Love 2.0 (10 page)

At random, blocks of these conjoint images were preceded by positive, neutral, or negative images, all rather mild. The images used to create positive emotions, for instance, showed cute puppies or delecable desserts. By tracking blood flow within the FFA and PPA, the researchers could thus compare how wide or narrow each participant’s perceptual field of view was under the influence of different emotional states. The results were clear. Negative emotions narrowed people’s perception, reflected by significantly reduced blood flow within the PPA. Put differently, when feeling bad, people were great at following
the task instructions—they ignored all that surrounded the faces so thoroughly that their brains barely registered the presence of the houses. The results for neutral states were much the same. By contrast, positive emotions broadened perception, as reflected by increased blood flow within the PPA. In other words, on the heels of seeing puppies or cake, people’s brains registered both the faces and the houses that encircled them. When feeling good, these data suggest, you can’t help but pick up more of the contextual information that surrounds you. In Huxley’s terms, positive emotions provide a temporary bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. This brain imaging study provides solid evidence that your doors of perception open wider than usual under positivity’s influence.

A related and fascinating series of studies tested stroke patients beset with brain lesions that produce visual neglect, or the inability to perceive and act on information presented within the visual field opposite the brain lesion. A patient with lesions in his right parietal cortex, for instance, is literally unaware of images and words presented within his left visual field. Using both controlled behavioral tasks as well as brain imaging, researchers discovered that when such patients listen to pleasant music, they overcome their loss of awareness. That is, they are temporarily able to see and act on information that simply doesn’t register for them while not listening to music, or when listening to music they don’t like.

One point I wish to make here is that your experiences of love and other positive emotions need not bowl you over to bust open your perceptual gates. Studies like these show that far less intense positive emotional experiences—like taking in inspiring images or listening to upbeat music—open those same doors. What Huxley described as temporary and spontaneous bypasses that circumvent the reducing valve turn out to be the orderly perceptual byproducts of commonplace positive emotions. Indeed, with the emotional know-how I offer you in part II, you’ll be able to infuse any day or activity with expanded modes of consciousness.

As positive emotions open your doors of perception, you become better equipped to connect with others. Your mind’s typical modus operandi, after all, is to be rather self-centered. Your thoughts tend to revolve around what you yourself need and want, and your own concerns. Self-absorption can become ever more extreme when you feel threatened in some manner. By contrast, my collaborators and I have conducted experiments that show how when you feel good, you see beyond your cocoon of self-interest to become more aware of others, more likely to focus on their needs, wants, and concerns, and to see things from their perspective.

Once you actually forge a connection with someone else to create a shared moment of positivity resonance, the doors of perception widen further, in unique ways. First and foremost, you come to view one another as part of a unified whole—a single “us” rather than two separate “me’s.” And compared to other positive emotions, love stretches your circle of concern to include others to a greater degree. Love carries its characteristic
care
and
concern
for others, a warmth and genuine interest that inspire you to extend your trust and compassion to them. In fact, a recent attempt to pinpoint the most essential feature of love—a feature that spans all varieties of love, from romantic to parental to platonic—identifies such care and concern, expressed abstractly as your “investment in the well-being of another, for his or her own sake,” as an essential, always-present fingerprint of love. Love’s characteristic care and concern drive you to attend more closely to other people’s needs and help you vigilantly take in and evaluate incoming information so that you can protect them from harm. Love also leaves you with more positive automatic reactions to the persons with whom you’ve shared micro-moments of positivity resonance the next time you meet, an implicit goodwill that paves the way for future experiences of positivity resonance with them. Indeed, studies show that as you learn to cultivate micro-moments of love more readily, your everyday interactions with friends and coworkers become more lighthearted and enjoyable.

Simply put, love changes your mind.

Doing

If, like me, you are a product of Western culture, odds are you tend to see the mind and body as rather separate. “Thinking” seems like one thing, and “doing” quite another. Yet this sharp distinction is only an illusion. New science makes clear that each is cut from the same cloth. Knowing then that love alters your mind’s modus operandi, swinging open your doors of perception wider, allowing you to recognize your unity with others, care for them, and capitalize on your combined strengths, should make it easier to understand how love alters your gestures and actions. For just as neuroscientific studies show that positive emotions open your perceptual awareness, kinematic studies by my collaborator Melissa Gross show that they also open your torso, literally expanding the (rib) cage in which your heart sits. When your mind and body are infused with good feelings, those feelings lift and expand your chest, a subtle nonverbal gesture that makes you more inviting to others, more open for connection.

Genuine good feelings also open up your face, as your lips stretch up and open into a smile, raising your cheeks to create (or deepen) the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes.

Any positive emotion can draw you to smile and carry yourself with a more open posture. And so any positive emotion can be taken by those around you as a sign to relax and connect. When someone feels safe enough to accept that invitation and joins you with his or her own heartfelt good feelings, love’s positivity resonance fires up. The nonverbal gestures unique to these shared micro-moments of love eluded scientists for decades. In part, this reflected early methodological choices, like overreliance on posed expressions and still photographs. More recently, scientists have taken a more holistic and dynamic look at the spontaneous nonverbal expressions that flow between two people engaged in ordinary conversations infused with mutual positivity. Widening their approach has enabled scientists to uncover the unique nonverbal fingerprint of love.

