 All right, we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome, I think we're all in for a treat. I'm Rosalind Picard. For those who don't know me, I'm a professor at the MIT Media Lab and one of the people behind the Advancing Well-Being movement here and also faculty chair of MIT's Mind, Hand, Heart. But today, it's my super pleasure to welcome Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. I had heard about her work for decades here. Very significant in changing the field of psychology. And I think having findings that will impact all of us here increasingly. The basics are she's the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UNC Chapel Hill. She also heads a lab called Positive at Motions and Psychophysiology, PEP, acronym. She has a bachelor's in psychology from Carleton College, a doctorate from Stanford, and did a post-doc at UC Berkeley. She's won a bunch of awards. Two of them are the American Psychological Association's inaugural Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology. And also, this is the site of experimental social psychology's career trajectory award. I think you're probably at least most famous in our circles for the broadening build theory of positive emotions. And maybe what people don't realize when they just focus on the emotion is all the connections to our own health and well-being and what a difference that can make. She's had a huge scientific impact and popular impact in not just in academia, but in the business world and education work featured in New York Times Sunday magazine, CNN, PBS, US News World Report, USA Today Oprah. She has briefed the Dalai Lama on her research. Soon she'll be able to say she briefed MIT on her research. The author of Positivity, which is a general audience book, although rooted in great science. And more recently, the book Love 2.0, discussing the emotion that emotion theorists don't usually touch, love to hear more why that is, the emotion of love, but bringing the science of good rigorous methodology to that and helping us understand how it can affect biological and cellular makeup as well. So without further ado, it's awesome to have you here. Thank you. Thanks. It's great to be here. I get the chance to share with you some of the research from my team at the PEP Lab. And just to give a shout out to them, the kind of work that I'm going to share with you is certainly not stuff that one person can do alone. So I have had a great team of graduate students and staff and undergrads all helping me out and generous support from the National Institute of Health. And I'm going to be talking to you about what is a smile for? And more generally, the value of face-to-face connections. Now, I know that at one level, you already know face-to-face connection is a valuable part of daily experience, and your parents or your grandparents are probably telling you that. I have more connection with people. So I want to be able to help you appreciate why that is the case from both the side of mental health and the side of physical health and why positive face-to-face connection is so critical for us human animals. And I'm going to be using as the platform for this work the Broad and Dill Theory of Positive Emotions, which has been the blueprint of my research for the last several decades. And it really was among the first scientific treatments of trying to understand why humans have positive emotions in the first place. And so I'm going to give you a script review of just sort of the nuts and bolts of that quote go further. Now, the most important initial concept to keep in mind is that emotions are very short-lived. They're like a wave rising up on the sea, and then they dissipate within seconds, maybe minutes. But something that's lasting hours, weeks, months, that's not emotion anymore. I might be emotion-related or I might not be talking about these fleeting experiences that are like a smile, that change our inner psychology and our brain functioning and physiology little by little. So these very short-lived experiences were often just ignored by psychologists because they, again, were so fleeting, how could they matter? And for positive emotions, they're all rather mild, typically. But one key way that positive emotions, even mild positive emotions, maybe especially mild positive emotions, they fundamentally change the way the human brain works and how we take in information. And in particular, a key thing that positive emotions do is they broaden our awareness. So just like this water lily opens and closes with the presence and absence of sunlight, our minds open and close with the presence and absence of subtle, fleeting, positive emotional experiences. We know this from our tracking studies. We know this from behavioral choice studies. We know this from brain imaging studies. So there are many ways in which positive emotions just kind of expand the boundaries, expand our peripheral vision. So that's sort of how liberal this broadened perspective is. And when we are able to see a broader field, we're able to integrate more diverse concepts and ideas. And that is a feature of positive emotions, the broadening effect, which, like a positive emotion, is also fleeting. So we have these moments of expanded awareness. So when the positive emotion is gone, we kind of go back to typical. When we experience negative emotions, our focus narrows even further. But that is consequential because little by little, having more of these moments where your mind is expanded, that your awareness is broadened, changes you little by little, puts you on a trajectory of growth that builds your resources. And so the analogy I make is to eating your fruits and vegetables. We know that having just one stem of broccoli in 2018 is not going to make you healthy. You need a steady diet of fruits and vegetables. It's part of your daily health behaviors. Positive emotions can be counted in that same way. Having just one positive emotion is going to do much for your health. Having a steady diet of positive emotions within one's daily experience puts you on a trajectory of, one way to say, it's becoming the best version of yourself, becoming more resourceful. It builds social resources, psychological resources, like resilience, cognitive resources, like the ability to stay within the present moment, mindfulness. And we'll talk about how it builds physical resources in terms of healthy profiles. A colleague of mine pointed out this study some time ago on being emotions. I didn't know there was a whole field of emotion in these. But the findings actually really map on to the rod and milk theory. It's surprising. I would have thought that maybe it would be in common with mammals, human positive emotional experiences were in common with mammals. But apparently bees, too, depending on the sweetness of the nectar that they consume, they're more likely to be exploring more broadly in their environment and able to bounce back from a little bee challenge. How they challenge bees in the laboratory is just get them in a tube and then hold them still. There's an analogous way that makes babies upset, like having a whole new baby's arms down. It makes them kind of upset. Bees get upset, and that's state two. And if they've had more sweet nectar prior to that, they bounce back from the threat faster. So just like humans bounce back better when they have a store of positive emotions in their history and recent history. So there's something about the nervous system and how dopamine energizes our nervous system that is in common across many different kinds of nervous systems. Animals that move and forge need to explore their environments. Humans are no different. Positive emotions help put us in a mode that facilitates exploration and trying new things. Now another way positive emotions broaden our awareness is to, it unlocks other focus. Most of the time, humans are pretty self-absorbed. We're kind of wrapped up in our own to-do list, our own set of goals, our own worries and concerns. And it can take a little disruption of positive emotions to make us realize that there are other people in the room that might have something in common with somebody else. And so positive emotions seems to break open that cocoon of self-absorption and allow us to see ourselves as more connected and more of a piece with others. So we think people think and speak more in terms of we than in terms of me versus you. We also see something very interesting with smile mimicry. We probably all