How to Be a Better Human - How to find connection –and love– in everyday life (w/ Barbara Fredrickson)

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Romantic love isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – at least that’s one way positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson puts it. Barbara’s decades of research suggest that emotions outside of our narrow definition of love are just as important to our well-being. In this episode, Barbara shares what to look for when we want to broaden our experience of positive emotions, and suggests ways to build the consistent connection and care at the heart of our best relationships. For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I love traditions. I love a ritual. I love a routine. I love a repeated action that I can count on. Some of my attempts at creating those traditions, though, have been complete busts. For example, every year on December 12th, when the date is 1-2-1-2, I try to create

a holiday where you say everything twice, wear two items of each item of clothing, and generally just try and do everything double. I call it 1-2 day. And I have to say, this is without a doubt my wife's least favorite day of the year. Every year she sees me walk into the kitchen wearing two hats, two pairs of sunglasses, and drinking from two glasses of water simultaneously. And every year she goes, oh God, not this again. So look, not every tradition is successful. Not every tradition is going to get buy-in from the other people who would have to participate

in it. But the beautiful part when a tradition does work is that it's a way for you and the people around you to build memories and to deepen your connection to each other. Today's guest, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, is an expert in positive psychology. And she's changed the way that I think about love and friendship and how recognizing positive emotions helps cultivate those connections much more deeply. Barbara looks at what really creates those bonds between us. And her research has found that a single big dramatic day,

a one-two day, if you will, might actually be far, far less important than the collection of tiny moments that we experience together along the way. Here's a clip from Barbara's TED Talk. I'm here to take love off this romantic pedestal and clear away the cupids and the cartoon hearts and help you see love from the perspective

of science. When you really connect with another person, a beautifully choreographed biological dance is unfolding as your smiles, gestures, and postures come to mirror one another and come into sync. Your heart rhythms come into sync. Your biochemistries come into sync. Your heart rhythms come into sync. Your biochemistry's come into sync. Even your neural firings come into sync. It's as if in that micro moment, a single positive emotion is rolling across two brains and bodies at once, creating a momentary resonance of good feeling and goodwill between you. Now, what's more is that as you have more of these micro moments of connection in your daily life, it changes you. It changes you for the better, not just socially and psychologically, but also physically.

We're going to be right back with more from Barbara Fredrickson after a micro moment of podcast ads. Don't go anywhere. Today, we're talking about positivity, love, friendship, and the science of human connection with Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. Hi, my name is Barbara Fredrickson. I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So I would love to start at the beginning, which is how did you first get interested in psychology and then more specifically in positive psychology? Yeah, I have kind of superficial reasons for being interested in psychology. My big sister was a psychology major and there was a time because she was six years older than me

that I just wanted to do everything she did. She didn't continue on in psychology, but I can credit her for that. And then I had an amazing mentor as an undergraduate who helped me see that my path in psychology would be best fit by being a researcher. I'm curious because you do get interviewed a fair amount, and people cite your work a lot, what do you think people get wrong the most?

Yeah, I think what people get wrong is they think that if positive emotions are valuable, they either think you should be feeling good all the time, or that you should never feel bad, that negative emotions are somehow not valuable. All emotions are valuable when they fit the current circumstances that we're in and no emotion should be worn like a uniform, like a permanent veneer. I mean, emotions are about moments. And so having more moments that include positive emotions is great and healthy, but we shouldn't expect to be happy all the time. I've heard you talk a lot about both moments and micro moments. When we're thinking about these moments of emotions of all kinds, positive,

negative, how do you think about them in your own life when a strong emotion arises? Yeah, well, I think probably the most more useful term, I think, would be pleasant and unpleasant, because you could say all emotions are positive in terms of the outcomes that they could produce if they're in the right circumstance and expressed in a healthy way. But I think one big difference is that there's such foundational asymmetries between feeling good and feeling bad. Negative things, we tend to get riveted by unpleasant things. And for our ancestors, those could have been threats to life and limb, and the cost of ignoring them was very high. So negative experiences and negative emotions are absolutely riveting and attention grabbing. Positive things sometimes go under the radar because, you know, for our ancestors, it wasn't about, you know, life or limb, but rather opportunity. And the cost of missing an opportunity is not as big as missing a danger. And so they don't captivate our attention in the same way.

