Broaden and Build

The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions

• “Taking in the Good”

  • Focus on how you want to feel

  • Be aware of the visceral sensations

  • Deliberately intensify a positive experience by enriching it

    • Ex: if you’re savoring a relationship experience

      • Imagine the person’s face, the sound of his or her voice

      • Let yourself feel supported, valued, believed in

      • You can also call up feelings of being loved by others

  • **passing mental states become lasting neural traits

• Positive emotions (such as love) stimulate release of oxytocin, further enhancing your mood, as well as your ability to bond with others

• LTP

  • The longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating, the more neurons that fire and thus wire together, the stronger the trace in memory

  • Emotional arousal facilitates learning by increasing excitation and consolidating synaptic change

    • “Neurons that fire together wire together” (Hebb)

    • Amygdala responses send activation down “descending” pathways to brainstem and hypothalamic centers

    • These in turn produce their global effects through “ascending” fibers to other brain regions

  • In this way, emotions greatly affect information processing in a positive direction throughout the entire brain

    • Except for trauma (extreme and prolonged negative events tend to be erased from memory)

• “Flowers Pulling Weeds”

  • When you are in positive state of mind, bring to mind a negative experience that you want to process and cast “sidelong glances” at it

    • Positive experiences can be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones

    • When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other

    • That’s one reason why talking about hard things with someone who’s supportive can be so healing

      • The painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person (Hanson)

  • Neurological basis of this process is memory reconsolidation

• Memory reconsolidation

  • Whenever we retrieve a memory, the brain rewrites it a bit

    • It is slightly altered chemically by a new protein synthesis that links it to our present concerns and understanding

    • When a memory is activated, if other things are in your mind at the same time (particularly if they’re strongly pleasant or unpleasant) they will be associated with that neural pattern

    • Then, when the memory leaves awareness, it will be reconsolidated in storage along with those other associations

  • This provides method for:

    • Clearing old painful memories

    • Helping prepare you to handle stressful situations effectively (stress inoculation therapy)

  • Every time you sift positive feelings and views into painful, limiting states of mind, you build a little bit of neural structure

  • Over time, the accumulating impact of this positive material will literally, synapse by synapse, change your brain, and how you feel and act, in far-reaching ways (Hanson)

• Priming study (Smith, Larsen, Chartrand)

  • Positive and negative emotions induced using images from international affective picture system (IAPS)

  • In each block, participants were exposed to either predominantly negative pictures with rare positive pictures or predominantly positive pictures with rare negative pictures

  • ERPs (event related potentials) were recorded during each of the stimulus presentations

  • Results:

    • Intensity of response to negative targets was significantly higher when participants were primed with negative images

      • Accessing positive constructs attenuates attention to negative information

• Trying to suppress negative thoughts doesn’t really work

  • White bear/red volkswagen thought suppression study

    • Group 1: participants told to try not to think about white bears

    • Group 2: participants told not to try to think about white bears but if they did, to replace the though with the image of a red Volkswagen

      • Group 2 significantly more successful

        • Very difficult (if not impossible) to suppress a maladaptive thought/emotion

          • Much easier to replace the thought/emotion with a more desirable one

• Accentuating the positive and ignoring the negative may also enhance happiness by shifting other people’s behavior in a positive direction

  • This is basis of behavioral therapy, which is empirically validated to work on children and animals, as well as adults

  • What Shamu Taught Me about a Happy Marriage

• Applying Principles of Behavior Therapy

  • Use what trainers call “approximations”, rewarding small steps toward learning a new behavior

    • Behavior: husband leaves dirty clothes all over the floor

    • Response: thank him if he throws one dirty shirt into the hamper

      • If he throws in two, kiss him

      • Step over soiled clothes on the floor without any sharp word

  • Devise incompatible behaviors

    • Behavior: husband has habit of hovering over you when you cook

    • Response: pile up parsley for him to chop at other end of kitchen or set out bowl of chips and dip across the room

