Review - Assignment Essays

Submit summaries the 3 materials:

1 video, 1 article and Chapter 3 from the textbook, A Primer in Positive Psychology.

Each source’s summary must be at least 150 words total 450

include APA format in-text citations and a References list.

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU

A reprint from

American Scientist
the magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

This reprint is provided for personal and noncommercial use. For any other use, please send a request to Permissions,
American Scientist, P.O. Box 13975, Research Triangle Park, NC, 27709, U.S.A., or by electronic mail to perms@amsci.org.
©Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society and other rightsholders

Back in the 1930s some young
Catholic nuns were asked to write

short, personal essays about their lives.
They described edifying events in their
childhood, the schools they attended,
their religious experiences and the in-
fluences that led them to the convent.
Although the essays may have been ini-
tially used to assess each nun’s career
path, the documents were eventually
archived and largely forgotten. More
than 60 years later the nuns’ writing

surfaced again when three psycholo-
gists at the University of Kentucky re-
viewed the essays as part of a larger
study on aging and Alzheimer’s dis-
ease. Deborah Danner, David Snowdon
and Wallace Friesen read the nun’s bio-
graphical sketches and scored them for
positive emotional content, recording
instances of happiness, interest, love
and hope. What they found was re-
markable: The nuns who expressed the
most positive emotions lived up to 10
years longer than those who expressed
the fewest. This gain in life expectancy
is considerably larger than the gain
achieved by those who quit smoking.

The nun study is not an isolated case.
Several other scientists have found that
people who feel good live longer. But
why would this be so? Some answers
are emerging from the new field of pos-
itive psychology. This branch of psy-
chological science surfaced about five
years ago, as the brainchild of Martin
E. P. Seligman, then president of the
American Psychological Association

(APA). Like many psychologists, Selig-
man had devoted much of his research
career to studying mental illness. He
coined the phrase learned helplessness to
describe how hopelessness and other
negative thoughts can spiral down into
clinical depression.

At the start of his term as APA pres-
ident, Seligman took stock of the field
of psychology, noting its significant ad-
vances in curing ills. In 1947, none of
the major mental illnesses were treat-
able, whereas today 16 are treatable by
psychotherapy, psychopharmacology
or both. Although psychology had be-
come proficient at rescuing people
from various mental illnesses, it had
virtually no scientifically sound tools
for helping people to reach their higher
ground, to thrive and flourish. Selig-
man aimed to correct this imbalance
when he called for a “positive psychol-
ogy.” With the help of psychologist Mi-
haly Csikszentmihalyi—who originat-
ed the concept of “flow” to describe
peak motivational experiences—Selig-
man culled the field for scientists
whose work might be described as in-
vestigating “that which makes life
worth living.”

This is how many research psychol-
ogists, myself included, were drawn to
positive psychology. My own back-
ground is in the study of emotions. For
more than a dozen years, I’ve been
studying the positive emotions—joy,
contentment, gratitude and love—to
shed light on their evolved adaptive
significance. Among scientists who
study emotions, this is a rare specialty.
Far more emotion researchers have de-
voted their careers to studying nega-
tive emotions, such as anger, anxiety
and sadness. The study of optimism
and positive emotions was seen by
some as a frivolous pursuit. But the

positive psychology movement is
changing that. Many psychologists
have now begun to explore the largely
uncharted terrain of human strengths
and the sources of happiness.

The new discoveries generated by
positive psychology hold the promise of
improving individual and collective
functioning, psychological well-being
and physical health. But to harness the
power of positive psychology, we need
to understand how and why “goodness”
matters. Although the discovery that
people who think positively and feel
good actually live longer is remarkable, it
raises more questions than it answers.
Exactly how do positive thinking and
pleasant feelings help people live longer

Do pleasant thoughts and feelings help
people live better as well? And why are
positive emotions a universal part of hu-
man nature? My research traces the pos-
sible pathways for the life-enhancing ef-
fects of positive emotions and attempts
to understand why human beings
evolved to experience them.

