The Science of Happiness

The Science of Happiness

© Angela Winter. Originally published in The Sun, May 2009.

angelawinter.com/the-science-of-happiness/

This interview originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of The Sun, and a condensed version
was featured in Utne Reader‘s 25th anniversary issue in fall 2009. An excerpt is reprinted in
the textbook America Now: Short Readings from Recent Periodicals (Bedford/St. Martin’s),
edited by Robert Atwan.

The Science Of Happiness

Barbara Fredrickson On Cultivating Positive Emotions

Most scientists who study emotions focus on negative states: depression, anxiety, fear.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has spent more than twenty years investigating the relatively
uncharted terrain of positive emotions, which she says can make us healthier and happier if we
take time to cultivate them.

Fredrickson’s findings are the subject of her new book, Positivity (Crown). Though its title might
make it sound like a self-help bestseller, the book doesn’t belong in the pop-psychology
section, and Fredrickson is no Pollyanna telling us to put on a smile before leaving the house
each morning. Negative emotions, she says, are necessary for us to flourish, and positive
emotions are by nature subtle and fleeting; the secret is not to deny their transience but to find
ways to increase their quantity. Rather than trying to eliminate negativity, she recommends we
balance negative feelings with positive ones. Below a certain ratio of positive to negative,
Fredrickson says, people get pulled into downward spirals, their behavior becomes rigid and
predictable, and they begin to feel burdened and lifeless.

Fredrickson, who’s forty-four, was born and raised in the Midwest and comes from, in her
words, “a long line of stoics” who didn’t discuss or reveal their emotions. When she was
growing up, emotional expression — positive and negative — was discouraged. She says,
“The implicit message from family members was ‘You should have known how I was feeling by
the look on my face.’ Yet the looks on their faces hardly ever changed!” The suppression of
emotions at home motivated her escape into the life of the mind, and she focused on her
academic studies.
After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Carleton College in Minnesota, Fredrickson moved
to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she received her PhD from Stanford University and did
her postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley. She began studying positive
emotions because there was so little research on them, she says. A good friend in graduate
school once joked that Fredrickson studied emotions because she didn’t have any. Fredrickson
acknowledges the joke’s kernel of truth: she’s spent much of her adulthood becoming fluent in
the emotions that were left unspoken in her childhood. She exemplifies the adage that we
teach best what we most need to learn.

Fredrickson has been on the faculty of Duke University and the University of Michigan and is
currently the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. She also serves as director and principal investigator of the university’s Positive
Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab. Fredrickson’s research has been featured in the New
York Times Magazine and on CNN and PBS. Her theory of how positive emotions have
functioned in human evolution was recognized with the 2000 American Psychological
Association’s Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology. Since then, she has traveled extensively
as an international expert on positive emotions, and in 2008 she received the Society for
Experimental Social Psychology’s Career Trajectory Award.

Fredrickson and I arranged to meet for this interview at a restaurant we both enjoy in Carrboro,
North Carolina. The owners graciously allowed us to come in before they opened for the day
so we could have a quiet spot to talk. Fredrickson arrived dressed smartly in black with a
Parisian scarf around her neck, and we settled into a booth to discuss the benefits of
increasing positive emotions in our lives. The name of the restaurant, appropriately enough, is
GlassHalFull.

♦♦♦

Winter: How do you define “positive emotions?”

Fredrickson: If we look at a whole range of positive emotions — from amusement, to awe, to

interest, to gratitude, to inspiration — what they all have in common is that they are reactions to
your current circumstances. They aren’t a permanent state; they’re feelings that come and go.
That’s true of all emotions, but positive emotions tend to be more fleeting.

They are also what I would call “wantable” states. They not only feel good, but we want to feel
them. Some people might say it feels good to be angry, and anger can sometimes be useful or
productive, but people don’t want to feel angry. Positive emotions have a kind of alluring glitter
dust on them. You want to rearrange your day to get more of those sparkling moments.
Even so, people do differ in how much they actively seek out positive emotions. One of my
aims in writing my book was to increase readers’ appreciation and respect for positive
emotions so they could perhaps reap the benefits of positive emotions more fully.

