Positive interventions are one of the building blocks for the application of positive psychology in our day-to-day lives. In this course taught by Dr. James Pawelski, we explore positive interventions through theory, research and practice. We provide learners the basic tools for using and measuring positive psychology in professional or personal contexts. Suggested prerequisite: Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science.
1.6 Cultivating Positive Emotions
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Positive Psychology: Applications and Interventions
691 ratings
University of Pennsylvania
691 ratings
Course 2 of 5 in the Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology
From the lesson
Introducing the Course and Exploring Positive Emotions
Meet the Instructors
James Pawelski, Ph.D.Director of Education and Senior Scholar
Positive Psychology Center
[MUSIC]
Last time we talked about positive emotions and how important they are.
We talked about Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory of
positive emotions.
Now, we want to talk about cultivating positive emotions.
Research indicates that we can actually increase our positive emotions.
Now, negative emotions are valuable and important.
But most of us, I think probably experience enough of those and
we don't experience enough of the positive emotions.
So, this doesn't mean that we should aim to experience
positive emotions all the time.
Imagine if we had the goal of teaching dogs, for example,
to wag their tails all the time.
That would be very unhelpful, for
dog owners and for the dogs themselves, because you'd never know what the dog is
really trying to communicate with it's wagging tail.
Emotions are important and we need to make sure that we
are taking into account the context in which we find ourselves.
Sometimes the context is one in which negative emotions are appropriate.
Sometimes the context is one in which positive emotions are appropriate.
There's also a cultural context here in terms of
the kinds of positive emotions that are valued in different cultural context.
But for now, we just want to have a basic sense of
various positive emotions and how they can be cultivated.
Before I turn to that question though,
I want to make one point contrasting positive emotions with pleasure.
And I'm now following suggestions that Barbara Fredrickson has made in her book
on positivity, where she contrasts positive emotions and pleasure.
They're related she says.
She calls them cousins.
But she points out that they're related in the sense that
they both take us toward what we want.
Positive emotions are in context where we like to be and
pleasure certainly is something that we enjoy.
But a difference between them
is that physical pleasure tends to narrow our attention.
So, if you're eating a wonderful dessert, for
example, the tendency is to focus in on that dessert.
And the taste and the smell of that dessert, the texture of the dessert,
and really focus in on it to get the most out of the pleasure you can.
And when you're eating that dessert,
it also brings immediate rewards, you're enjoying the moment right there.
By contrast, positive emotions broaden our attention.
So, they make us more likely to notice things beyond simply
the narrow focus and they bring us rewards in the future.
So, there's nothing wrong, in general, with pleasure, but
it's different from positive emotions.
And pleasure, if we aim for pleasure in our lives, we may not get the same kind
of long term benefits that we get if we prioritize positive emotions.
Now, it's important when we think about positive emotions to have
a broad vocabulary when we're describing them.
If we're feeling up, we often just say, if somebody asks us how we're doing,
I'm feeling great or I'm happy.
And but that's okay, in what respect?
How are you feeling great?
How are you feeling happy?
So, it's important to be able to connect with a full range of positive emotions.
So, what I'd like to do now is just pause and
I invite you to take a minute to write down as many positive emotions as you can.
Okay, great, welcome back.
Now, Barbara Fredrickson in her work focuses on ten positive emotions.
And I'd like to just tell you briefly about each of these positive emotions and
you can see whether you had these on your list or
whether you had somethings on your list that are not on Barb's list.
So, the first positive emotion that Barb talks about is joy.
And she says this happens in a context where your life feels safe and familiar,
there's, little effort is required on your part, you do not have to get up and
do something strenuous necessarily, but the emotion that comes,
this excited emotion that comes when things are going your way.
I remember when I was in college and I had always wanted to act and so
when I found out about tryouts for a play I went and I tried out.
And I went back to look at the outcomes of that tryout and I was so nervous.
Had I gotten the part or had I not?
And I looked at the list and I realized, not only had I gotten the part in
the play, but I had gotten a larger part that I hadn't even tried for.
I was so excited and I kind of of froth in the mouth a little bit I think,
but I was kind of so excited that I've actually gotten to be in the play.
And so, I was smiling, I was laughing, I was walking quickly,
I was pumping my fist and that sort of thing.
So, this is the kind of thing that can happen when we feel joy.
Now, I actually think there's another kind of joy that we can also
experience as well that can be different, but just as significant.
And this is a kind of quiet joy, where maybe somebody looking at
us from the outside wouldn't necessarily know that we're feeling joy on the inside,
but we're feeling deeply moved, and deeply joyful.
We might actually shed a tear because we're so moved.