The environment, modern day environment is kind of set up to capitalize on our, you know, can't take our eyes off of negativity. So it's easy to potentially consume way too much of it. And we need to, I think it's useful to kind of cultivate your eye for the positive things. So you don't miss the subtle positive emotions that potentially we could experience them regularly all day long. So if negative emotions are inevitable and we're kind of hardwired in some ways to pay attention to them, at what point do negative emotions become really detrimental to a person?

Yeah, this is why I mentioned, you know, fit the circumstances. Because, you know, right at the moment where we're discovering we lost someone or something we really care about, sadness is absolutely the right, a fitting emotion. Sometimes it'll take people a while to get to the point where they feel like

they can express their sadness, but it's fully appropriate for that situation. Now, if immobilizing sadness were to last for weeks and months, that's a little more concerning. Same would be us to share our anger. But if we're angry all the time in every circumstance, so there's a emotional wisdom that comes from fitting the emotion to the right circumstance. And people who are most resilient have the emotions that match the circumstances the best and they don't linger on negative emotions too long. Say someone's listening to this and they're feeling like, oh, I'm maybe not in the,

I'm not in the camp where it's fitting the way or it's helpful anymore. What are some things that people can do? I mean, a very first step is realizing, you know, this isn't serving me anymore. And I think looking sometimes at what are the ways of patterns of thinking or assumptions that you've made that are fueling the continued sadness, continued anger. Am I seeing the world in black and white terms? Am I truly understanding the nuance here? How am I not letting this too shall pass unfold in my life? You know, that things change. And most often things can change for the better in terms of really significant pain, really significant losses.

It might be a wave we need to ride, but it won't last forever. It's sort of recognizing that emotion is present, accepting that it's just, it's an important part of human experience, and then riding it out. That's one of the reasons why older people are happier than younger people. Older people tend to accept their emotions to a greater degree than younger people. So it's sort of one of the pieces of lessons of life from experience. You wrote a book called Positivity, and you are the director of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, which also, first of all, you had to have done some work to make sure that it was PEP. That wasn't just coincidental, because that's perfect.

Yeah, actually, my graduate students are responsible for that. They really wanted to have the psychophysiology in there. And they're like, and it's PEP. It was excellent. That was the acronym. I think that there's sometimes positivity, especially is something that culturally we kind of think of as like, oh, well, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Are you a positive person or a negative person? That's sort of like a fixed state. And it seems as though your work and your research are dedicated to the idea that

that's not true, that we don't just have some sort of innate sense of positivity and it can't really be changed. Right. I mean, there are individual differences. Some people are a little more happy-go-lucky than others. But I think that it's important to recognize that, again, emotions are states, they're moments, they're things we can cultivate more frequently in our lives. And no matter where people are on that trait level of happy-go-lucky, you can always kind of increase the frequency of mild positive emotions. That's, you know, we don't have to be like the most intense high, or we don't have to have really prolonged positive states, but just frequent. Frequent and mild is what keeps us on the healthy side of emotional well-being and mental health. And the fact that emotions

and positive emotions in particular are fleeting, they can last seconds or minutes. It seems like from some of the things that I've read about emotions and neuroscience and psychology these days that there's an increasing sense that the relationship between our brains and our bodies is a two-way street.

So it's not like, like you think about it as like you get excited and then your heart starts beating faster. My understanding is that there's also some research that shows that like your heart starts beating faster. Your brain then says like, does that mean that I'm excited? And that it's kind of, it goes both ways, not just one way. Definitely goes both ways, not just one way. kind of lay low or stay closer to connected to your inner circle only. You don't feel like going out and meeting new people when you're sick. There's research to show that if you experimentally

create inflammation without illness, just the inflammation, that that makes people feel a little more depressed, a little more like they don't want to be with people they don't know. a little more depressed, a little more like they don't want to be with people they don't know. And it colors our emotional psychology. What's the body feeling like right now? What kind of situation am I in? And have I been in a situation like this before where this feeling goes with this circumstance and we kind of knit those together? And so, yeah, there's definitely a two-way connection between body and brain. There are ways in which we can bring these lessons into our body, right? So we can do the work of like, okay, I'm going to walk outside and I'm going to reach out to a friend, but also I can focus on some physical things I can do to actually change

my emotional state. Yeah. Get enough sleep, eat food that's going to keep you kind of steadily energized across the day as opposed to big spikes and energies and drops, regular physical activity or just going for a brisk walk. Those are all things that are really quite known to affect our mood and our outlook and our propensity to experience those mild positive emotions. We're going to take a quick break, but we will be right back after these messages.