encountered in our own experience and learning a little bit about emotion science is that we tend to mimic each other's facial expressions. There's something particularly interesting about what happens when we mimic smiles. There are known to be so many different kinds of smiles. Paul Atlin, who's the major emotion theorist who studies the face, argues that there are 50 kinds of smiles. Some of those smiles are, hey, I'm interested in getting to know you. Let's connect. That's considered an affiliate of smile. There's also enjoyment smiles, which would be, I'm over here enjoying my chocolate, oblivious to what's going on with somebody else in the room. And then there are what are called domineering smiles, which is the kind of, I'm better than you and I know it and I'm gonna make you feel that. That sort of, it's not even all that positive, but it still shows up with a smile. And so how do people understand all the differences between these different kinds of smiles? Well, it turns out that mimicking the smile is key because when we mimic the smile, we are not only moving the same muscles on our face, there's sort of a neural mimicry that goes on with that that allows people to feel a little bit about the other person's feeling. So if there was sort of this domineering smile and you make eye contact with someone and mimic that smile, you're more likely to think, oh yeah, this is one of those smiling smiles. I mean, that's just the way it informs your gut and tells you that maybe this isn't a friendly person after all. Now, eye contact is really key to this because mimicry doesn't occur nearly as much when people don't make eye contact. So being face to face with someone and being able to look into their eyes triggers the mimicry that triggers what you can call intrusive activity or understanding the subtleties of another person's intentions. Okay, so smile and mimicry is something that happens when you face to face and it basically accounts for people having the sense of I don't know if I trust this person or oh, definitely trust this person. And the sad part is that when we don't make eye contact and we don't mimic, we just don't have access to the same gut wisdom about what somebody else is feeling. And one of the things that I've argued, well, when I first started working in the area of positive emotions, I was discovering in my studies and my theorizing was matching this. I kind of thought all positive emotions were the same. They're all, we have evidence that many different positive emotions were on their wares. Many of them build resources. They tend to occur in blends. So it's kind of hard sometimes to separate the influences of different positive emotions. But through the data building up in my laboratory, I've come to believe that there is one positive emotion that if you make the analogy to fruits and vegetables that maybe there's one that's a super food. Now my son who's here with me, not in the room, but he tells me, well, there's no such thing as super foods, that's a myth. So I still want to use this analogy that there may be one kind of positive emotion that's more consequential for our growth and development than others. And that is what got me interested in studying love. Now I have a very different take on love than a lot of emotion scientists, which probably is what allowed me to dive into this area when most people didn't want it. It was like the third grade, all you don't want to touch it. And that is because there's an earlier emotion theorist Calzar who took a similar view and I thought this makes a lot of sense. I argue that love is any positive emotion that is co-experienced across people. So instead of thinking of emotions as simply being owned by an individual, which is the way our language tends to focus on, it's like your joy, his anxiety, and we kind of parse them out as belonging to people. If you really look at how emotions unfold, oftentimes they're very much unfolding across multiple brains and bodies at once in synchrony. So that's what when positive emotions are in synchrony like that, that's what I'm calling positivity resonance. And I'm arguing that it's one of the building blocks of love, like perhaps the most elemental building block of love. So I just want to give you a few visual images of this to help you know, like it's on the same page of what I'm talking about. So it could be sharing a laugh with a friend. It could be celebrating a co-worker's success. It could be hugging your neighbor in a difficult moment. And this may not seem like positivity, shared positivity is the primary feature and it's not. And if the primary emotion in the room may be hurt and compassion and concern, but when somebody needs another person in there hurt, there's an element of good feeling in there. It's relief that somebody understood you or is taking the time to try to understand you. And the person who's able to kind of be that shoulder, so may not, feels a sense of at least I was there, at least I was able to help a little bit. And this is where a very well-earned feeling of mild pride could come in and pride people are hard times, sometimes accepting that as a positive emotion, but it just means something good happened and I was responsible, that the self is responsible. So even though the predominant emotion and compassion situation may be negative, there is a shared positivity that runs through that. I think the clearest example of positivity resonance is smiling at a baby. And this doesn't even have to be your baby. It can be a baby on the plane, a baby in the restaurant. And the reason that this is such a good, clear example is that when you're interacting with a pre-verbal infant, you're doing it as a dance. There's a dance of mutual synchrony and smiles and you gotta get it just right, otherwise they might start screaming, so you're being really sensitive to what's making them happy. And it unfolds as a little, as just a little emotional dance that has joy in it. And research shows that when parents have this sort of temporal synchrony and positivity with their infants, that the parents and the infants show rises and falls in oxytocin that are correlated. So even oxytocin is a neuropeptide that has been linked to bonding and other key parts of social behavior. As in safe context, oxytocin is also related to sort of guarding boundaries of groups and so it's not always leading to just positive or associated with positive experiences. So I just wanna share a little bit about some of the ideas I'm bringing together in what I call Positive New Resonance Theory. And it's a mashup of two different areas of psychological science. My home discipline is affective science or emotional science. But I'm also bringing in ideas about relationship science, where some of my close collaborators have pointed me to some of the most important aspects of that. And one is a definition of love that has been discovered by asking people to think about all kinds of relationships, like the love you might have for your romantic partner, but also the love you have for your child or for your parents or for your best friend. And then they just ask people to subtract certain ingredients from that relationship. Would you still call it a love relationship? And this is the description that people are not willing to take away and still call it a love relationship. And so that is investing in the well-being of the other person simply for his or her own sake. So when you just really appreciate someone because they make you breakfast in the morning or they kill the spiders in your house, it's not that functional kind of appreciation. You just care about their well-being regardless, just for his or her own sake. And this is really, he is one of my earlier research areas was on the objectification of women. So there's a way in which you objectifying somebody else is appreciating them for what they do for you as opposed to appreciating them for their own well-being. And the flip side of that, when somebody is invested in you simply for your own sake, it feels like they get you, they're on your side. And the jargon phrase for that is perceived responsiveness or feeling like you're understood, cared for, and validated. And then in a relationship, scientists have argued that the fundamental core of intimacy is mutual perceived responsiveness. You both feel like you understand, cared for, and validated one another. Now, these are really important ideas for a relationship science. What I think the emotion science can