental agility was one of the variables that we said helps you to stay resilient. And so cognitive flexibility and mental agility are probably are very synonymous or close cousins of each other. So, what do negative emotions do? Well, negative emotions narrow your thinking. Think about the last time you were really ticked off, like you had a really good anger going. Probably, you remember that your attention got really narrowed. You maybe found yourself ruminating about the transgression, thinking about the person that transgressed you. Your energy and your thoughts probably centered on, how do I protect myself? How do I defend myself? How do I fight back? Hopefully figuratively but maybe literally. That's what negative emotions do, they narrow our attention. Now, positive emotions do the opposite. Positive emotions broaden our attention, and they help us to be more creative. There's a whole bunch of studies that Dr. Fredrickson and her colleagues have done that helped us to understand this broadening benefit of positive emotion. So here's an example of some of her research. So, they do an experiment where subjects are induced to feel a positive emotion. So they do something to the subjects that brings on a positive emotion and there's lots of easy ways to help people to feel a positive emotion. Give them a piece of candy, or have them read a cartoon, or watch a funny video. Giving someone positive feedback induces positive emotion. Even reading a list of positive words can help us to feel a positive emotion. So they did that, they induced positive emotion in their subjects. And then, they had some subjects that had positive emotion and some subjects they kept in a more neutral condition where they didn't experience a positive emotion. And they looked at the creativity of the subjects who were feeling a positive emotion compared to the subjects that were not feeling a positive emotion, that were in a neutral emotional state. What they did is they gave the subjects an every day object, like a chair, or a coffee cup, or a paper clip. And they asked the subjects to come up with as many different uses for these everyday objects as possible. So, what did they find? Well, they found that the subjects that were in the positive emotion state, feeling a positive emotion, came up with many more creative uses of these everyday objects than people who were in a neutral emotion state. So, for example, with a paper clip. Sure, it could hold paper together, but it also could be used as a cuff link, as an antenna for a radio, as a necklace, as an imitation trombone. That's one that makes me laugh. A guitar pick, a bookmark. And so, subjects that were feeling a positive emotion, we're able to look at this everyday object and think of all sorts of creative ways that that object could be used. They also were able to generate more creative solutions to problems. So, this is another fun study that they did. So again, some subjects were experiencing a positive emotion, some subjects were in a neutral emotional state. And then, the researchers asked them to figure out a way to attach a candle to a wall so that the candle doesn't drip. And they only could use a few very common objects, so a box of thumbtacks, the candle, and a book of matches. Okay so just again, you've got these objects, a candle, matches, and a box of thumb tacks and your task is to attach it to the wall but you can't have any of the wax drip on the floor. So what happened? Well, those that were in a positive emotion state, feeling a positive emotion, came up with many more creative solutions than those that weren't in a positive emotion state. That's actually a really hard task to do, try it out. And here's an example of a creative solution that people feeling positive emotions came to. They emptied the box of thumbtacks. And they used the thumbtacks to mount that empty box to the wall and then they used it as a platform and put the candle on top of that empty box of thumbtacks. So now they could light the candle, it's stuck to the wall and it drips on to the box itself. That's a pretty creative solution.