Today on the show, we're talking with Dr. Barbara Fredrickson about her research on human connection and the science of what makes us feel loved and feel deep emotional ties to other people, whether they're friends or romantic partners. Here's another clip from Barbara's TED Talk. Love isn't just that lightning bolt experience that connects you to your soulmate. No less life-changing, it's also that simple, genuine smile that you can share with anybody all day long. Now, this isn't just some ivory tower exercise of remapping definitions. This has been a huge wake-up call for me personally.

I've come to see that every interaction that I have all day long is an opportunity. But if I'm going to step into that opportunity, I need to step out of my head and away from my keyboard and take some risks, be open, be vulnerable. And what I found is that the payoff for doing that is huge. Your TED Talk is about love and about broadening the definition of love. So we've been talking about these like small, mild, positive emotions. Why is it important to you to label the small moments of connection as love as well,

rather than just the big romantic proposals and marriages and stuff like that? Yeah, I think it's useful because culturally, we all agree that love belongs on a pedestal, that we think of it as important. And I think that by drawing people's eye to the most elemental unit of love, the smallest unit of love, sort of positive connection between people is helpful in terms of helping you see where do those important relationships start? Or how does a feeling of feeling safe and at home

in your community, where does that come from? How do we learn to trust people? The theorizing and research that my team and I've been doing points out that those moments of positive connection with others are where that feeling of feeling safe in your town, feeling trusting of another person. And so we don't have to exclusively take love as like this mysterious force that is a lightning bolt and brings people together. I think of it a little bit like comparing the sun to stars. And we know they're the same thing. But during the daytime, we just don't see stars because the sun is so bright. And so I think that's what's happening with romantic love. And it's just so big and important in people's lives that we are not seeing these other small sources of love and warmth and connection that are much more available.

Who do you think of as a person who you love? Who falls in that circle? Because it sounds like it's quite a broad circle. Yeah. Well, certainly, you know, my family and close friends. I mean, I have an inner circle of loved ones like anybody else strives to have, and they're, you know, especially important to me. But I really do feel like having done research in this area makes me much more likely to smile at somebody I pass by on the street or have a conversation with somebody in line next to

me at the grocery store. I mean, I am a really extreme introvert, but I have learned to value these moments. And I feel like my day is better because I've connected. Those are two really easy, practical ways to put this into practice. What are some other ways that people can practically expand their circle of love? You know, we all spend a long part of our day at work. Enriching the quality, the emotional quality of our connections with people on our team at work is really important because, you know, sometimes we spend more time with our work colleagues than with our family. And I think one way to increase that is, you know, be helpful, help people do their job, but also just connect with people on a human level. Like, what did you do this weekend? Or what's the most important thing that you're looking forward to? or, you know, just don't be all business.

Realize that the work is going to be better. It's going to be a contributor to people's well-being if we take time to connect human to human while we do work together. It's interesting because just thinking about in my own experiences in offices or in work settings, there was an office where people would often, when they got in, they would make their own breakfast in the little kitchen. And there was this like egg cooker thing that could cook six eggs at once. And that just became like the thing where when the egg cooker alarm went off, people would be in there and they'd be like, oh, are you going to take the last egg? Are we going to take the eggs?

And just, it's just a silly small thing. But I was like, oh, the people who eat eggs in the morning, they are all friends with each other because there's like this little ritual around the weird little dome that hard boils eggs. That became a thing where all of a sudden there's a connection. And it's not because it was some sort of big, meaningful moment where they said, like, we're going to form a cult around hard boiled eggs. It was just, they had this shared moment that they had almost every day.