Why So Negative?
There are probably a number of reasons
why the positive emotions received little
attention in the past. There is, of course,
the natural tendency to study something
that afflicts the well-being of humanity—
and the expression and experience of
negative emotions are responsible for
much of what ails this world. But it may
also be that the positive emotions are a
little harder to study. They are compara-
tively few and relatively undifferentiat-
ed—joy, amusement and serenity are not
easily distinguished from one another.
Anger, fear and sadness, on the other
hand, are distinctly different experiences.

This lack of differentiation is evident
in how we think about the emotions.
Consider that scientific taxonomies of

330 American Scientist, Volume 91

The Value of Positive Emotions

The emerging science of positive psychology is coming
to understand why it’s good to feel good

Barbara L. Fredrickson

Barbara L. Fredrickson is the director of the Posi-
tive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at
the University of Michigan. In 2000 she won the
Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology. Address:
3006 East Hall, 525 East University Avenue,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
48109–1109. Internet: blf@umich.edu

basic emotions typically identify one
positive emotion for every three or
four negative emotions and that this
imbalance is also reflected in the rela-
tive numbers of emotion words in the
English language.

Various physical components of emo-
tional expression similarly reveal a lack
of differentiation for the positive emo-
tions. The negative emotions have spe-
cific facial configurations that imbue
them with universally recognized sig-
nal value. We can readily identify an-

gry, sad or fearful faces. In contrast, fa-
cial expressions for positive emotions
have no unique signal value: All share
the Duchenne smile—in which the cor-
ners of the lips are raised and the mus-
cles are contracted around the eyes,
which raises the cheeks. A similar dis-
tinction is evident in the response of the
autonomic nervous system to the ex-
pression of emotions. About 20 years
ago, psychologists Paul Ekman and
Wallace Friesen at the University of Cal-
ifornia, San Francisco, and Robert Lev-

enson at Indiana University showed
that anger, fear and sadness each elicit
distinct responses in the autonomic ner-
vous system. In contrast, the positive
emotions appeared to have no distin-
guishable autonomic responses.

The study of positive emotions has
also been hindered because scientists at-
tempted to understand them with mod-
els that worked best for negative emo-
tions. Central to many theories of
emotion is that they are, by definition,
associated with urges to act in particular

2003 July–August 331www.americanscientist.org

Figure 1. Feeling joy in the
pleasures of life, as depict-
ed in Marc Chagall’s Fes-
tival in the Village, offers
rewards beyond those of
simply experiencing the
moment. There are bene-
fits to personal health, de-
velopment and longevity,
as well as evolutionary
reasons why human be-
ings experience positive
emotions. C

or
bi

ways. Anger creates the urge to attack,
fear the urge to escape and disgust the
urge to expectorate (Figure 2). Of course,
no theorist argues that people invari-
ably act out these urges; rather, people’s
ideas about possible courses of action
narrow in on these specific urges. And
these urges are not simply thoughts ex-
isting in the mind. They embody spe-
cific physiological changes that enable
the actions called forth. In the case of
fear, for example, a greater amount of
blood flows to the large muscle groups
to facilitate running.

The models that emphasize the role
of these specific action tendencies typi-
cally cast the emotions as evolved
adaptations. The negative emotions
have an intuitively obvious adaptive
value: In an instant, they narrow our
thought-action repertoires to those that
best promoted our ancestors’ survival
in life-threatening situations. In this
view, negative emotions are efficient
solutions to recurrent problems that
our ancestors faced.

Positive emotions, on the other
hand, aren’t so easily explained. From
this evolutionary perspective, joy,
serenity and gratitude don’t seem as
useful as fear, anger or disgust. The
bodily changes, urges to act and the fa-
cial expressions produced by positive
emotions aren’t as specific or as obvi-
ously relevant to survival as those
sparked by negative emotions. If posi-
tive emotions didn’t promote our an-
cestors’ survival in life-threatening sit-
uations, then what good were they?
Did they have any adaptive value at
all? Perhaps they merely signaled the
absence of threats.

The Broaden-and-Build Theory
We gain some insight into the adaptive
role of positive emotions if we aban-
don the framework used to under-
stand the negative emotions. Instead of
solving problems of immediate sur-
vival, positive emotions solve prob-
lems concerning personal growth and
development. Experiencing a positive
emotion leads to states of mind and to
modes of behavior that indirectly pre-
pare an individual for later hard times.
In my broaden-and-build theory, I pro-
pose that the positive emotions broad-
en an individual’s momentary mind-
set, and by doing so help to build
enduring personal resources. We can
test these ideas by exploring the ways
that positive emotions change how
people think and how they behave.