Winter: You make a distinction between pleasures and positive emotions. How are they
different?

Fredrickson: When I began my work, many scientists lumped pleasure and positive emotions
together and concluded that both signal us to go forward as opposed to pull back. I agree that
positive emotions have that go-forward quality, but I’ve argued for separating the two
psychological states. Positive emotions are triggered by our interpretations of our current
circumstances, whereas pleasure is what we get when we give the body what it needs right
now. If you’re thirsty, water tastes really good; if you’re cold, it feels good to wrap your coat
around you. Pleasures tell us what the body needs. Positive emotions tell us not just what the
body needs but what we need mentally and emotionally and what our future selves might
need. They help us broaden our minds and our outlook and build our resources down the road.
I call it the “broaden-and-build” effect.

Winter: What about happiness? Is it a positive emotion?

Fredrickson: Scientists most often measure happiness by asking how strongly a person

agrees with statements like “I’m satisfied with my life” or “If I could live my life over, I wouldn’t
change a thing.” These kinds of questions are much broader in scope than questions that are
used to meas¬ure positive emotions, such as “Are you feeling amused, silly, or lighthearted?”
Positive emotions are much more narrow-band feelings, not overall judgments about your life.
Sometimes we use happy to refer to a specific emotion, but, scientifically speaking, it’s not OK
to use a single word, like happy, in multiple ways. I view happiness as the overall outcome of
many positive moments.

My goal as a scientist has always been to pull apart the process of how one state leads to
another and ultimately guides us to a useful outcome. Over the last decade researchers have
found some stunning correlations between expressing more positive emotions and living
longer. My role is to ask, How does that happen? How do you go from experiencing these
pleasant momentary states to living longer — perhaps even ten years longer?

Other researchers have found that the number of positive emotions a person feels predicts his
or her satisfaction with life. What we’ve done is uncover how positive emotions actually cause
us to be happier by helping us build our resources for managing day-to-day life. When we have
better resources, we emerge from adverse situations feeling more satisfied with the outcome.
My colleagues and I have a paper forthcoming in the journal Emotion called “Happiness
Unpacked.” We’re trying to take this word happiness, which is a little bit of a garbage-can term
— people put too many things in it — and look under the hood at the dynamics of the process.
And what we’ve found is that we should be focusing on how we feel from day to day, not on
how we can become happy with life in general. If you focus on day-to-day feelings, you end up
building your resources and becoming your best version of yourself. Down the road, you’ll be
happier with life. Rather than staring down happiness as our goal and asking ourselves, “How
do I get there?” we should be thinking about how to create positive emotions in the moment.

Winter: Aren’t there cultural differences in which emotions we define as “positive?”

Fredrickson: Yes, what have been studied the most are differences between East Asian and
Western populations. The typical finding is that Westerners (Americans and Canadians,
mostly) feel positive emotions when they do something that sets them apart; they feel pride in
their accomplishments. East Asians more often feel positive emotions in situations that connect
them to another person. Those are just general trends, however. Within each culture there’s a
lot of variance.

I would argue, too, that how much people appreciate positive emotions differs from culture to
culture. Latin cultures, for example, celebrate positive emotions more and have more passions
built into the culture. In the U.S. I think that our focus on productivity, outcome, and
achievement helps blind us to positive emotions.

But positive emotions seem to function the same way in all cultures. For example, we’ve
created a study examining how positive emotions help people feel “at one” with another
person. We have people think about their best friends and then look at a series of images
showing two circles. First the circles overlap a little bit, then a little bit more, and a little bit
more. We ask the research participants to select the pair of circles that depict how they feel
about their best friend.

Then we cause the participants to experience some positive emotions and have them fill out a
similar survey, which includes more items so that they can’t remember which circles they
chose the first time. When we ask how they feel about their best friends now, people pick
circles that overlap more, indicating more of this feeling of oneness. We’ve been able to
replicate those results in India and Japan, as well.

Winter: Is that a typical example of the type of research that you do?