Yeah, it was a ritual. They had this shared moment that they had almost every day. Yeah, it was a ritual. I mean, I think rituals are really important for giving us opportunities to connect. You don't want to force the connection. But one thing you can do is create a common kind of home base. It's creating those places where our paths cross frequently. So there's familiarity and you kind of show recognition of others. Decade by decade, we're losing this because we tend to use our

little screens to connect with our inner circle of loved ones, no matter where they are. And we don't look up from there to connect with people who happen to be where we are physically, where our feet are. I mean, we are mammals, we are creatures, we are evolved to take in and benefit from being in each other's presence. Virtual connection is a thin proxy. You said it's a thin proxy. Tell me more about that. We don't get all the same sorts of connections, emotional connections going between people. And a big part of that is that we cannot get the eye contact right. You know, right. You know, if we're on Zoom, we are kind of get the feeling of being looked at rather than making eye contact. And I think that our creature brain takes that as

being monitored as opposed to being connected to and seen. And another thing eye contact is really important for is emotion contagion, that we're much more likely to understand at a deeper level, more able to track the sincerity of people's emotional expressions when we're face-to-face and can make the eye contact right. There's some research by social psychologist Paula Niedenthal on this, how when we make eye contact, we're much more likely to mimic the smile. When we mimic the smile, there's sort of a neural mimicry that kind of informs our gut about what another person is feeling so that we get kind of cut off from that, you know, visceral feedback when we're not in person. And people are much worse at picking up deception when we're not in person, and they're better at it when they're in person. And I would argue, too, that people are much better at collaborating to create these shared positive emotional states in person.

You know, that when you're sending texts to your loved one with a little LOL or a laughing happy face, how often are you really laughing? And will they really laugh? Your laugh and their laugh don't have a chance to really build on one another and resonate. That's what's missing when we're connecting virtually. I mean, people who are listening may not be aware of this, but you and I are not in the same place right now, right? We are in different states, thousands of miles apart, and we are talking through our computers.

And so on the one hand, I absolutely understand and agree. And I mean, just to give a specific example, I have learned from doing a bunch of these interviews that if I look at your actual picture, if I look at what the image of your face that is shown to me, it actually looks like I'm looking down at my notes. So instead, I am forcing myself to look right at the camera, which is kind of a surreal like performance where I'm like, I'm trying to make eye contact, but I'm actually looking into one dead mechanical eye. But the flip side of that is, I wouldn't be able to have this conversation with you if it weren't for the

remote technology, it would be a very different conversation conversation or it wouldn't have happened at all. Yeah. I mean, some people would argue that it might be better if it's only audio because there isn't a misfire with the eye contact. So I totally appreciate that you look at the camera eye and I'll try to do the same thing. I'm not telling you that you have to make eye contact with your computer. But even if you do that, it's not eye contact. It simulates eye contact a little bit. What happens when we are physically face-to-face? What happens to our bodies when we are connecting with someone else? You know, it's interesting how much our physiology comes into synchrony. There's research to show that having a conversation where you're closely following what the other person is saying and jumping in, that two individuals' brain activity is kind of moving along in the same way. We find that with physiology in terms of heart rate and sweat gland activity,

that there's much more likely to be a synchrony in reactivity, especially when people are connecting over positive things, sharing a positive emotion at the same time. So it's really like the same emotion is rolling through two brains and bodies at once, or, you know, maybe in a small group with others similarly. We locate emotions within the boundaries of an individual more so than we should. Emotions, I think, transcend people and connect people as well. You know, in my professional life as a comedian, when you see people in a crowd laugh,

it is not one person laughing. That's so rare. It is this communal laugh. And that really does resonate, right? It's not like the idea that this is a communal experience. I think often I think of that as like a performance. You're having this communal experience, even when it's not a performance, when everyone's not directed towards a stage, right? I'm driving along on a road trip with some friends. And all of a sudden, you all have the same like giddy, out of control laughter over something that is not funny at all. And that's just this shared experience that you can't even explain afterwards. Like that's a shared experience where it's not just one person's emotion. It's extremely contagious, but maybe that even the idea of contagion is wrong because it's actually, it makes it sound like it's spreading. Yeah. It's collaborative. Yeah. I think of it as collaborative or co-experienced because contagion does still fit that model of it jumped from one person to the next. Yeah, our physiology is really wired to connect in this way, to really pick up emotional nuances and see what they mean for us and also to build closeness, when positivity, any positive emotion is resonating between people