My students and I conducted experi-
ments in which we induced certain
emotions in people by having them
watch short, emotionally evocative film
clips. We elicited joy by showing a herd
of playful penguins waddling and slid-
ing on the ice, we elicited serenity with
clips of peaceful nature scenes, we
elicited fear with films of people at pre-
carious heights, and we elicited

sadness

with scenes of deaths and funerals. We
also used a neutral “control” film of an
old computer screen saver that elicited
no emotion at all.

We then assessed the participant’s
ability to think broadly. Using global-
local visual processing tasks, we mea-
sured whether they saw the “big pic-
ture” or focused on smaller details
(Figure 3, left). The participant’s task is
to judge which of two comparison fig-
ures is more similar to a “standard”

figure. Neither choice is right or
wrong, but one comparison figure re-
sembles the standard in global config-
uration, and the other in local, detailed
elements. Using this and similar mea-
sures, we found that, compared to
those in negative or neutral states,
people who experience positive emo-
tions (as assessed by self-report or
electromyographic signals from the
face) tend to choose the global config-
uration, suggesting a broadened pat-
tern of thinking.

This tendency to promote a broader
thought-action repertoire is linked to a
variety of downstream effects of posi-
tive emotions on thinking. Two decades
of experiments by Alice Isen of Cornell
University and her colleagues have
shown that people experiencing posi-
tive affect (feelings) think differently.
One series of experiments tested cre-
ative thinking using such tests as Med-
nick’s Remote Associates Test, which
asks people to think of a word that re-
lates to each of three other words. So,
for example, given the words mower,
atomic and foreign, the correct answer is
power (Figure 3, right). Although this test
was originally designed to assess indi-
vidual differences in the presumably
stable trait of creativity, Isen and col-
leagues showed that people experienc-
ing positive affect perform better on
this test than people in neutral states.

In other experiments, Isen and col-
leagues tested the clinical reasoning of
practicing physicians. They made some
of the physicians feel good by giving
them a small bag of candy, then asked
all of them to think aloud while they
solved a case of a patient with liver dis-

332 American Scientist, Volume 91

Figure 2. Negative emotions—like anger, fear and disgust—can be understood as evolutionary adaptations to threats our ancestors faced.
Anger (left) elicits the urge to attack, fear (middle) the urge to escape and disgust (right) the urge to expel. In this view, the negative emotions nar-
row our thoughts and actions to those that promoted survival in life-threatening situations. Because the positive emotions—joy, serenity, grat-
itude and the like—were not so readily understood from this perspective, psychological science had not come up with with a satisfying expla-
nation for their evolutionary significance until recently.

ease. Content analyses revealed that
physicians who felt good were faster to
integrate case information and less like-
ly to become anchored on initial
thoughts or come to premature closure
in their diagnosis. In yet another exper-
iment, Isen and colleagues showed that
negotiators induced to feel good were
more likely to discover integrative so-
lutions in a complex bargaining task.
Overall, 20 years of experiments by
Isen and her colleagues show that
when people feel good, their thinking
becomes more creative, integrative,
flexible and open to information.

Even though positive emotions and
the broadened mindsets they create
are themselves short-lived, they can
have deep and enduring effects. By
momentarily broadening attention
and thinking, positive emotions can
lead to the discovery of novel ideas,
actions and social bonds. For example,
joy and playfulness build a variety of
resources. Consider children at play in
the schoolyard or adults enjoying a
game of basketball in the gym. Al-
though their immediate motivations
may be simply hedonistic—to enjoy
the moment—they are at the same
time building physical, intellectual,
psychological and social resources.
The physical activity leads to long-
term improvements in health, the
game-playing strategies develop prob-
lem-solving skills, and the cama-
raderie strengthens social bonds that
may provide crucial support at some
time in the future (Figure 4). Similar
links between playfulness and later
gains in physical, social and intellectu-
al resources are also evident in nonhu-
man animals, such as monkeys, rats
and squirrels. In human beings, other
positive states of mind and positive ac-
tions work along similar lines: Savor-
ing an experience solidifies life priori-
ties; altruistic acts strengthen social ties
and build skills for expressing love
and care. These outcomes often endure
long after the initial positive emotion
has vanished.