Fredrickson: We do lots of different studies. I like to follow the ideas rather than stick to one
particular method. In the early days more of our research was physiological: we were looking
at blood pressure, heart rate, and so on. In another series of studies we trained people in
lovingkindness meditation, which focuses on creating more feelings of warmth and kindness
toward others. You’re first asked to think of someone in your life for whom you have warm and
tender feelings, whether it’s a child or a spouse or even a pet, and then to try to bring forth
those feelings as much as you can and hold them in your heart. As you’re doing that, you let
the child or pet or person you were thinking about kind of slip away, but you hold on to the
feeling. Then you take that warm, tender feeling and apply it to yourself or to others whom you
might not normally feel that way about. And you continue to apply that feeling to ever larger
circles of people.

We had a study come out in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in November
2008 called “Open Hearts Build Lives.” We looked at the effects of lovingkindness meditation
on people’s resources. We gave the research participants a survey to take stock of their
personality traits, health, and social ties at the start of the study, then randomly assigned them
either to learn lovingkindness meditation or not. All of them tracked their emotions daily for two
months, and then, a few weeks after the meditation workshops had ended, we measured those
same traits again. We found that the participants who learned to meditate were doing much
better than when they’d started. More important, the ones doing the best were the same ones
who reported increases in positive emotions during the workshop. If people learned the
meditation but didn’t feel more positive emotions from it, they didn’t experience any benefits
down the road. So we were able to attribute the benefits not to learning lovingkindness
meditation but to the daily increase in positive emotions that most participants got from it. Over
time positive emotions literally change who we are.

Winter: What are the specific benefits of positive emotions?

Fredrickson: When people increase their daily diets of positive emotions, they find more
meaning and purpose in life. They also find that they receive more social support — or perhaps
they just notice it more, because they’re more attuned to the give-and-take between people.
They report fewer aches and pains, headaches, and other physical symptoms. They show
mindful awareness of the present moment and increased positive relations with others. They
feel more effective at what they do. They’re better able to savor the good things in life and can
see more possible solutions to problems. And they sleep better.

Winter: A graduate student of yours from the University of Michigan spearheaded a study of
race bias and positive emotions.

Fredrickson: Yes, that finding is huge. Kareem Johnson was the student. He’s now on the
faculty at Temple University. He was interested in how we perceive other people’s faces. It’s
well-known that we perceive objects by looking at their features. If we see a coffee mug, for
example, we might notice that it’s blue and narrow at the top. But we perceive faces as a
whole. We don’t think, I’ve seen these eyes before, or, I’ve seen that nose before. In fact, we
have this holistic perception of anything with which we’re expertly familiar. Expert bird-watchers
perceive birds as a whole, for example, whereas novice bird-watchers notice individual
features. In a way we’re all experts at human faces.

Johnson thought that since positive emotions make people think broadly or holistically, people
should be better at recognizing faces when they’re in a positive emotional state. So he showed
research participants a set of faces on two occasions to see how many they could remember.
When his results came back inconclusive, we were all frustrated. An effect was there, but it
wasn’t large or reliable. So we broke the data down in different ways. We separated men and
women, and, noticing that he’d used both Asian faces and white faces in the study, we broke it
down by race. And that’s when we found something unexpected: positive emotions had no
effect whatsoever on the ability of white participants to recognize white faces, but there was an
effect on their ability to recognize Asian faces. We found that positive emotions increased the
ability to recognize cross-race faces only — that is, the Asian faces for white participants. In
later studies we replicated the finding with whites’ ability to recognize black faces.

And the positive emotional state didn’t just make it a little bit easier for participants to recognize
cross-race faces. It made it no different than recognizing faces of the participants’ own race. It
was as if race was gone from people’s minds — at least, in terms of face recognition. Scientists
had earlier determined that when people look at cross-race faces, they look at individual
features: a nose, an eyebrow . . .

Winter: They’re objectifying.

Fredrickson: Exactly. They use the same process they use to recognize objects, which
suggests there’s some dehumanization going on. The implications of that are heart wrenching.
But what we’re finding is that, under the influence of positive emotions, people use the same
holistic process for cross-race faces that they use for faces of their own race. It’s as if people,
when they’re feeling good, are better able to see the full humanity of people of a different race.

