The Positivity Ratio — by Barbara FredricksonImagine you’re a water lily. It’s early dawn and your petals are closed in around your face. If you can see anything at all, it’s just a little spot of sunlight. But as the sun rises in the sky, things begin to change. Your blinders around your face begin to open and your world quite literally expands. You can see more. Your world is larger.
Just as the warmth of sunlight opens flowers, the warmth of positivity opens our minds and hearts. It changes our visual perspective at a really basic level, along with our ability to see our common humanity with others.
We know this because we’ve done studies that show this. Researchers find that when you induce positive emotion, people's brains can't help but pick up on the context, even when they were told to ignore it. When people are feeling neutral or negative emotions, they don't see the context at all.
This suggests that when people experience positive emotions, they have a wider awareness -- which may explain why people have a better memory for peripheral details when they’re remembering episodes that were positive. Positive emotions quite literally help us see more possibilities.
https://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?op=audio&tid=2430
