1: Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson “was minding my own business as an emotions scientist.
“My main goal at the time was to find a way to probe the long-range effects of accumulated positive emotions,” she writes in her book Love 2.0: Creating Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection. “Would they build people’s resources and transform their lives for the better as the theory predicted?”
At the time, she was desperate to find an experiment, complete with randomization and rigorous measures, that would allow her to test the impact of daily inputs of positive emotions.
“The vexing question was how? How can people reliably and sustainably increase their daily intake of positive emotions?” she notes.
Barbara is known for her “broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions,” an essential framework within Positive Psychology that shows how positive emotional states contribute to resilience, well-being, and health.
The traditional experimental methods that she and other scientists had used in the lab “to test the short-range effects of positive emotions—the music, the film clips, the cartoons, the unexpected gifts of candy—wouldn’t do,” she remembers. “They fall flat and lose their charge with repetition.”
That year, Barbara also happened to be participating in an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on integrative medicine.
Which is where she learned about the ancient mind-training practice known as “Loving-Kindness Meditation.”
“A lightbulb went off for me,” Barbara writes. “This ancient practice, honed over millennia, could help me test my theory.”
2: During the next 12 months, Barbara and her students designed and conducted an experiment to test the impact of learning to self-generate positive emotions through loving-kindness meditation. The study subjects were reasonably healthy working adults with no particular spiritual orientation.
The results?
“When people, completely new to meditation,” she writes, “learned to quiet their minds and expand their capacity for love and kindness, they transformed themselves from the inside out.
“They experienced more love, more engagement, more serenity, more joy, more amusement—more of every positive emotion we measured.
“And though they typically meditated alone, their biggest boosts in positive emotions came when interacting with others, off the cushion, as it were,” Barbara writes.
“Their lives spiraled upward. The kindheartedness they learned to stoke during their meditation practice warmed their connections with others.”
Subsequent studies confirmed these human connections improved overall health.
“We also came to discover that other interventions to foster connection—ones that didn’t require learning to meditate—could increase people’s experiences of love and likewise improve their health.”
The research shows that when we learn practical ways to generate warm connections with others, we can transform our lives.
3: All of which sparked Barbara to rethink the concept of love.
While our culture has many definitions of love, science has one: “Love is that micro-moment of warmth and connection that we share with another living being,” Barbara writes.
Yet, defining love as a shared positive emotion doesn’t go nearly far enough. Barbara writes: “I want to emphasize, though, that love isn’t simply one of the many positive emotions that sweep through you from time to time.
“It’s bigger than joy, amusement, gratitude, or hope. It has special status.”
Barbara calls love “our supreme emotion.”
All of the other positive emotions have important advantages.
Yet, “the benefits of love run far deeper, perhaps exponentially so,” she writes. It “makes us come most fully alive and feel most fully human. It is perhaps the most essential emotional experience for thriving and health.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What do I make of Barbara’s research that shows people new to meditation were able to expand their capacity for love and kindness?
Action: Experiment with Loving-Kindness Meditation.
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