Johnson did another study in which we took a white face and a black face and used morphing
software to create faces that were a blend of the two. We created morphs that were 10 percent
white, 20 percent white, and all the other gradations along the way. We then presented the
faces one at a time to participants — who knew they were looking at morphed pictures — and
asked, “Does the photo have more of the black face or more of the white face in it?” Under
normal circumstances, people were good at being able to say whether the morphed picture
had more of the white face or more of the black face in it. But when they were experiencing
positive emotions, people became worse at that task. They failed at drawing distinctions
between the races and identifying which features were “other.”
What I especially like about the face-recognition work is that it’s related to broadened thinking
— if you have more-inclusive views, you’re able to recognize more individuals — and also to
building resources, because the first step in building a relationship is recognizing a person. If
you’re not sure whether you talked to this person last week, you’re going to hold back on
saying hello to him or her. There’s no going forward in a relationship until you can correctly
identify whom you’re talking to. [Laughs.] I think this finding is especially important in a global
environment if we wish truly to connect as people.

Winter: Could you tell me about your collaboration with business consultant Marcial Losada?

Fredrickson: He contacted me in 2003, just a few weeks after I’d had my second son, and
said he had a mathematical model that he thought articulated my broaden-and-build theory. He
was looking at group behavior among business teams in a way that was compatible with how I
had been talking about individuals broadening their capacity, building their resources over
time, and showing resilience. It was a very unlikely collaboration, however. Though he’d gotten
his PhD in psychology decades earlier, he’d just retired from a long career in industry and was
doing business consulting. Mathematical modeling was his hobby. He didn’t have a research
lab at the time — just a laptop at his dining-room table and loads of data from past
observations of business teams.

The first day we met, Losada ran mathematical models for me on his laptop, showing what was
going on in these business teams — how one person’s positive or negative behavior
influenced another’s and how dynamics developed over time. Losada told me he could
calculate the exact “positivity ratio” that would predict a group’s success. I offered to test his
ratio against data that I had collected to see whether it held up in other contexts, as well. We
decided that, if the data cooperated, we would write a paper together.

Winter: What sort of studies had Losada conducted?

Fredrickson: He had been studying sixty business teams as they did annual strategic
planning. These weren’t fake meetings arranged for research; they were real planning
sessions. Losada had a team of assistants behind one-way mirrors listen in and record every
statement that was made and identify it as “positive,” “negative,” or “neutral.” The research
assistants also recorded whether people were focused inward on the group or were thinking
about the larger context surrounding the organization, and whether people were advocating
their own point of view or were asking questions and trying to pick up new information.

Later, drawing upon independent business metrics, he was able to rank the sixty business
teams’ performances. The really successful, high-performing teams had about a six-to-one
ratio of positive to negative statements, whereas the low-performing teams had ratios of less
than one to one, meaning that more than half of what was said was negative. People on the
high-performing teams had an even balance between asking questions and advocating for
their own points of view, and also an equal measure of focusing outward and focusing within
the group. The low-performing teams had asked almost no questions and almost never
focused outside the group. They exhibited a self-absorbed advocacy: nobody was listening to
each other — they were all just waiting to talk.

Losada took this behavioral data and wrote algebraic equations that reflected how each stream
— the questioning, the positivity, and the outward-inward focus — related to the others. He
learned that his equations matched a set of existing equations called the Lorenz System, which
is famous in nonlinear dynamics because it led to the discovery of chaos theory, sometimes
called the “butterfly effect” — the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in one location can set
in motion a series of events that causes a hurricane on the other side of the globe.