My students and I recently tested
these ideas by surveying a group of
people to examine their resilience and
optimism. The people were originally
interviewed in the early months of
2001, and then again in the days after
the September 11th terrorist attacks.
We asked them to identify the emo-
tions they were feeling, what they had
learned from the attacks and how opti-
mistic they were about the future. We

learned that after September 11 nearly
everyone felt sad, angry and somewhat
afraid. And more than 70 percent were
depressed. Yet the people who were
originally identified as being resilient
in the early part of 2001 felt positive
emotions strongly as well. They were
also half as likely to be depressed. Our
statistical analyses showed that their
tendency to feel more positive emo-

tions buffered the resilient people
against depression.

Gratitude was the most common
positive emotion people felt after the
September 11th attacks. Feeling grate-
ful was associated both with learning
many good things from the crisis and
with increased levels of optimism. Re-
silient people made statements such as,
“I learned that most people in the

2003 July–August 333www.americanscientist.org

global-local
visual
processing

Mednick’s
Remote Associates Test

mower
atomic
foreign

Figure 3. Psychological tests reveal that people tend to think broadly when they experience
positive emotions. A global-local visual processing test (left) asks participants to judge which of
two comparison figures (bottom) is most similar to a standard figure (top). People experiencing
positive emotions tend to choose the figure that resembles the standard configuration in global
configuration (the triangles). Similarly, people experiencing positive emotions score highly on
tests of creativity such as Mednick’s Remote Associates Test (right), which asks people to think
of a word that relates to each of three other words. (The answer is in the text on the previous
page.) The positive emotions broaden people’s mindsets, which allows them to solve problems
like this more readily.

Figure 4. Positive emotions broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires. Joy, for
example, encourages playful behavior. These broadened thought-action repertoires in turn
build intellectual, physical, social and psychological resources for the future. Such resources
translate into greater odds of survival and reproductive success.

social resources
� solidify bonds

� make new bonds

intellectual resources
� develop problem-solving
skills

� learn new information

physical resources
� develop coordination

� develop strength and
cardiovascular health

psychological resources
� develop resilience and optimism

� develop sense of identity and
goal orientation

world are inherently good.” Put differ-
ently, feeling grateful broadened posi-
tive learning, which in turn built opti-
mism, just as the broaden-and-build
theory suggests.

My students and I have recently
completed an experimental test of the
building effect of positive emotions.
Over the course of a month-long study
of daily experiences, we induced one
group of college students to feel more
positive emotions by asking them to
find the positive meaning and long-
term benefit within their best, worst
and seemingly ordinary experiences
each day. At the end of the month,
compared to others who did not make
this daily effort to find positive mean-
ing, those who did showed increases
in psychological resilience.

So “feeling good” does far more than
signal the absence of threats. It can
transform people for the better, making
them more optimistic, resilient and so-
cially connected. Indeed, this insight
might solve the evolutionary mystery
of positive emotions: Simply by experi-
encing positive emotions, our ancestors
would have naturally accrued more
personal resources. And when later

faced with threats to life or limb, these
greater resources translated into greater
odds of survival and greater odds of liv-
ing long enough to reproduce.

The Undoing Hypothesis
We might also ask whether there are
other immediate benefits to experienc-
ing positive emotions, aside from the
tautology that they make us “feel
good.” One effect relates to how people
cope with their negative emotions. If
negative emotions narrow people’s
mindsets and positive emotions broad-
en them, then perhaps positive emo-
tions undo the lingering effects of neg-
ative emotions.