add is a momentary lens. There's some, there's kind of a sense that goes through relationship science that really views relationships almost as a status that toggles on your inner relationship or toggles off where you break up or get immersed or have a falling out. What emotion science adds is that these moments of feeling that somebody cares for you or that you're invested in somebody else, those are emotional moments that are like that wave that rises up and dissipates. And then you go off and work on your problem set or you're going to work and you're not necessarily at that moment investing in the well-being of another person. The other thing that emotion science can add is in the biological and behavioral components because emotions by definition are both mind and body experiences and biological and phenomenological. And whereas relationship science almost seems like it's hovering inside of people's minds only in terms of switching into a different category of connection. And then the other thing it can add is this Robinville theoretical backdrop which acknowledges that there are some features of the experience that are transient. And by those transient features end up being really consequential in terms of the resources that they build. And so one of the things I argue is that a lot of the other things that we typically consider to be love are really the resources that are built as these moments of positivity resonance accrue. So just to define it formally, positivity resonance is an interpersonally situated experience marked by momentary increases in shared positive emotions, mutual care and concern, and biological and behavioral synchrony. And those are the momentary aspects. These three facets are kind of graded together in that momentary way. And over time having more such moments build embodied rapport or just as you walk away from the interaction and you think, oh, we really clicked, we really connected. It builds up social bonds. A lot of times we take the social bonds themselves to be, oh, that's love. And this other stuff is just sort of what love feels like. Another thing people take to be love is commitment, loyalty and trust. And it can often seem mysterious. How do I build commitment? How do I build loyalty? How do I build trust? Whether, and that's something that is important in education and business and all kinds of arenas. And it can seem like a mystery from the perspective of this theory, you build those by creating more of these momentary experiences of shared positivity with this bio-behavioral synchrony and mutual care and concern. So you'll notice here that I talk about interpersonally situated experiences. I stop short of saying face to face, but I do think what's required is real time sensory connection. So something that is happening dynamically in real time and it's possible to experience it say over the phone because shared voice carries a lot of information about emotion through the vocal tract. So the major hypothesis that I'm working with is arguing that these micro moments or these momentary experiences of positivity resonance are the most elemental building blocks of what we typically think of as love relationships, bonding relationships, trusting loyal relationships. And I would argue also from the findings that we have is the fundamental building block of health. And so I wanna give you a sense of how we measure positivity resonance. We do this in multiple different ways. We're kind of trying to triangulate it from many different sides, but one way that we've developed is through a short questionnaire. And this is a questionnaire that's suitable for describing episodes. Because again, positivity resonance is something that occurs in interaction with others. So typically one way we measure this is have people think about their day yesterday and divide yesterday into a series of episodes. Might be 10 episodes, might be 20. But one episode would be coming to this talk. Another episode could be taking an hour to catch up on my email. Or another episode could be a meeting with your collaborative team. So things like that. And then we ask for what proportion of time in that episode did you feel, and then we use these items, did you feel a sense of mutual sense of warmth and concern? Were you able to attune to and connect with one another? Did thoughts and feelings flow with ease? Did you feel a mutual sense of being energized and uplifted? Were you mutually responsive to one another's needs? Did you sense mutual trust and respect? And did you feel in sync? Of course. People respond for each item from zero to 100%. People aren't hardly ever at 100%. So there's just, within an episode you might feel about 20% of the time we felt this energizing of the three kind of response. And what we find is that there are, if we ask, was that episode face-to-face? Was it connected through technology? Or was it connected through a phone or video chat? We find that if you're face-to-face, the more face-to-face it is, the more you are likely to experience positivity resonance. If you're interacting through computer-mediated interaction, it's not real time and very little to no sensory connection. There's a negative association between how much time you spend connecting that way and positivity resonance. So face-to-face is the place where it's most prominent. We see the zero correlation when it's some real-time sensory connection like shared video or shared voice. And I think that really depends on what people's intentions are. We've done a study, one of my former doctoral students from major business study, looked at people who were telecommuters who work mostly from home and didn't go to a physical office space versus those who go to a physical office space. And we find that for those people who telecommute, the phone becomes their main way of positive connection with their colleagues. And so they have much more positivity resonance in a phone call than somebody who is with people face-to-face all day and they make a phone call and they find it deadening. So that's where I think we see that zero correlation for video and phone. And I want to share with you the basically bottom line of three different studies we did where we used this episode-level measure of positivity resonance and linked it to different aspects of well-being. We find that there's a reliable and strong correlation with flourishing mental health. Now, flourishing mental health is not just about being happy, it's also feeling like you have a meaning purpose that you're part of the community. So it's like happy plus meaning, those things together. It's also associated with having fewer depressive symptoms and less loneliness. It's not surprising that it would be less loneliness but it's kind of constructility there. And we also see in some of the studies and marginal in others and not in others so it's unclear right now. But self-reported illness symptoms, people who are experiencing more positivity resonance report in some studies, fewer exchange cold students acne, things like that. Now of course these are correlational findings that can go in both directions but it's interesting to see a strong association with mental health. I want to share with you a study that has a lot of rich components where we are completely unable to use the self-report measure of positivity resonance and that's because the data were all gathered over the last, well over 20 years starting in the 1990, early 1990s because I helped collect the data when I was a postdoc and so when I had a sabbatical couple of years ago I went back to the lab where I worked as a postdoc and said I think we can test some of these ideas about positivity resonance with this existing data. And so Bob Levinson was my mentoring collaborator back in my postdoc years and he and his team of amazing graduate students have done this work and what I love about it is completely not dependent on grant funding, we do this with zero grant funding just all people power and existing data. So I want to share with you a study about long-term marriages and as I start to talk about love, positivity resonance and long-term marriage I don't want to mislead you to think that positivity resonance is only about romantic relationships. It is equally about day-to-day connections with others but this is the data that I have to take a deep dive in on the concept. So from 150 long-term married couples they're defined as people who are married either 15 years or more that was half the sample or 