When Losada used these equations to plot the dynamics of the high-performing and low-
performing business teams, you could see how, in the high-performing teams, one person’s
question led to another person’s positivity. You could see that the two groups, high- and low-
performing, were not just different in degree; they were different in kind. Underneath the
dynamics for the high-performing teams was what physicists call a “complex chaotic attractor,”
which produces unpredictable or novel outcomes. So high-performing teams produced novel
creative results. Underneath the structure of low-performing teams was a “fixed-point attractor”
that caused the teams to spiral down to a dead end. There were also medium-performing
teams, which showed some creativity, and at times it looked as if a complex chaotic attractor
was trying to emerge, but then a moment of intense negativity would occur, and they’d never
bounce back. What’s interesting is that the negativity always arose within the realm of self-
absorbed advocacy and not asking any questions. That’s where the fixed-point attractor lies.

Winter: What was the ratio that Losada gave you?

Fredrickson: Using the Lorenz equations, we were able to algebraically predict that a ratio of
three positive events to one negative event should be the tipping point where things become
chaotic — in a good sense — and a medium-performing team becomes a high-performing one.
(Losada would bristle at my use of three to one. He would say 2.901 to 1 is the ratio, because
when you get into the mathematics, precision is critical.)

I tested that ratio against my own data in one study after another. Each time I found support for
the idea that the three-to-one ratio is a tipping point. I pored through the scientific literature and
found other scientists who were examining how positive and negative emotions balanced each
other out, and I found still more evidence consistent with Losada’s math. As soon as we saw
how consistent the evidence was, we started writing that paper, which appeared in American
Psychologist in 2005.
I feel fortunate to have played a role in that discovery. It wasn’t just adding to the scientific
literature on emotions; it was about life and how to live it. I started to feel that this is important
information for people to know about themselves. If we’re aware of the tipping-point ratio, it
could make a big difference in how we choose to live our lives. That’s what compelled me to
write the book.

I’ve looked at my own life differently since then, too. We discovered the ratio just after my
second son was born, and the discovery definitely changed the way I thought about parenting.
When your kids are young, your reactions help shape how they perceive their experiences —
whether they’re going to feel good or bad about what just happened.

You’re the sculptor of their emotional lives. We tend to tell toddlers, “No, no, no,” all the time.
My work made me think there needs to be more playfulness in my parenting, more emphasis
on stepping back and following the child’s interest. On some level I think parents know this, but
the three-to-one ratio provides a yardstick against which I can assess how a day went. It
motivates me to make sure the negativity I send my sons’ way is necessary and in proper
proportion with the positivity I offer them. I want to make sure that my boys have the ability to
express whatever they’re feeling and to follow their interests. I think that was missing when I
was growing up, and it led me to go upstairs into my head and carve a life out of staying up
there.

Winter: Is three to one the ideal ratio?

Fredrickson: No, three to one is the tipping point. The healthiest thing would be to aim above
that — four to one, five to one, or even six to one. Actually, there’s research that suggests
married couples who share about a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative emotions with one
another are in solid marriages. In marriages that are not doing well or are on a slippery slope
toward divorce, the ratio is more like one to one or less. And there’s not a lot of in-between.
Couples seem either to find a steady state at about five to one, or else slide down into
negativity.

In general the epidemiological data show that only 20 percent of Americans are flourishing.
The rest are either languishing or just getting by. Maybe they remember a time in their lives
when things were coming together easily; there wasn’t a lot of self-concern, self-scrutiny, or
self-loathing because they were focused outward and contributing to the world. But now they’re
just doing the minimum necessary to get by. This “just getting by” mode is not depression or
mental illness. It’s merely people living lives of quiet despair. Upwards of 60 percent of the
adult population feel like they’re going through the motions. It makes me want to share the
news about this work and get people back to those times when they were flourishing.

Winter: When you say “flourishing,” what do you mean?

Fredrickson: Flourishing encompasses both feeling satisfied with your life and also functioning
well in it. The way psychologists measure that second part is to assess whether people feel as
if they are learning, growing, and making contributions to society.

Winter: How has your study of positive emotions been received in the academic community?
What criticisms and support have you received?

Fredrickson: Positive psychology was founded about a decade ago, but I’ve been doing work
on positive emotions for almost two decades, so for many years I worked in relative isolation
and didn’t draw critical attention. Since Marty Seligman, former president of the American
Psychological Association, founded positive psychology, the field has grown like wildfire, with
lots of interest both within and outside academia, but it’s also garnered a fair amount of
criticism. Some of the criticism, I think, is based on a misunderstanding of positive psychology:
that we’re saying you should feel positive all the time, and there’s something wrong with you if
you don’t; or that we’re saying the negative side of life isn’t worth studying.

