We speak with Professor Barbara Fredriksson, the world-renowned specialist in emotions research and one of the leading scientists in positive psychology, who tells us more about her theories and how leaders can apply positivity.
Interview by Armin Forstner
Professor Fredrickson, you are the pioneer in understanding the effects of positive emotions and how to create them. Can you talk us through your main theories and why positive emotions are so important for the everyday experience?
I think positive emotions are so important because I believe that they are the drivers of positive organising and positive leadership. I think it is important to draw people’s attention towards these very small moments, because it is these that change the way in which our brains work, by changing the way we connect with other people and through changing our developmental trajectories over time. All of this work is really an adjunct from the ‘broaden and build theory’, which is now 20 years old, as it was first published in 1998.
I developed the ‘broaden and build theory’ because I had noticed that in the emotional science literature at that time, almost everything that scientists were doing to understand emotions was about trying to understand negative emotions. I’ve always been really interested in tackling new frontiers or unchartered areas, and so I was drawn to this research simply because it was unchartered territory.
When I was beginning to learn about positive emotions, the first thing I noted was that they helped to undo the lingering aftereffects of negative emotions. I then began to think about this finding, and I could see that it had an undoing effect at the physiological level. Therefore I wanted to step back, and try to think about this effect from an evolutionary functional analysis perspective, and that is what led me to develop the broaden and build theory.
