Integrative Medicine Research Lecture Series Archive

Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D. is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (PEP Lab) at the University of North Carolina. She is a leading scholar studying positive emotions and human flourishing, and her research on positive emotions and lifestyle change is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fredrickson has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and two books, Positivity and Love 2.0, geared toward a nonscientific audience.

The ability to self-generate meaningful positive emotions and share them with others is essential to health from infancy to old age. In this presentation, Dr. Fredrickson will justify this claim by drawing on her broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions as well as the new concept of positivity resonance along with the latest supporting evidence. The theory holds that, in the moment of experience, positive emotions expand people's awareness (the broaden effect) and that, over time, moments of expanded awareness accumulate and compound to increase people's resources for living well (the build effect). Dr. Fredrickson postulates that when positivity resonates between and among people, the broaden and build benefits increase considerably. Experiments from multiple laboratories now support the broaden effect of positive emotions, using behavioral measures as well as eye-tracking and brain imaging. More recently, field experiments have tested the build effect of positive emotions, finding that people can reliably increase their daily diets of positive emotions and positivity resonance through the contemplative practice of loving-kindness meditation, and by doing so, they nourish growth in their personal resources. Improved resources, including perceived mindfulness, environmental mastery, self-acceptance, positive relations with others, and physical health, in turn contribute to increases in life satisfaction and reductions in depressive symptom. Moving beyond self-reported resources, a recent field experiment finds that the practice of loving-kindness meditation also increases people's cardiac vagal tone, a biological marker of health and flexible self-regulatory capacity. These new data deepen the evidence that contemplative practices transform enduring biological functioning in ways that may promote both mental and physical health.

Watch the lecture at: http://videocast.nih.gov/Summary.asp?File=17839&bhcp=1