Traditional psychology started out mimicking medicine. Because medicine was all about
diagnosing, treating, and curing diseases, psychology focused on diagnosing, treating, and
curing mental illnesses. And psychology developed its scientific rigor through its efforts to
understand pathology. What Seligman did was take that scientific rigor and direct it toward
understanding human potential. He challenged the field to look at what makes life worth living;
what a healthy person looks like, rather than a suffering one.

But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go on understanding and treating mental illness. I’m
collaborating on a project in which we are trying to teach people with schizophrenia
lovingkindness meditation to help with the symptoms of their disease that you don’t hear so
much about: the zapped motivation and flattened emotional life.

I also think some critiques of positive psychology arise from the belief that if you’re a hard-
nosed intellectual, you can’t think being happy is good. There’s a famous paper in psychology
called “Happy but Mindless?” which suggests that people who are happy are somehow bubble-
headed softies, not critical of the world and therefore not intellectuals. I think that’s a distorted
stereotype that highly critical people cultivate to justify their own negativity. [Laughs.] Being
positive or negative isn’t about being smart or dumb; it’s about thinking broadly or narrowly.
Whether thinking broadly is useful or not depends on the situation you’re in. It’s just a different
style of thinking. In some circumstances it can help you be more creative.

Some people never get past a superficial impression of positive psychology, but those who do
often say there’s much more depth to it than they thought. I have also had people say to me, “I
don’t like positive psychology, but I like your work.” [Laughs.] My goal is to encourage people
to see that there’s far more to positive emotions than just feeling good.
Winter: As I was searching online for critiques of the positive-psychology field, I was surprised
to find English teachers weighing in — in particular, Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at
Wake Forest University, who’s written a book called Against Happiness. He and others argue
that sorrow, melancholy, and other so-called negative emotions stimulate people to reflect
deeply, to plumb the depths of the psyche, and to generate works of art. Do you think
negativity is something to be avoided or minimized?

Fredrickson: Not at all. Actually we’ve found that negativity is required for flourishing. The
beauty of having a mathematical model, as Losada and I did, is that you can test hypothetical
worlds, such as a world with almost no negativity. What would that lead to? We ran the
mathematical model with a hundred-to-one ratio of positive to negative emotions, and the
complex, beautiful butterfly dynamics just dissolved.

Nobody in positive psychology is advocating full-time, 100 percent happiness. The people who
do best in life don’t have zero negative emotions. In the wake of traumas and difficulties, the
people who are most resilient have a complex emotional reaction in which they’re able to hold
the negative and the positive side by side. Say you’re in mourning for a spouse, but you’re still
able to laugh or feel blessed when you appreciate the deceased’s good qualities, or to
appreciate that your neighbors are taking such good care of you. It doesn’t mean that you’re
not deeply pained by the death. And the positive emotions you feel are quiet, more reverent.
Denying the negative and painting on the positive is unhealthy, and anybody who makes it
their goal never to express a negative emotion quickly drives everyone away from them,
because we know their positivity isn’t real. And the reason we know it’s not real is that
emotions should reflect our circumstances, and nobody goes through life with 100 percent
good circumstances. There’s no escaping loss, grief, trauma, and insult.

Winter: The Sun has sometimes been criticized for being “too sad.” In fact, many of the essays
and stories we publish describe difficult experiences or emotions. I’ve wondered whether
negative stories carry more weight or are simply more compelling.

Fredrickson: Negative events do grab people’s attention far more than positive ones. In
psychology this is called the “negativity bias.” Our brains are wired to scan for perennial threats
like the ones our ancestors faced. Yet there’s another psychological finding that gets talked
about less called the “positivity offset.” It says that even though the negative grabs more
attention, most moments in life — if you evaluate them one by one — are actually positive. So
the opportunities to experience positive emotions are much more abundant. Indeed, negative
emotions grab our attention partly because they’re relatively rare in day-to-day living.