35 years and more that was the other half of the sample. At the time the study was started every single study of marriage was on newly wins and so it was a really big deal to be studying marriages that had lasted. And as part of this study there are many different parts but I'm gonna focus in on a 15 minute conversation about an area of conflict within marriage so we identified this by having people fill out a survey individually beforehand which are the topics that you guys as a couple tend to disagree on and of things like money, raising the kids, how to keep house, eating weight, things like that. And so we picked something that was high as high as possible on both of their lists and we don't say, go argue. We say, try to advance your agreement on this. Have a conversation about this area of conflict and how they take it from there is really up to them. We are hoping that it is typical of how they might resolve conflict in real life. And so we have a 15 minute conversation during which we gather second by second data on physiology. And so what is measured is pulse transit time to the ear and finger which is a loose core of blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance, sweat run activity and finger pulse amplitudes and degree of vasoconstriction or sympathetic nervous system activation. We're also measuring how much people move around in their chair by having a movement sensor underneath the chair that they're sitting in. And we also videotaped them. So this is a couple that gave permission to have their lengthness shown to audiences. And so here's them talking about their area of disagreement. And this is a really nice data set because an army of coders had already coded the specific emotions that each couple member expressed second by second through this whole 15 minute conversation. And this was based on John Gottman's work on reading researchers in marriage, especially emotion in marriage. And each second of both the speaker and the listener were coded as expressing either positive affect, joy, humor, affection, validation or negative affect. For the time, this was pretty typical to have way more negative emotions on people's emotion coding lists than positive emotions but anger, whining, sadness, disgust, defensiveness, those kinds of things. So what we were able to do is identify each second within the videotape, how many seconds there was shared positivity that both the husband and the wife expressed positivity. And we also measured when there was shared negativity or unshared emotions and so on. But another way that we looked at these videos is we compared this kind of coding system to a new coding system that we developed where we had, we took brand new coders and introduced them to the idea of positivity resonance kind of like I've done for you already. It wasn't a really super in-depth training but we asked them to watch a 32nd segment of the videotape and then rate, did positivity resonate between the two partners? Did they show actions, words or voice intonation that conveyed a mutual warmth, mutual concern, mutual affection or a shared temple like shared smiles, shared laughter. And so for each 32nd bin that was coded as no, I didn't see any of that, one was I saw a little bit of that too, I saw a lot of that. So then we aggregated those across the 30, 30 second bins that made up to 15 minutes. And what we found was this was a much better predictor of marital satisfaction of the couple than were the ways that affect that had been measured previously as an individual phenomenon. So we can look at how often that each individual was positive and we can also look at when that was shared positivity. Our measure which takes much less coding hours is a much better predictor the couple's view of how positive their relationship is. And one part of the study that I'm especially excited about is the parts where we get to look at biological synchrony. And here we use the physiological measures and that behavioral coding system, we use that behavioral coding system, the previous one, the SPATH coding that existed too. Find moments of shared positivity and then look to see the degree to which there was physiological synchrony in those moments. So here's that same couple that are having a moment of shared positivity and how this was coded was looking at the co-variation in two people's physiological changes second by second. So here we have a couple where this is a representation of an actual heart rate data this is interbeat interval and so you see maybe the husbands up here in black and the lives in the gray and what we do is take a rolling 30 second window and look at within each 30 seconds what's the correlation between this line and this line. And you see both of these are kind of going up and so there's the synchrony score is a positive correlation. So we do that rolling window across this whole stretch and I'm just gonna show you two other instances. Here's one where the heart, the interbeat interval is going down that's you can increase in heart rate for each and so the correlation there is pretty high on the synchrony score and over here is a moment where they're not doing the same that one person's pretty steady, one's showing change is a correlation between those is low. So for each of these physiological measures we get a measure of synchrony across the diet levels for synchrony and we've looked at them individually, physiological measure by physiological measure we find that they all show a similar pattern and so we aggregate them into a broader measure of physiological synchrony. Now there's two ways that a couple's physiology could be in sync. One way is the heart rate's increasing and the book decreasing at the same time that's called in phase synchrony, they're synchronized in phase and then there's also anti-phase synchrony where one is increasing the other's decreasing doing like that. Kind of mirroring each other, they're clearly in sync but they're going in opposite directions. And so what we did again was take each second of the 15 minute interaction and classify each second as a second of shared positivity or un-shared positivity. Shared negativity or un-shared negativity, shared neutral. And because we're doing that positive alone we need to look at it separately for husbands and wives but when we get to the shared data it's the same for each. Okay so our prediction was that we'd see more biological synchrony when there's shared positive affect. That's actually a prediction that goes against a lot of ideas in affective science which argue that bag is stronger than good and there's gonna be much more of a spreading of a contagion of negative emotion and positive emotion. And so we were especially interested, well this is the difference we predicted that if you experience positive emotions together there's more of this in-phase linkage than when you experience positive emotions alone. Really key comparison is what happens with negative emotions we see much less in-phase linkage than positive emotions. And with neutral we see no differences there. What's interesting with the negative is we see more of that anti-phase linkage where one person's heart rate goes up and one goes down. It's like they're kind of taking turns feeling different things rather than feeling it and see greater. We see the same exact pattern with lives. If you might remember that this was a sample that had middle-aged adults and older adults. We see the same pattern in middle-aged adults as in older adults. If you break it down by each individual measure we see pretty much the same pattern for each individual measure as well. So the shared positivity at the second by second level is associated with this physiological synchrony really reliably. Now you might ask why do you care about this second by second synchrony? What value does that have? Well the beauty of this dataset is that it was collected over the course of 20 years of marriage. Now in the outline years the sample dwindles and we have fewer in the sample. We have found preliminary evidence that our measure of positivity resonance predicts who's in the study 20 years later and then we look well why did people leave the study to get a divorce? Well very few divorces because these were people who had already made it to 15 and 35 years. The reason they were out of the study is one who died and so we're now doing a study of getting death records of the whole sample to see if we can above and beyond the typical predictors of longevity at