Such effects may extend to the phys-
iological realm. The negative emotions
have distinct physiological responses
associated with them—autonomic ac-
tivity (as mentioned earlier), including
cardiovascular activity, which repre-
sents the body’s preparation for specif-
ic action. A number of studies suggest
that the cardiovascular activity associ-
ated with stress and negative emo-
tions, especially if prolonged and re-
current, can promote or exacerbate
heart disease. Experiments on nonhu-

man primates reveal that recurrent
emotion-related cardiovascular activi-
ty also appears to injure the inner walls
of arteries and initiate atherosclerosis.
Because the positive emotions broad-
en people’s thought-and-action reper-
toires, they may also loosen the hold
that negative emotions gain on both
mind and body, dismantle preparation
for specific action and undo the physi-
ological effects of negative emotions.

My colleagues and I tested this undo-
ing hypothesis in a series of experi-
ments. We began by inducing a negative
emotion: We told participants that they
had one minute to prepare a speech that
would be videotaped and evaluated by
their peers. The speech task induced the
subjective feeling of anxiety as well as
increases in heart rate, peripheral vaso-
constriction and blood pressure. We
then randomly assigned the participants
to view one of four films: two films
evoked mild positive emotions (amuse-
ment and contentment), a third served
as a neutral control condition and a
fourth elicited sadness.

We then measured the time elapsed
from the beginning of the randomly as-
signed film until the cardiovascular re-

334 American Scientist, Volume 91

1 2 3anxiety-provoking
situation short films shown cardiovascular recovery

amusement

contentment

no emotion

sadness

0 10 20 30 40 50
time (seconds)

Figure 5. Undoing hypothesis suggests that positive emotions “undo” the lingering effects of negative emotions. This was examined by pro-
voking anxiety in a group of participants by asking them to prepare a speech under time pressure. After learning that they did not have to de-
liver their speeches after all, the participants were shown one of four films, eliciting either amusement, contentment, no emotion or sadness.
Measurements of the participants’ heart rate, blood pressure and peripheral vasoconstriction revealed that feeling positive emotions leads to the
quickest recovery to baseline measures obtained before they were placed in the anxiety-provoking situation. These undoing effects may part-
ly explain the longevity of people who experience positive emotions more often.

actions induced by the speech task re-
turned to each participant’s baseline
levels. The results were consistent:
Those individuals who watched the
two positive-emotion films recovered
to their baseline cardiovascular activity
sooner than those who watched the
neutral film. Those who watched the
sad film showed the most delayed re-
covery (Figure 5). Positive emotions
had a clear and consistent effect of un-
doing the cardiovascular repercussions
of negative emotions.

At this point the cognitive and phys-
iological mechanisms of the undoing
effect are unknown. It may be that
broadening one’s cognitive perspective
by feeling positive emotions mediates
the physiological undoing. Such ideas
need further exploration.

Ending on a Positive Note
So how do the positive emotions pro-
mote longevity? Why did the happy
nuns live so long? It seems that posi-
tive emotions do more than simply feel
good in the present. The undoing ef-
fect suggests that positive emotions
can reduce the physiological “damage”
on the cardiovascular system sustained
by feeling negative emotions. But some
other research suggests that there’s
more to it than that. It appears that ex-
periencing positive emotions increases
the likelihood that one will feel good
in the future.

My colleague Thomas Joiner and I
sought to test whether positive affect
and broadened thinking mutually en-
hance each other—so that experiencing
one produces the other, which in turn
encourages more of the first one, and
so on in a mutually reinforcing ascent
to greater well-being. We measured
positive affect and broadened thinking
strategies in 138 college students on
two separate occasions, five weeks
apart (times T1 and T2), with standard
psychological tests. When we com-
pared the students’ responses on both
occasions we found some very inter-
esting results: Positive affect at T1 pre-
dicted increases in both positive affect
and broadened thinking at T2; and
broadened thinking at T1 predicted in-
creases in both positive affect and
broadened thinking at T2. Further sta-
tistical analyses revealed that there was
indeed a mutually reinforcing effect be-
tween positive affect and broadened
thinking. These results suggest that
people who regularly feel positive
emotions are in some respects lifted on

an “upward spiral” of continued
growth and thriving.