Negative experiences can demand our attention so much that it takes self-discipline, willpower,
and practice not to focus solely on them, and to look at all that’s positive in our situation, as
well. Negativity doesn’t always feel like a choice; it feels like it just lands on you, and you have
to deal with it. Positive emotions, I think, are more of a choice.

Winter: Isn’t focusing on positive emotions a luxury available to only those who can afford it?
What about people who are mired in conflict, or poverty, or awful social conditions?

Fredrickson: I think positive emotions are available to everybody. There’s been research done
with people in slums across the globe and with prostitutes, looking at their well-being and
satisfaction with life. The data suggest that positive emotions have less to do with material
resources than we might think; it’s really about your attitude and approach to your
circumstances. Hard lives often appear worse to the outside observer. If we see somebody
living on the streets, we think that person’s life must be awful every minute. We think that
having certain illnesses or physical limitations must be terrible all the time. But if you study
people who have these illnesses or live on the streets, you find that they still feel good when
they are with their friends or families, and they feel excited when they encounter something
new, and so forth. It’s in the ordinary transactions of life — being with others and following your
interests — that positive emotions grow.

That said, I have done some studies that show that when people are fearful or threatened —
when they don’t feel “safe and satiated,” as I would put it — they have far fewer positive
emotions. I analyzed data from a recent Gallup World Poll. They asked questions like “Do you
feel you have enough resources to feed your family every day?” and “Do you have a roof to
sleep under every night?” Other questions were indicators of whether people found their
environment to be safe: “If you lost your wallet, would someone return it to you?” or “Have you
been assaulted in the past year?” In my analysis of these data, I determined that people who
don’t feel safe and satiated have fewer positive emotions because they’re too worried about
survival, their next meal, or how to clothe their children. So there are some bedrock conditions
that need to be met. Once they are met, though, even at a very low level, everyone has the
same opportunities to experience positive emotions. Affluence isn’t necessary.

Winter: What are some ways to increase one’s positivity?

Fredrickson: One way is to be aware of the present moment, because, again, most moments
are positive. We miss many opportunities to experience positive emotions now by thinking too
much about the past or worrying about the future, rather than being open to what is.

Another way is to pay attention to human kindness — not only what others have done for you,
which helps unlock feelings of gratitude, but also what you can do for other people, how you
can make somebody’s day. We found that even just paying attention to when you are kind —
not necessarily increasing how often you’re kind, but just paying attention to the times when
you are — can make you more positive.
Another simple technique is going outside in good weather. One of my former students, Matt
Keller, who’s now on the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found that people
who spend even just thirty minutes outside when the weather is good show an improvement in
their mood.

There are more-involved ways to increase your positive emotions, such as to practice either
mindfulness meditation or lovingkindness meditation. You can also rearrange your life around
your strengths. Ask yourself: Am I really doing what I do best? Being employed in a job that
uses your skills is a great source of enduring positive emotions.

Winter: You’ve written that emotions are contagious, and that certainly seems to be the case
when somebody is always spreading negative ones. How can we deal with the negativity of
others?

Fredrickson: I hear that a lot: “It’s not my negativity that’s a problem; it’s theirs.” [Laughs.] I
think no difficult person is 100 percent horrid. Well, you may come up with some historical
exceptions, but there are usually small things that you can appreciate about any person.
Sometimes the best solution is to have less contact with somebody, but I think we change and
grow more when we continue to connect. Ask yourself: What can I change about my approach
to this person that might lead us to a different place? I call this “social aikido,” a way to defuse
others’ negativity without harming them or yourself. Maybe there are certain tasks that you
shouldn’t do with this person. If every time you try to do task A together you’re at each other’s
throats, maybe you can arrange to do other tasks with him or her.

Winter: What are your thoughts about pharmaceutical approaches to mental health?

Fredrickson: I don’t do research on psychopharmacology, but my take, simply as a

professional in the field, is that there are certain circumstances in which a person has no initial
seeds from which positive emotions can grow. This condition is called “anhedonia.” Drug
treatment is often necessary to get such people off rock bottom.