And if we're walking, we're more likely to walk slowly.
But on the inside, we're feeling connected and uplifted and definitely joyful.
In addition to joy, there's gratitude.
So, this is where you receive something beyond what you deserved.
I know that, just to take one example from my own life,
a mentor of mine by the name of John Lox, is somebody who spent so much time with me
when I was just starting out in my career, and gave me so much great advice.
I just felt unbelievably grateful that someone like him,
he's a senior philosopher at Vanderbilt University, so he was in a position
of authority and great success in the world in which I was just starting out.
And he took the time to listen to me and my ideas and give me wonderful advice.
And so, ever since then, I've been filled with gratitude for what he did for me.
So, gratitude can be about big things,
it can also be about things that may seen relatively trivial.
I remember when I was in school in graduate school.
I didn't have money for a car and so when I went grocery shopping I had to walk.
It's a bit of hike and I would walk back to my apartment with
two bags of groceries as much as I could possible carry.
And I remember one day, I went grocery shopping and it started to rain.
So, I was walking with my hands full of groceries and
these paper bags and I had an umbrella in one hand.
And I was trying to keep my head under the umbrella.
And I had a loaf of bread that I had purchased.
And it was just sitting precariously on the top of one of those bags.
And the more I walked, trying to keep my head under the umbrella,
the more that loaf of bread started to worm its way out of the bag.
And I thought what's going to happen when that bread falls on the wet sidewalk?
And just about the time that I thought it was going to happen,
out of nowhere a hand reached under the umbrella.
Someone had seen what was going on, grabbed the loaf of bread and
placed it securely in the bag.
And I was fine and
I was able to walk back to my apartment without losing any of my groceries.
I didn't know who it was, I didn't know anybody to thank.
But I'm remembering this now, decades later, with gratitude, for
a small act of kindness that a stranger extended to me at a time when I needed it.
So, we can think of these life changing things and
these smaller events in our lives as examples of green cape gratitude.
Things that come our way that we don't expect nor deserve.
We can also think of red cape gratitude.
An occasion when you avoid something bad that could have happened but it didn't.
I think in my own life this past summer, I was excited.
One of the things that I love most to do in
the world is go hiking in the mountains.
And so, I had a chance this summer to go hiking with my dad,
who had just turned 81, and my son who was 5 years old.
So, we had a grand time hiking in the mountain.
And then, we saw that it was starting to get late, so
we're coming back down the mountain and my dad lost his footing.
And he fell heavily on the mountain.
And we didn't know if he was hurt or not, if he could move,
if he could continue down the mountain.
We were still pretty far up the mountain.
We didn't know what to do.
And so, we actually called for help.
And thankfully,
there were some people who came up and helped us get down off the mountain.
So, I feel incredible gratitude and a lot of relief
that what might have happened in that situation actually didn't.
And my dad is fine, and my son is fine, and I am fine.
And we have great memories from climbing the mountain.
So, green cape gratitude, red cape gratitude.
It's a powerful emotion.
Let's move now to serenity.
So like joy, serenity happens when you feel safe and familiar in your life.
You don't really need to get up and do anything.
But it's much more low key than joy, Fredrickson says.
She calls it more of an afterglow emotion.
When maybe you've played a game and you've won a really important game with
your colleagues in your sport, and you're just kind of sitting around enjoying that.
There's nothing you have to do at the moment but
you're filled with positive emotion, it's kind of an afterglow.
Maybe reminiscing and savoring what's just happened to you and your colleagues.
Another emotion, a positive emotion, is interest.
This, also, is when you're feeling safe but
actually your attention is drawn to something new and interesting.
Maybe you've just discovered a new area that you're interested in learning about.
Or you've just met someone that you think is fascinating,
and you're curious to learn more about that person.
So, you're very activated,
you're very motivated to try to learn more about what you're interested in.
Another emotion is hope.
Now, we feel hope when circumstances are actually difficult.
If everything were going our way,
we wouldn't really need to have hope, would we?
But when things aren't going our way, something bad has happened, or
we're concerned that something bad is going to happen, that's when we need hope.
And we can be sustained by hope.
This desire for things to be better, and the belief that they can be better for us.
So, again, it's another very important positive emotion.
And, let's go next to pride.
Pride is something that we fell when we've caused something good to happen.
I'm the one who made that happen.
I'm mindful of my son, Liam, who's actually just turned six and
he is having a grand time learning new things, being able to jump further,
run faster, climb higher and it's great when it reaches out to his mom or
me, my wife, Suzy, or me and he says, look, look what I can do.
And we say, okay let's see Liam and he does it, and he we say, Liam that's great.
Good job.