  • Use least reinforcing syndrome (LRS): any response, positive or negative, will fuel a behavior – if a havior provokes no response, it typically dies away

    • Behavior: husband habitually loses keys and tears around in panic searching

    • Response: ignore behavior, keep doing what you are doing

  • Adopt animal trainers’ motto: “it’s never the animal’s fault”

    • You just need to brainstorm new strategies when your “puppy” misbehaves

• Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions

  • Barbara Frederickson

  • Positive emotions build upward spirals of positivity

    • Even momentary experiences of positive emotions create upward spirals

      • They may accrue into self-perpetuating emotional systems

        • I.e. positive emotional states become positive emotional traits

      • Habits we develop turn into automatic behavior

    • These upward spirals counter downward spirals of negativity

      • Structural differences between upward and downward spirals are largely incompatible (neurologically as well as psychologically)

        • One cannot be simultaneously happy and unhappy

        • Positive emotions may thus exert a countervailing force

    • Positive emotions broaden cognition, as well as behavioral repertoires

    • Behavioral flexibility over time builds personal resources, such as mindfulness, resilience, social closeness, and even physical health, which in turn further promotes well-being

      • Like begets like in the realm of mind

• Experimentally induced positive emotions – relative to induced neutral and negative states

  • Broaden the scope of people’s visual attention, as shown through behavioral tests and brain imaging

  • Expand people’s creativity

  • Study on effects of affect on visual attention

    • Participants instructed to listen to music (designed to induce happy or sad mood) and generate matching thoughts for a period of 10 min

    • Performance on two tests was assessed

      • Remote associates test (RAT):

        • Three stimulus words presented

        • Task is to find another word that can be associated with all three words in a meaningful way

      • Eriksen flanker task:

        • Press left button as quickly as possible if center arrow points to the left

        • Press right button if arrow points to right

      • Results:

        • RAT: positive affect improved scores on task

          • Suggests an increase in the scope of semantic access

        • Flanker: positive affect impaired performance on task

          • Indicates increased processing of flanking distractors, suggesting an increase in the scope of visuospatial attention

        • → positive states increase the breadth of attentional allocation to both external visual and internal conceptual space

  • Another study on effects of mood on visual attention, but this one using brain imaging

    • Pictures from IAPS used to induce positive, neutral, and negative affect in separate experimental blocks

    • Participants then asked to identify gender or face in center of image

    • Assessed extent to which participants’ parahippocampal place area (PPA) registered when outer images of house changed

      • Based on fact that there tends to be greater response to novel stimuli and adaptation with repeated presentation of a stimulus

    • Results:

      • Positive affective states increased, negative states decreased

        • PPA response to novel places

        • Adaptation to repeated places

      • → positive affect enlarges the scope of perceptual encoding

        • Positive correlation found between affective valence and magnitude of PPA response to novel places

        • Correlation was found between affective valence and reduction in PPA response with repetition

  • Study on effects of affect on creativity

    • Researchers induced affect in experimental group by

      • Showing a few minutes of a comedy (positive affect), a documentary about concentration camps (negative), a math film (neutral) or no film OR

      • Giving participants a small decorated bad of candy (positive)

    • Performance assessed on two tasks:

      • Remote associates test

      • Candle problem

        • Find a way to attach the candle to a wall so that it burns properly using no other objects than those on the table

    • Results:

      • Participants in positive affect conditions performed better on both Remote Associates Test and the candle problem than those in negative or neutral affect conditions

      • A physical exercise control group (intended to represent affectless arousal) also failed to show performance comparable to positive affect group

      • → positive affect facilitates creativity, probably by increasing attentional scope to include weakly activated solution possibilities

    • *the broadening effects of positive emotions on cognitive and behavior may be partly mediated by dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens, striatum, and other cortical and limbic regions

      • Evidence for this provided by lesion studies and experimental manipulation of dopamine levels

  • Relation between broad associations/creativity and positive mood is bidirectional