Compton Psychology. Just individual positive affect and individual social connection just positivity resonance link up above and beyond those. But what we do have here is data from over 10 years. We looked at how much positivity resonance coded in terms of shared positive affect second by second with the physiological linkage in that second. So couples who have more of that. Again these were middle-aged and older adults so their people's chronic illness load is gonna increase typically across the decade for this age sample. We find that that's true for people who have low positivity resonance and those who have higher positivity resonance. They're expected to be increasing chronic illnesses across a decade if they emerge. So it's kind of buffered against it was health protective over 10 years. I need to tell you that this is data for wise women. For whatever reason and we have only speculation but for the husbands we don't see a similar pattern. You might have your own ideas about why this may be the case. The best idea that really smart graduate students shared in the talk once was like, oh yeah that makes perfect sense. Is that demographically from sociological perspective we know that older women tend to have a wider family network than older men. A lot of times for older men their one close relationship is their spouse. So if these markers of positivity resonance are typical of what older women are experiencing in all of their relationships then to the extent that these moments of positivity resonance are health protective they're having more of those moments in their day. So if they're getting a higher gaming diet than somebody who's just getting those connections within one relationship. So that's a possibility. We do not have the data to be able to test that in this study but it will be a nice series of distributions for a lot of somewhere to do that. Now I spent all this time talking about close relationships, marital relationships. I wanna take a step back and point out that positivity resonance can equally be a feature of what are called weak ties or your interactions with strangers and distant acquaintances. That there's some research by Liz Dunn and her team that shows that for college students the emotional quality of their connections with strangers and acquaintances within a given day are a better predictor of their end of day mental wellbeing or emotional wellbeing than their interactions with close friends and others. So the quality of those connections that you have with people you hardly know really are consequential for mental health. I wanna take just a moment to talk about two different areas in my own research where we look at kind of the possible connections. We've seen already in many areas of affective science there's a connection between people who experience and express more positive emotions and longevity and that correlation, prospective correlation has been kind of a mystery. Like how could these cleaning positive experiences be so predictive of longevity? And one way that we've been interested in studying this is through looking at heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is closely connected to the body's ability to regulate not only the cardiovascular system but also inflammation and glucose. If you have heart attack, your cardiologists may wanna know your heart rate variability because that predicts how well you'll do post-infarction and the psychologists are very interested in heart rate variability because people who have higher heart rate variability that's the one that's also associated with health have been shown to be better at regulating their emotions, better at regulating their attention and perhaps because of both of those they're better to have higher social skill. So it seemed like this could be kind of a bridge construct between psychological and emotions and social experience and health on the other end. So we've done a study where we randomly assign people to learn to self-generate more experiences of positive emotion by a particular positive emotion that are about caring and friendliness towards others. This is a study where we randomized people to learn lung and kindness meditation versus being at a weightless control. We measured their heart rate variability at the beginning of the study and that actually predicts as the past literature would suggest predicts people's ability to get positive emotions out of their meditation practice. So showing that again, that's kind of following from the better able to regulate their attention and their emotions. And so when they practice meditation, they have more positive emotional groups. These are people with higher cardiac failure tone or higher heart rate variability. But we also see that three months later, the more positive emotions and the more positive social connections people recorded on a day-to-day basis because we ask people for nine weeks to report on their emotions and social experiences at the end of every day. People who showed an increase in those showed the biggest increases in heart rate variability. So we know that becoming more physically fit and better cardiovascular fitness can improve your heart rate variability. This is the first study to show that improving your emotional and social experiences also has an effect on improving your heart rate variability as if you know an indicator of heart health. So that's one way. And one of the key mediators here was positive social experiences. So it was kind of a proxy measure of positivity resonance. I've also done some work where we've looked at and continuing to look at cellular makeup in terms of the gene expression profile in the immune system. And in particular, there's some past research that had linked adversity, long-term psychological adversity to a profile gene expression in the immune system that's associated with an increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes and a decreased expression of antiviral and antibody synthesis genes. So it's kind of like when the body is experiencing a lot of cues or a chronic social stress, there's like the immune system takes a double hit. It kind of turns you more towards the diseases of inflammation, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, some cancers and getting worse at fending off viruses. And so a colleague of mine, Steve Cole, was kind of the pioneer of doing work in this area and I heard him give a talk like 10 years ago and see it in a long time when we graduate school together and I said, hey, Steve, remember me? Do you think this might have a relationship on the other side to positive experiences? So we were able to get funds to do another one of these studies where we randomized people to learn loving kindness meditation or a different kind of meditation, mindfulness. And we look at changes in gene expression. The first set of studies we found just looked at the degree in which people with existing levels of mental health like their flourishing mental health is related to their gene expression profile. And we were the first to find that there's a connection between people's unimorned well-being that feel connected, part of a community, they have been social relationships. People who score high on that measure show a profile in gene expression in an immune system in their leukocytes that is the opposite of the zindersity pattern. They're showing reduced expression of pro-inflammatory genes and higher expression of antiviral and antibody synthesis genes. And it's kind of like your immune system is kind of paying attention to your recent emotional history and preparing you for the microbial threats that are likely to be more present for you. So if you're very socially connected, it's useful to have better antiviral fighting capacity within your immune system because you're gonna be cozyed up with a lot of people when that's where viruses spread. But if you're more chronically lonely, and this is the finding that Steve Cole and John Casciogro had found several in her studies chronic loneliness is associated with that adversity pattern. So your immune system is not so much preparing you to deal with viruses, but more with bacteria. And with is the idea that maybe you'd be more likely to be cast out of your community as a one of our human ancestors and maybe to deal with, you know, wounds of predation or come specific fighting. And so your body might be more, your immune system might be more geared to protecting you to things that might be more immune threats