It’s also true that 60 percent of people who are given a placebo for depression get better. I
think that placebos work on people who don’t have anhedonia; who still have some positive
emotions, like hope, from which they can build a path to recovery.

Winter: Inspired by your work with Losada, you’ve written that people who flourish become
“beautifully unpredictable.” What is the value of unpredictability?

Fredrickson: Acting in unexpected ways is necessary for growth. Nobody grows by doing the
same thing every day.
In natural selection random genetic variation leads to new traits, even new species. Children
are not exact replicas of their parents. There’s always some random genetic combination that
can lead to new skills and attributes. Similarly I think that being “beautifully unpredictable” is
essential for our individual evolution.

Winter: Is there one positive emotion that seems to be more beneficial than others?

Fredrickson: No, all positive emotions appear to generate equally good outcomes. There are
certain positive emotions that are easier to elicit, such as gratitude, because it’s possible to
cultivate at any given moment. Awe or amusement, on the other hand, requires specific
situations.

Winter: How has your work changed you?

Fredrickson: I got into science because I’m a typical intellectual, ivory-tower person — not
driven by emotions, very focused on achievement and success. Living in my head got me
through difficult times when I was younger and helped me become a great student. But I think
it disconnected me from my heart. So the biggest change for me has been to realize that
achievement, recognition, and success are not everything. I have workaholic tendencies, but
my work tells me: Enjoy the moment.

Winter: Can you give me an example of a time when you had to draw on what you’ve learned
in your work?

Fredrickson: I took a faculty seminar in integrative medicine at the University of Michigan. The
approach was experiential. We were encouraged to participate as patients, to see integrative-
medicine practitioners ourselves. I thought, What? You don’t want us to just read about it?
[Laughs.] But I accepted the challenge. That year I realized that I was forty years old and had
never learned self-care. I knew only how to work, how to achieve. Till then I’d lived off my
youthful energy reserves. But by age forty those were dwindling. I was carrying extra weight
from having had two kids, and I had workaholic habits and bad back and joint pain. I didn’t
know how to get well except by pushing myself, saying, I need to work harder at the gym. I
needed to learn how to take care of myself.

I realized that self-care needed to be guided by positivity. Looking for new ways to exercise, I
came across a dance class that was about being joyful. It taught me to see being active as
pleasurable. Before that, I had viewed exercise only as “work,” and I’d always get bored and
wouldn’t stick with it. Now, because I crave the sheer joy of movement, I keep moving. It
helped me lose thirty-five pounds last year.
As a mother, I had to learn in almost an intellectual fashion how to take care of my kids. I was
an extraordinarily anxious new mom. I would ask my husband, “What do I do with the baby?”
And he’d say, “If you were the baby, what would you want?” He had a much better intuition for
parenting. I’m lucky to have had him to teach me.

Winter: Do you track your own positivity ratio?

Fredrickson: No, not formally. But I do make a conscious attempt each day to cultivate my
own and others’ positivity and to appreciate the possibilities life has given me, because you
never know when the next blast of negativity will show up.

To accompany the book, I created a free website where people can track their
positivity: PositivityRatio.com. Tracking helps you to become more mindful of your sources of
positive and negative emotions the same way that keeping a food diary helps you become
more mindful of your eating habits or a budget helps you become more mindful of your
spending. After you get a feel for it and your habits are where you want them to be, you don’t
need the tracking tools so much. But they can be a good place to start.

I wanted to write a book about the positivity ratio because it’s so practical. It moves the findings
from description to prescription. Many scientists are hesitant to prescribe, but it’s not a
prescription for what to think or what to do. It’s a prescription for how to tell whether what
you’re thinking and doing is moving you in the right direction.

Winter: Are you happier now than you used to be?

Fredrickson: Happier isn’t the right word. I feel I’m more aware and more mindful, and I feel
more alive, and I yearn to keep feeling this way. I have a better appreciation of what life can be
and a humbleness about what I need to do to foster goodness in the world. I’m a student of my
work, not a finished product.