Undoing our emotions a

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Reading Practice
 
UNDOING OUR EMOTIONS
 
A. Three generations ago, 180 young women wrote essays describing why they wanted to
join a convent (a religious community of nuns). Years later, a team of psychological
researchers came across these autobiographies in the convent’s archives. The researchers
were seeking material to confirm earlier studies hinting at a link between having a good
vocabulary in youth and a low risk of Alzheimer’s disease in old age. What they found was
even more amazing. The researchers found that, although the young women were in their
early twenties when they wrote their essays, the emotions expressed in these writings were
predictive of how long they would live: those with upbeat autobiographies lived more than
ten years longer than those whose language was more neutral. Deborah Danner, a
psychologist at the University of Kentucky who spearheaded the study, noted that the
results were particularly striking because all members of the convent lived similar lifestyles,
eliminating many variables that normally make it difficult to interpret longevity studies. It
was a phenomenal finding’, she says. ‘A researcher gets a finding like that maybe once in a
lifetime.’ However, she points out that no one has been able to determine why positive
emotions might have such life-extending effects.
B. Barbara Fredrickson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, believes
that part of the answer is the ‘undo effect’. According to this theory, positive emotions help
you live longer by shutting down the effects of negative ones. Fredrickson’s theory begins
with the observation that negative emotions, like fear and stress, enhance our flight-or-fight
response to very real threats. However, even when the emergency is gone, negative
emotions produce lingering effects. Brooks Gump, a stress researcher at the State
University of New York, explains that one of these effects is excessive cardiovascular
reactivity. Behaviourally, Gump says, this reactivity is related to excessive vigilance: the
state of being constantly on guard for potential dangers. Not only is it physically draining to
live in a perpetual state of high vigilance, but high cardiovascular reactivity could be linked
to increased chances of a heart attack.
C. Fredrickson believes positive emotions work their magic by producing a rapid
unwinding of pent-up tension, restoring the system to normal. People who quickly bounce
back from stress often speed the process by harnessing such emotions as amusement,
interest, excitement, and happiness, she says. To test her theory, Fredrickson told a group
of student volunteers that they had only a few minutes to prepare a speech that would be
critiqued by experts. After letting the students get nervous about that, Fredrickson then told
them they wouldn’t actually have to deliver their speeches. She monitored heart rates and
blood pressure. Not surprisingly, all students got nervous about their speeches, but those
who viewed the experiment with good-humored excitement saw their heart rates return to
normal much more quickly than those who were angry about being fooled. In a second
experiment, Fredrickson reported that even those who normally were slow to bounce back
could be coached to recover more quickly by being told to view the experiment as a
challenge, rather than a threat.
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D. Fredrickson believes that positive emotions make people more flexible and creative.
Negative emotions, she says, give a heightened sense of detail that makes us
hypersensitive to minute clues related to the source of a threat. But that also produces
‘tunnel vision’ in which we ignore anything unrelated to the danger. Fredrickson speculated
that just as positive emotions can undo the cardiovascular effects of negative ones, they
may also reverse the attention-narrowing effects of negative feelings: broadening our
perspectives.
E. To verify her theory, Fredrickson showed a group of students some film clips- some
saw frightening clips, some saw humorous ones or peaceful ones. They then did a
matching test in which they were shown a simple drawing and asked which of two other
drawings it most resembled. The drawings were designed so that people would tend to give
one answer if they focused on details, and another answer if they focused on the big
picture. The results confirmed Fredrickson’s suspicion that positive emotions affect our
perceptions. Students who had seen the humorous or peaceful clips were more likely to
match objects according to broad impressions.
F. This fits with the role that positive emotions might have played in early human tribes,
Fredrickson says. Negative emotions provided focus, which was important for surviving in
life-or-death situations, but the ability to feel positive emotions was of long-term value
because it opened the mind to new ideas. Humour is a good example of this. She says:
‘The emotions are transient, but the resources are durable. If you building a friendship
through being playful, that friendship is a lasting resource.’ So while the good feelings may
pass, the friendship remains. On an individual level, Fredrickson’s theory also says that
taking time to do things that make you feel happy isn’t simply self-indulgent. Not only are
these emotions good for the individual, but they are also good for society.
G. Other researchers are intrigued by Fredrickson’s findings. Susan Folkman, of the
University of California, has spent two decades studying how people cope with long-term
stresses such as bereavement, or caring for a chronically ill child. Contrary to what one
might expect, she says, these people frequently experience positive emotions. ‘These
emotions aren’t there by accident’, she adds. ‘Mother Nature doesn’t work that way, I think
that they give a person time out from the intense stress to restore their resources and keep
going. This is very consistent with Fredrickson’s work.’
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