when you're isolated from others. So these are the kinds of ideas that have led me to conclude that positivity resonance is a healthy behavior. There's nice sociological evidence that puts it on par with staying physically active, eating your fruits and vegetables, that these are things that we should be engaging in every day in order to be our healthy best. And the nice thing about it is that positive connections with others are they are fleeting. They don't last, you know, a tremendous amount of time, but neither is being physically active or eating your fruits and vegetables, but these are all forever renewable. We can start them up again in almost any circumstance where there are other people. And so I just want to close by touching on sort of like, what are some interventions that allow people to experience more positivity resonance? And I want to say, you've already been in one. You've listened to me talk about the concept for an hour, and that's actually much more than an intervention than you've tested already, where we just give people like a 10-minute overview of what positivity resonance is, and we say, go have more of these moments in your day with strangers and acquaintances and people you know. And if when people take that on as an assignment over three weeks time, three weeks later they're scoring higher on flourishing mental health, lower on loneliness, lower on depression. There are other things that we found increase people's positivity resonance I touched on that we've done studies of formal meditation, both mindfulness and loving kindness meditation turn out to be great routes to increasing positive emotions, and loving kindness in particular increases people's sense of positive connections with others in daily life. But mindfulness does that a bit too, so they're not so starkly different. And I'm also just working on a manuscript now where we're looking at informal meditation. So as people in our studies were being trained in meditation, which is like formal meditation and sitting down in time where you're not going to be disturbed and maybe listening to about any meditation and engaging in what's considered formal practice. Informal practice is engaged when you're like in the flow of daily activities, maybe as you're walking in from where you parked to your office or while you're waiting for the microwave oven to count down, you're standing in front of the lunch. So then you just kinda switch your attention either to being in the present moment, focusing on your breath or wishing somebody well who you see off in the distance and just like, I hope that person has a nice day. That those kinds of moments add up and increase people's positive emotions day-to-day and their experiences of positive connection and being feeling integrated with others and sort of on the same page with others. There's also, if you're interested in some of these ideas and you're like, I wanna share this with somebody else or you wanna go a little deeper on it. With my university, I created a six week, very short MOOC that conveys the ideas that are basically foundation on my both positivity and the plug of Ardenville theory but also spends equal time talking about positivity resonance and benefits. It has a lot of, it's geared for people who have no background in anything and just kinda wanna understand more. There have been about 200,000 people have taken this course from all over the world. Most of them from non-English speaking countries and who had chumped from emerging economies. So I'm really pleased with how far some of the ideas that we come up with in Ivory Tower can reach in terms of people's interest. So another way, another sort of life hack that can be useful for, you know, thinking, oh, this idea of positivity resonance sounds interesting. I'd like to create more of this in my life. My colleague, Pascal Sheeran, has done this great work on if then plans which basically to unlock an if then plan, all you have to do is decide where, when and how you might wanna do something differently. Like for me, I don't wanna use my, I don't wanna text while I drive. So I say, if I'm in the car and I reach my hand over to my phone, then I'll say, hey, don't do that, you wanna be alive. And so it's a way of using your automatic cognitions to trigger you to your intentions in the right moment. So it kind of offloads your behavioral intentions into automatic processing. And so it could be the case that you think, when I'm in the presence of others and I feel the temptation to pick up my phone and just engage from these people and engage with these people, that pull my phone away and I'll try to connect with the people in my midst. So I just wanna, and by focusing on what a smile is for, getting back to this question. Now there's one take in science on what a smile is for. This comes from Paul Ekman's work is that the smile expresses an otherwise hidden internal state. Another set of researchers that flip that on his head and say what a smile is for is to invoke positivity in another, not necessarily just to express it. Another set of researchers have argued that a smile when it's a minute creates this intersubjectivity allows you to kind of know a little bit better when you're got what another person is feeling. Others have said it helps broaden collective mindsets and build collective resources after some researchers who took some of these other ideas and linked them with the Ron and Bill theory. And what I'm arguing is that it's all of the above. You don't have to choose between these alternate theories of what a smile is for, that it can be both a way to express positivity, trigger it, and to the extent that we see connections with heart health, with immune health, then a smile functions as a bid when it's an affiliative smile to enter into this life-giving moment of positivity resonance. So with that, I just wanna end here and take your questions if you have them. I see that I've gone on long so if you do have to just get up and leave, I totally get that. I know some of you have another class, but yeah, I have a question to start with. We noticed 90% of people when they got frustrated, smiled, with their eyes and their mouth, the true smile of happiness, but clearly they were not happy. Would you say that's playing, that's probably playing with a whole bunch of, these other ones specifically? It could be an attempt to kind of disengage a little bit with the frustration and kind of take a step back and think, oh, what a, how do I get into this? And we know that positive emotional experiences can help people undo or get out of negative emotional experiences. So there's some way in which there's positive emotions and facial, positive facial expressions that can be used as emotional regulation tools. That's one possibility that's just showing up as an automatic way of regulating emotion. That seems like here it can make you feel better and broaden your mindset to try to find way out of that frustrating situation. Right, yeah. So yeah, that's what I kind of want to meant by kind of take a step back and kind of think about the situation more generally rather than just be continuing stuck with that in-cast. In the back. Is it possible with the computer or anything that's not a human? For example, if you're interacted with a robot or what is honesty or trueness? Right, we're actually, I have a philosophy doctoral student who's working with me and we're trying to begin to forge a connection with a researcher who's created rapport in human agents. Jonathan Ratch has worked, you probably may know it. And there's, we want to see whether those rapport features which are a lot of them based on synchrony and timing and shared smiles. When the artificial agent is showing those things back that we typically experience, those have already been shown to relate to rapport. Report is a concept that's really close to positivity residents, but without some of the other features of biomefemeral synchrony. But it has that kind of mutual care piece in it. So I think there's already indirect evidence that you can have those connections. Now, the question is what happens when you realize the artificial agent really hasn't been listening or taking in information in the way you wouldn't expect it for a human. So there's, that might work. The basic rapport box have been shown to be really good at capturing more information in sensitive interviews like with veterans coming back and getting an interview about PTSD symptoms because it seems