But positive emotions don’t just
transform individuals. I’ve argued that
they may also transform groups of peo-
ple, within communities and organiza-
tions. Community transformation be-
comes possible because each person’s
positive emotion can resound through
others. Take helpful, compassionate acts
as an example. Isen demonstrated that
people who experience positive emo-
tions become more helpful to others. Yet
being helpful not only springs from
positive emotions, it also produces pos-
itive emotions. People who give help,
for instance, can feel proud of their
good deeds and so experience contin-
ued good feelings. Plus, people who re-
ceive help can feel grateful, and those
who merely witness good deeds can
feel elevated. Each of these positive
emotions—pride, gratitude and eleva-
tion—can in turn broaden people’s
mindsets and inspire further compas-
sionate acts. So, by creating chains of
events that carry positive meaning for
others, positive emotions can trigger
upward spirals that transform commu-
nities into more cohesive, moral and
harmonious social organizations.

All of this suggests that we need to
develop methods to experience more
positive emotions more often. Al-
though the use of humor, laughter and
other direct attempts to stimulate posi-
tive emotions are occasionally suitable,
they often seem poor choices, especially
in trying times. Based on our recent ex-
periment with college students, my ad-
vice would be to cultivate positive emo-
tions indirectly by finding positive
meaning within current circumstances.
Positive meaning can be obtained by
finding benefits within adversity, by in-
fusing ordinary events with meaning
and by effective problem solving. You
can find benefits in a grim world, for
instance, by focusing on the newfound
strengths and resolve within yourself
and others. You can infuse ordinary
events with meaning by expressing ap-
preciation, love and gratitude, even for
simple things. And you can find posi-
tive meaning through problem solving
by supporting compassionate acts to-
ward people in need. So although the
active ingredient within growth and re-
silience may be positive emotions, the
leverage point for accessing these bene-
fits is finding positive meaning.

So, what good is it to think about the
good in the world? The mind can be a

powerful ally. As John Milton told us,
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of
heaven.” The new science of positive
psychology is beginning to unravel
how such transformations can take
place. Think about the good in the
world, or otherwise find positive mean-
ing, and you seed your own positive
emotions. A focus on goodness cannot
only change your life and your com-
munity, but perhaps also the world,
and in time create a heaven on earth.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the Univer-
sity of Michigan, the National Institute of
Mental Health (MH59615) and the John
Templeton Foundation for supporting some
of the research described in this article.

Bibliography
Aspinwall, L. G., and U. M. Staudinger. 2003. A

Psychology of Human Strengths: Fundamental
Questions and Future Directions for a Positive
Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American
Psychological Association.

Danner, D. D., D. A. Snowdon and W. V.
Friesen. 2001. Positive emotions in early life
and longevity: Findings from the nun study.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
80:804–813.

Fredrickson, B. L. 1998. What good are posi-
tive emotions? Review of General Psychology
2:300–319.

Fredrickson, B. L. 2000. Cultivating positive
emotions to optimize health and well-being.
Prevention and Treatment 3. http://
journals.apa.org/prevention/volume3/
toc-mar07-00.html

Fredrickson, B. L. 2001. The role of positive
emotions in positive psychology: The
broaden-and-build theory of positive emo-
tions. American Psychologist 56:218–226.

Fredrickson, B. L., and T. Joiner. 2002. Positive
emotions trigger upward spirals toward
emotional well-being. Psychological Science
13:172–175.

Fredrickson, B. L., and R. W. Levenson. 1998.
Positive emotions speed recovery from the
cardiovascular sequelae of negative emo-
tions. Cognition and Emotion 12:191–220.

Fredrickson, B. L., M. M. Tugade, C. E. Waugh
and G. Larkin. 2003. What good are posi-
tive emotions in crises?: A prospective
study of resilience and emotions following
the terrorist attacks on the United States on
September 11th, 2001. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 84:365–376.

Isen, A. M. 1987. Positive affect, cognitive
processes and social behavior. Advances in
Experimental Social Psychology 20:203–253.

2003 July–August 335www.americanscientist.org

For relevant Web links, consult this issue of
American Scientist Online:

http://www.americanscientist.org/
template/IssueTOC/issue/394

Turn in your highest-quality paper
Get a qualified writer to help you with

“ Review ”

Get high-quality paper

NEW! AI matching with writer

Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:

Turnitin Report

Formatting

Title Page

Citation

Outline

Place an Order