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The Science of positive thinking

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By Vicky Dickson

Like any newly published author, Barbara Fredrickson has done a lot of book signing lately. One instance in particular stands out for her: the elderly man at the Regulator Bookshop who said he’d been reading her book for six days when his family members remarked on the positive changes they’d noticed.

“You’re a whole new Jim,” they’d said.

Jim told her he was 88 years old.

And that, for Fredrickson, was validation for the effort and sacrifice she’s put into writing Positivity.

As a UNC professor who’s worked in the field of positive psychology for more that 20 years, Fredrickson knows that Positivity is not particularly likely to further her academic career. She knows, too, that the benefits of positive emotions have already been widely touted. But what motivated her to add yet another tome to the self-help aisle was the chance to present the scientific evidence behind the assertion that positive emotions are good for you. By explaining how science can show what actually happens in a person’s body and life as a result of positive emotions, Fredrickson hopes to reach the skeptics who might otherwise dismiss positivity as just a new set of rose-colored glasses.
Though she radiates joy and compassion, Fredrickson is no Pollyanna. Her initial motivation for investigating positive emotions was simply that few other psychologists were doing so. She also admits to once having been told (by a close friend) that she studied emotions because she didn’t have any.

During the course of her studies, however, Fredrickson came to realize that the experimental results she was seeing could have a beneficial effect on her personal life. When the every-day stresses of juggling her career and family were compounded by her husband’s unexpected, life-threatening health problems, positivity helped. And not by banishing negative emotions; it would have been impossible for her not to have been anxious and sad during her husband’s hospitalization.

But positivity enabled Fredrickson to see both the good – the care and compassion of her neighbors and colleagues – and the bad in her situation. That focus, in turn, gave her the strength to pull her family through a very trying time.

Fredrickson knows she’s been given an opportunity very few academics enjoy: the chance to integrate her life’s work into the essence of the rest of her life. And by writing Positivity, she’s hoping to pass on a prescription that can help others learn “how to live, how to grow, and how to make a positive contribution to the world.” As Fredrickson herself has done.