to create this comfort and plus anonymity so that there's more personal relevation that allows people to get the help that they need. So as a diagnostic interview, I think that's a key piece. But we wanna do some studies to see if doing an interview with an artificial agent that has the capacity to build rapport then creates more of an interest in connecting with other humans when you're not interacting, when you move from interacting with the artificial agent to a human. Is there a way to keep our social skills highly attuned rather than all this interaction with artificial agents? We don't necessarily have to be polite to our Alexis but with an artificial agent that's kind of responsive to you that might keep our social skills at a sharp level so that when you turn to interacting with humans after lots of interactions with artificial humans that you're not clumsy. Because social skills we found is a skill that if you don't use it, it starts to erode it. So it might help us stay in well-tuned for social interaction. Great question, yes? All right, so I got two questions. So I'm curious, as you mentioned loving kind of meditation and positivity resonance kind of playing a role now. I'm just curious if you're kind of currently you're thinking is around how positivity resonance relates to building in terms of mediating it more so than kind of other aspects, other sort of positive emotions that you've come from your broadening part of your theory. So I'm curious kind of about positive resonance might, I guess, differentiate the impact of persons likely to build in other resources. And then I'm also kind of curious about kind of the model of love. And since kind of, I know you mentioned that there was a kind of a second component or like two-factor psychology onto it. But I was kind of curious when person says you know they love like, you know, their pet or they love the object, whatever. Like, how does that kind of factor into the model considered a different model? Taking your first question, this analogy that I made to a superfood, my prediction is that positive emotions that we co-experience with others do help us build more rapidly in terms of building our resourcefulness. Now, it could be that it's merely a quantitative difference because if you're experiencing, this isn't known from the research on capitalization. If you have a positive emotional experience that's a solo experience and then you go share it with a friend, you get to re-experience the positivity of that. And then if that friend responds in an active and constructive way and says, oh, tell me more, that's a really cool honor. Versus saying, oh, everybody gets that prize. You know, but if they respond well, that increases positivity as well. So when we co-experience positive emotions, the positive emotion tends to grow and build for a little bit longer. So it's like, if it's a healthy ingredient, you're getting a higher dose of it. We don't quite know if it's synergistically different or just quantitatively different. The positive view residents allows you to have kind of slightly longer episodes that are slightly more intense. And the other question was... I'm like, yeah, right. So like if, oh, say a person says, you know, I love their pet. Oh, right, love their pet. It kind of put fear into the model. Yeah, I think that you can co-experience positive emotions, especially with your mammal pets. You know, because eye contact and people who are dog, I'm not a dog lover. But people who are dog owners are saying, oh, my dog looks me in the eye. I know exactly what they feel like. You know, that's a form of connection. And then, you know, that could be just like the pre-verbal infants. You're kind of connecting with your, especially dogs. Dogs have the best research on how they can contribute to emotional well-being. I'm a cat person. I kind of take that issue. Cats don't seem to have as much ability to change people's mental health. But I think for your bee pets or your reptile pets, it's just less, without sharing more similarities in your nervous system, I think it's less likely. Now, when people say they really love a possession, I think that is, you know, that's certainly a way that people tend to use the word love. But it's just an outside the scope of my theory. Because I'm really talking about these building block moments that happen between and among people. And so, you know, some colleagues of mine have said, oh, I really like what you're theorizing here. Just don't call it love. And the reason I persisted in the face of that criticism is that we already, as a society, put love on a pedestal. We say, makes the world go round. We say, this is the most important thing in life. And I'm trying to say that these little moments of positivity resonance deserve that elevation. They need to be taken with that much importance and respect. And I think if I just call it positivity resonance, people, oh, I'm not going to live with or without positivity resonance. But you think, love is like, oh, well, that's. So it's part to get the idea to have as much draw as possible. So I'm part thinking of communicating with my audiences too, I guess. Do you know of any interventions with children or youth? I'm thinking about health class for junior high kids, that kind of thing. Interesting. Yeah, I have a close connection with a woman who started a group that's kind of running wild in schools, elementary schools right now, about being more grateful and kind, but not starting with gratitude, starting with kindness. It's looking for a good project, or if you just will go look for a good project or something like that. It's really about trying to help. It started as an anti-bullying intervention and kind of broadened into just creating more positive communities. And I think the reason it's really taken off is it's designed to be completely run by kids. My kids, four kids. So it gives eight-year-olds this kind of community leadership opportunity and kind of using a little structure. It's much better than having adults come in there and say, be kind, be grateful, but it doesn't play very far. So but adolescents, I think, yeah, that's a really important time to kind of bring in these ideas, kind of saying, there are positive connections outside of romantic or sexual connections that are really important to keep maintaining. So I said, yeah. Yes? I have a question on the five love languages, which was by Dr. Garrett, and you mentioned about the correlation of which you measured the synchrony. How would you comment on, because everybody expresses themselves differently, like some people value physical touch versus some people value quality time. So how would you mention that you want to have a personalized correlation to address to those people when you do a study? Well, as a social psychologist, when you're looking across all the ways in which the world and people vary as a social psychologist, I'm looking through what's in common across people. I'm also treating as a personality psychologist, which is looking at how people differ from one another. This theory is really looking at the common thread. Now that doesn't mean those individual differences and styles of how you want to communicate don't also exist there. We're just focusing on more of the common values. A typical thing that we do, though, is to look at what's called the big five personality traits, common chancelessness, extroversion, agreeableness, and see if people, with those constellation of traits, is this just extroverts we're talking about. We know that's not the case. Introverts show same sort of positivity resonance that extroverts do. So it's one way to kind of put the research on what's the common thread through the cases to make sure that it's not just being carried by a certain group. So yes? I was wondering whether the subjects have ever seen the feedback, seen the signals themselves as they were going through the experiment. In the couple study? Yes. No, they didn't see that connection. But they did do. There's another layer of data that we are also working with. A week after they have that conversation, they come back to the research lab and watch the videotape of their interaction. And they rate, using a rating dial, how positive or negative they themselves were feeling at the time of the conversation. After they do that, they watch the video another time, and they rate how they think their partner is feeling. And so we can measure from that common packet accuracy, and we can also