in this warm, caring way, that's what I call this moment of love, that the most elemental unit of love, that it's not a different positive emotion, but it's any positive emotion when it's shared or collaborative or co-experienced. It makes me immediately think that it must be extremely important then who we allow into our circle of collaboration. Definitely. There's a classic sociological study of networks that shows that your friend's friend's happiness contributes to yours, you know, and that being in a network of friends or co-workers that have a lot of depression and negativity makes it more likely that you will also be experiencing something similar. And the reverse is true for happiness, that happiness is not just

spreads, but it's a collective phenomenon. It's not like we don't feel positive and negative emotions on our own, but they hit us in a deeper way, and they benefit us in a more significant way when they're collaborative and shared. I'm sorry if this is a very basic question, but you study this. How do you study this? What does your research actually look like? There's a bunch of different ways that we look at the concept that I call positivity

resonance, which in my book, Love 2.0 is what I call love, these moments or micro moments of positive connection. One is by asking people to recall a recent in-person interaction with somebody and to reflect on what happened between you and another. And so instead of having a questionnaire that says, oh, did you like this person? Were you happy? You reflect on, was there a sense of mutual warmth between you? Did you feel in sync with the other person? Did you feel energized and uplifted in each other's company? Another way we look at it is we try to get more objective by looking at shared physiology. Is there a synchrony in biological responses? Is there a synchrony in nonverbal responses like people are nodding at the same time, smiling at the same time, leaning forward at the same time? time. And then when we get people into the laboratory and videotape an interaction, we can show them the videotape of that interaction later and ask them to rate moment by moment,

how positive or negative were you feeling during that interaction? Can you define positivity resonance? What is positivity resonance? Yeah, I do limit it to face-to-face from the data that we've gathered over the years, but a moment of in-person connection that is characterized by a trio of three features, shared or co-experienced positive affect, positive emotion. There's a pleasant sense in both people at the same time that there is a synchrony in caring, nonverbal expression. So smiling, nodding, leaning in, that both people are sort of engaged in the same tempo of warm gestures. And we've talked about a couple of

different ways of things that people should do to make sure that they have more connection and more of these moments of love and social positive emotions. What are some things that people should not do? What are the mistakes that people make? One mistake would be to, oh, synchrony is important. Maybe I should like model other people's gestures. Oh, I was absolutely thinking that I should do that. When you said it, I was like, okay, I can just like do a little mirroring exercise. Yeah, no, I think that takes you out of the moment too much. It puts your attention in the wrong place. I think being curious about other people, trying to figure out what, oh, this is a kind

person. I always want to connect with them and then realize, oh, I could be that kind person that other people want to connect to. Looking up from your phone screen is something we don't do enough. We kind of get really pulled into our tiny screens, even in very public venues. There's an opportunity cost. You're missing connection with people around you. And the hard thing is that people misestimate how much they think other people don't want to

talk to them. There have been studies on talking to strangers that suggest that people anticipate that it's going to go badly, I'm going to be awkward. They're not going to want to talk to me. And then when they actually do have that conversation, they're like, oh, that went really well. They really liked me. And I don't think it was so awkward at all. What's the last moment of connection like that that you've had like today or this week? What's the last one that you can remember most recently? Oh, I mean, I was teaching my big class this morning. I have more than 300 students, but I team teach it with a couple of colleagues and a number of, you know, teaching assistants and grad students. And, you know, we're high-fiving and giving each other, like, good to see you,

you know, and even though we just saw each other a couple of days ago, our course is called Health and Happiness. So, you know, it's kind of fun that I'm teaching it with people who really live it. Well, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for making the time to be on the show. Yeah, this has been fun. Thanks. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me,

including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by four strangers on a bus, Ban Ban Chang, Daniela Balarezo, Chloe Shasha Brooks, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by the eternally positive Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas. On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team that high-fives even more than Dr. Fredrickson's graduate students do. I'm talking Morgan Flannery, Noor Gil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this whole thing possible.

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