He's filled with pride as he's learning new things that he can do and
that he can accomplish.
Next, there's amusement.
And this also, Barb points out, is when we're feeling safe.
But there's an element of the unexpected about this, right?
So, something happens, somebody tells a joke, and it has an unexpected ending.
There's a social element to it that is,
we just enjoy being in other people's company.
We enjoy laughing and being amused.
And then, there's inspiration.
And inspiration is what we feel when somebody does something
that is, it's really an example of the best in human nature.
Maybe somebody reaches out, and help someone in a self-sacrificial way.
Or maybe someone dedicates their lives
to performance of a musical nature or in a theater.
And we get to observe that and we just so moved by the hard work and
success that they have achieved because of that hard work.
So, responding positively to the best in human nature.
Now, sometimes that inspiration can actually be about something even larger
and it can become a kind of awe.
So, like inspiration only bigger.
Awe is when you feel part of something larger than yourself.
This can be sometimes something we feel when we're in nature.
Maybe when we are at the edge of the ocean.
Or when we're climbing mountains.
It can also be something that comes as a result of human actions.
I remember visiting the Great Wall of China, for example, and
just being amazed at the sheer size and length of that wall.
So again, awe is this feeling of just being small, but not in a negative way,
because you realize that you're part of something that's just astonishingly large.
The last of the ten emotions, that Barb Fredrickson focuses on, is love and
she says that love is very special because it includes.
All of the positive emotions we've just been talking about and
in the context of a safe relationship, oftentimes a very close relationship.
So, it adds a component to these other emotions,
because we're experiencing it with someone else we care about.
I'm very excited to writing a book with my wife, Suzy,
on applying positive psychology to relationships.
Obviously, positive emotions are an important part of a healthy relationship.
And Barb's focus on love here is really key for that, okay.
So, we've jut gone through ten different positive emotions.
Curious to see how many of those you'd actually written on your list
before we got started, but
let's turn out to the question of how we can cultivate positive emotions.
Now, positive emotions are not the kind of things we can just will ourselves to
feel them, right?
I got to feel hope, I'm going to feel hope, I'm going to feel hope or
I'm going to feel serene, I'm going to feel serene, feel serene and
it doesn't work when we tell other people, you know, be joyful.
We can't do that on command.
But that doesn't mean there aren't ways that we can cultivate positive emotions.
And I just want to go through four different techniques, or
four different methods right now.
First of all, we can cultivate positive emotions by remembering a time
when we experience them, all right?
So, I was just telling you when we were going through the emotions,
times when I felt gratitude, for example, or times that I felt joy.
And when we allow ourselves to go back to that time and really
re-live it then we can re-experience those positive emotions as well.
A second way we can cultivate positive emotions is by acting
like we do when we feel them.
So, William James says, that the sovereign path to cheerfulness is to act cheerfully.
If you want to raise your mood, then act like you are feeling cheerful.
And often times that actually does make us feel cheerful.
It's important to remember the importance of our body in feeling these emotions.
So, if I just say, well, I'm going to try too be cheerful now.
That doesn't really work.
Well, how do act when I'm feeling cheerful as I move my body around then
it has this emotional effect as well.
A third way of cultivating positive emotions
is by putting ourselves in situations where we're more likely to feel them.
So again, if you want to feel more cheerful,
then staying inside by yourself in your room with
the lights off is probably not going to be an effective way of doing that.
But, if you go out in a situation where when you're with your friends,
or you're in this particular context,
you tend to feel cheerful, you're more likely to feel it.
And then finally, we can cultivate positive emotions by being more mindful
of what we're already feeling.
So many times, we're not even consciously aware of the emotions that we're having.
And if we just tune into them more,
we can realize that we actually do feel gratitude, or serenity,
or hope, and we can allow those feelings to magnify themselves inside of it.
Inside of us.
Now, it's important not to try to force the feelings again.
We can't make ourselves feel a certain way.
Like if you're trying to grow flowers, you don't want to pull the leaves and
pull the bloom to try to blossom to try and open it up more.
You've got to give it what it needs.
Give it the nutrient, give it the water, give it the sunlight and
that will allow the flower to bloom.
Similarly, with emotions.
By looking at these various ways of cultivating emotions
then we can invite the emotions to come without trying to force them.
So now, we've been talking about emotions, we've been talking about how to
cultivate the emotions, and this brings us to the end of our first week.
So, in the second week of this course, we're going to go into more depth and
detail about emotions, about how to manage your emotions,
and we'll also explore some other related topics about how to cultivate
a positive sense of our lives,
a positive sense of what it's like to be ourselves on the inside.
So, invite you to come back for our next week.
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