measure just how much do you project positivity onto your partner. So we're finding that those things are closely connected to positive resonance, too. So do you think that if, say, we had automated reality glasses or something like that, and when we looked at, say, important people in our lives, we could see how synchronized we are with it, what kind of effect would you think would be a positive kind of reaction? You know, I have this take on biofeedback, which probably, I don't know, maybe doesn't go so well in this context. But I think that by nature's design, we have really great built-in biofeedback. It's called Emotions. I don't know why somebody's calling me right now. Let me just get it off. It's one of those times where, sorry, I can't talk right now. It really helps. But I think giving people more skills of understanding what emotion they are feeling and when is potentially more valuable rather than taking people outside of their inner experiencing and looking at a number or a projection, which just almost, by definition, splits your attention between interacting and then how's the interaction going, interacting, how's the interaction going. Having that split attention is going to derail the interaction. So but even thinking about one's own emotions during the interaction can derail as well. But I think after you're outside of the interaction, I think, how did I feel? That may be better than seeing a number on a scale that is a readout of how did you feel. Emotions on nature's biofeedback is not really quick. Yes, you and I want to share. Sure. So much to your last point about whether or not these findings generalize across personality types, I'm wondering if in your studies you select for healthy individuals of people who don't have mental illnesses, for example. Because I'm wondering if, for example, severely depressed person might be a pervious to this perceived responsiveness, right? An inability to feel cared for despite people actually being invested in their well-being. So do you select for those? We typically take everybody who is interested in our studies. But I should say that we have found that people who come to studies that are run by the PEPLAM, Positive Emotions Psychophysiology that we end up getting higher mental health scores than we would otherwise. But and then other people's work shows us too that most people find interaction to be safe. And so positively residents, if you find interaction with other people to be safe and interesting and source a positive emotion, that's great because that can even improve mental health even further. The groups of people who do not find social interaction to be safe, they feel like it's too risky. Or people who are depressed chronically lonely, which is kind of extra appointment because you're feeling lonely, but you perceive just everyday interaction as a risk. And so you hang back more. And sort of why chronic loneliness is kind of as a self-sustaining system. And people have social anxiety, really strong social anxiety. So those are clear, effective disorders that are linked to kind of put up a barrier to feeling safe in social circumstances. And some of the prerequisites, I think, that are foundational for allowing positively residents to emerge. One is perceived safety. And the other is real-time sensory connection. So those are two that I've argued are the conditions that need to be in place for this to emerge. And so from that, I say, somewhat proactively, love is not unconditional because there are certain conditions that set the stage better. Perceive safety is one of them. Yes? Taking this theory, do you think you can really apply to different spheres of life because you don't really position it for personal examples, like marriage, et cetera? Because if you take an example with digesting, whatever emotion is, positive or negative, we need to digest it. And from Mariah and some other studies, they're actually equal. Whatever it is, positive or negative, we will take equal time to process the emotion, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, potential effect longer is a bit different. So do you think in some situations, like group places and some other spheres, this is actually no-go places, or sometimes it should be restrained because it'll actually derive our attention and we will spend time, like with an example of previous questions, while we will need to analyze even if it is positive and good and it actually might break our interaction or whatever process we are engaged in. I think it really depends on the nature of work. If people are working in teams, then I think positivity resonance is part of what allows you to kind of become one as a team and kind of pass the baton in really quick ways and kind of understand what each person needs, that perspective taking. Now, there's some work that isn't like that, that is much more absorbed in looking and for the heirs in a long contract or in a long sequence of programming or code. So there, if it's a certain kind of mental labor, then I can see your point. I think it really depends on the nature of work. There is a whole area in organizational studies and positive psychology where they mix called positive organizational studies and it turns out that positive emotions at work are part of what helps creativity and teamwork and just really depends on what kind of work you're doing, I think. So there's no way it's, I don't think it's possible to make a generalization one way or another because of that. Yes? I'm curious about your relationship between positive resonance and decision making process just to see if you've done any studies or how it influenced there. Second part of this is microintervention and informal limitations. There's work that's been done at Harvard with a longer, like I'm hearing mindfulness so to speak or so as a novelty seeking and producing approach to that. And a lot of the studies that your work kind of runs in parallel to that as far as the findings go. I was just wondering if you were familiar with that work and if there's any type of cross-computing that. Yeah. Well, one piece of Ellen Langer's work that I really think is a nice example of this. I don't ever follow every step of the way of her work but I do see points of connection. The one that I love is the orchestra study where they have an orchestra either try to go on stage and play a past perfect performance. So they say, okay, this last performance was perfect. Let's go do it again. Let's have a perfect performance. And then a different condition. They tell the orchestra to really get in sync with the other people in the orchestra and really play together. And then they ask the audience which, the degree to which they like the performance. Audience loves the synchrony. The synchrony amongst the players is what leads to a subjective group reading of a better performance. And so that I think is getting at this working together piece. So again, it's work that is about matching togetherness. So I use a bit of that example in my book, Loan 2.0. I talked to one of my friends who was learning how to jam when she was playing her electric guitar and that sort of unnameable piece what makes it really great is when you start really playing off each other well. And so parts of that collaboration. I mean, other work other than music making is like that. But music making, it's the synchrony made out of it. Yes? So I think the studies where, let's look at how positivity resonance is expressed across different social groups. Like how it can be used to improve relationship between interaction between different social groups. Yeah, yeah. You know, the work in this area is so new that there's the only lamb that's using the concept of positive resonance is my lamb right now. And so our papers are just getting out there. So we haven't done a study like that, but I do think that there's a lot of potential there. And so for researchers who are beginning to try to figure out how interracial interaction or how intergenerational interaction just can come together. I think that the unifying factor of emotions is a really key place. I mean, some of my grad students will say, oh, did you see that thing on Oprah where they brought people who were Trump voters versus Clinton voters into a room and then they actually experienced emotions together and they left as friends. You know, you could rewrite that in terms of positivity resonance, so. But I don't know many formal studies. This is great. Please join me if I can.