    • Inducing faster reading by manipulating paced reading makes participants feel more positively

      • Reading causes the activation of concepts, and presumably, faster reading activates more concepts, which could be seen as analogous to a massive increase in broad associative activation

    • In contrast, “rumination,” which involves swelling on a narrow theme, is associated with depression

• Research on rumination

  • We tend to believe that when we are upset, we should immediately try to focus inwardly and analyze the situation and evaluate our feelings in order to find solutions

  • However, research indicates that his is actually not a good idea

    • People believe they are gaining insight into themselves and their problems during their ruminations, but this is rarely the case

      • What they do gain is distorted, pessimistic perspective on their lives

  • When we’re deeply upset, our mind contracts, and that presents us from being able to find a way out of the difficult situation

    • One of the effects of the stress response is to cause our attention to narrow and focus on negative information

  • Instead, a much more effective immediate response is to broaden your perspective by making some very general positive affirmations, such as:

    • “Things always work out for me”

    • “All is well. Everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this experience, only good will come, and I am safe. (Louise Hay**)

  • You could also recall times when you have overcome challenges

    • Think back to a difficult or painful experience you had. What did you learn from it? In what ways did you grow? Would you be who you are today without that?

  • Practice Don’t-Know Mind

    • Bring to mind a conflict, inner or outer

    • Be aware of all the thoughts and opinions you have about how things should be, about how other people should be

    • Now recognize that you don’t really know

      • Think back on times when things didn’t work out the way you wanted them to, yet, in the long run, everything turned out better than they would have if things had gone the way you had initially planned

  • Redirect your attention by engaging in an absorbing activity, like reading a novel or playing with your puppy or kitten

• Does positive or negative affect exert a greater influence on happiness?

  • Positive – the ability to self-generate positive emotions in the face of adversity is a key ingredient of resilient coping

  • Resilient people experience:

    • Negative emotions at comparable levels to their less resilient peers

    • More positive emotions

  • A stressful study (Tugade & Frederickson)

    • To induce negative emotion, participants asked to prepare an impromptu speech that would be evaluated by others

    • Continuous recordings made of 6 cardiovascular measures during experiment

    • Emotion report taken and psychological resilience assessed at the end

    • Results:

      • No significant relations between trait resilience and emotions except for happiness and interest

      • Additionally, the greater ability of resilient people to rebound from stress and negative emotions was mediated by positive emotions

      • Positive emotions account for resilient people’s greater ability to rebound from both adversity and cardiovascular reactivity

  • Survey study, emotions assessed daily for one month and life satisfaction and trait resilience, at beginning and end of month (Cohn, Frederickson, Brown)

    • Positive emotions predicted increases in both resilience and life satisfaction

      • Negative emotions had weak or null effects and did not interfere with the benefits of positive emotions

    • Positive emotions also mediated the relation between baseline and final resilience, but life satisfaction did not

      • Suggests that it is in-the-moment positive emotions, and not more general positive evaluations of one’s life, that matters

        • The time period of activity in particular brain circuits, even for comparatively lesser amounts of time, can predict the presence of a person’s positive emotions minutes, or even a few hours, later

    • Change in resilience mediated the relation between positive emotions and increased life satisfaction

      • Suggests that happy people become more satisfied not simply because they feel better but because they develop resources for living well

• The importance of repetition

  • Study examining effects of repeated reappraisal of particular emotion-evoking stimuli in the short and long run

    • Participants told to use reappraisal to decrease their emotional response to the same negative photos 4 times in one session

    • Instructed to reappraise the images as a detached, objective impartial observer, and/or imagine that the pictured events occurred far away or a long time ago

    • Results:

      • Dampened amygdala responses to these images were shown even one week later

      • Amygdala response to these images one week later was lower than to images that had be reappraised only once

      • However, increased activation in the prefrontal cortex during reappraisal did not persist

        • Suggests that repeated reappraisal of particular emotion-evoking stimuli could have long-lasting “does-dependent” effects on amygdala response