Love, this new evidence shows, is characterized by four distinct nonverbal cues. The first cue, not surprisingly, is how often you and the other person each smile at each other, in the genuine, eye-crinkling manner. A second cue is the frequency with which you each use open and friendly hand gestures to refer to each other, like your outstretched palm. (Hostile hand gestures, like pointing or finger-wagging, are by definition excluded from this category of gestures.) A third cue is how often you each lean in toward each other, literally bringing your hearts closer together. The fourth cue is how often you each nod your head, a sign that you affirm and accept each other.

Taken together, these four nonverbal cues—smiles, gestures, leans, and nods—both emanate from a person’s inner experiences of love and are read by others
as
love. Love, displayed in this way, also matters. It has force. It forecasts not only the social support people feel in their relationships but also how they deliver direct criticism, which (as I describe in a later section) has been found to predict the long-term stability of loving relationships. These four nonverbal gestures are thus a dependable and consequential sign of love.

Other nonverbal gestures can also reveal love—literally if the timing is right. For instance, when people come together and connect, their actions often come into sync, so that their hand movements and facial expressions mirror each other to a certain degree. Spontaneously synchronized gestures like these can make two separate individuals come to look like one well-orchestrated unit. This phenomenon extends beyond pairs: Just as birds migrate in flocks and fish swim in schools, large groups of people at times spontaneously move in synchronized ways. You can begin to appreciate how a football game or a concert can trigger positivity resonance on a grand scale. Through intense synchronized cheers, chants, marches, or dance, these and other ways of keeping in time together forge deep feelings of group solidarity—even throughout an entire arena.

I experienced this powerfully when I attended my first major college football game, late in August 1995, in one of the world’s largest
outdoor stadiums, the University of Michigan’s beloved “Big House,” which seats more than one hundred thousand. I was new to the University of Michigan faculty and not a sports fan of any sort. Even so, a colleague of mine urged my husband and me to attend the opening game of the football season, because “that’s what we do here.” So we went, not expecting anything in particular. The game—the Pigskin Classic against the University of Virginia and debut for new head coach Lloyd Carr—turned out to be one for the record books. Although Michigan had been favored, well into the fourth quarter, the Virginia Cavaliers had the Wolverines shut out at 0–17. Somehow, though, the Wolverines pulled off two touchdowns that put the score at 12–17. Yet their failure to kick in extra points would leave them needing yet another touchdown to win the game. With fewer than three minutes remaining, they scrambled to make several attempts, each one thwarted by the strong Virginia defense. Then, with just four seconds left on the clock, Michigan quarterback Scott Dreisbach threw a Hail Mary pass to Mercury Hayes. This was clearly the Wolverine’s last hope, and the stadium fell into near-silence with the tension of it all. Running deep into the end zone, Hayes caught the ball with his left foot just brushing the turf before sheer momentum forced him out of bounds. It was an absolutely unbelievable touchdown! Coach Carr’s new team had achieved the biggest Wolverine comeback to date. The stadium exploded into celebratory cheers, high fives, and backslapping hugs. Virtually every
body
present was part of one massive burst of celebration. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life—before or since. More than one hundred thousand people—all strangers to us at the time—were sharing the same boisterous euphoria (save for a few Cavalier fans). I’d easily call it mass positivity resonance. And what a conversion experience: From that moment on, I was a die-hard Michigan football fan. For the first time in my life, I devoured the sports pages, donned maize and blue, and fretted if I had to miss a game. That single game cemented me within my new community.

Even far subtler forms of behavioral synchrony than this can change people. Suppose from where you sit on your front porch, you spot two of your neighbors chatting near their mailboxes. Although you can’t quite make out what they’re saying, their gestures make clear that they’re engaged in a lively exchange. As one raises her brows in disbelief, so does the other. Moments later, each touches her own face, one after the other. My doctoral student Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk has painstakingly coded behavioral synchrony like this as two strangers meet for the first time. What we’ve learned is that when people move together as one orchestrated unit, they later report that they experienced an embodied sense of rapport with each other—they say they felt alive, connected, with a mutual sense of warmth and trust as they conversed. Other studies concur. When synchrony is surreptitiously produced in experimental studies—by having people walk, tap, sing, sway, or rock together in time—it breeds liking, cooperation, and compassion, as well as success in joint action. By now, you’ll recognize these various effects as pointing to positivity resonance, your body’s definition of love. From the research you read about in
chapter 3
, you can also bet that the synchrony between your chatting neighbors runs deeper than what you can see with your own eyes. Odds are that their synchronized gestures both reflect and trigger synchrony in their brain and oxytocin activity as well.

Next I turn to the ripples that love spreads out over time. As you experience positivity resonance more often, day in and day out, it affects all that you become.

Becoming

Becoming Us.
Consider your closest relationships—with your best friend, your spouse, your parent, or your child—the people with whom you feel so interwoven that you freely use words like
we
and
us
in
everyday conversation. Yet those words didn’t always fit. Even your closest relationships had a starting point prior to which
us
didn’t apply. Odds are, positivity resonance was part of the origin story for each important relationship that you have today. Think back to those origins for a moment. Was the emotion you first shared together playful amusement or raucous joy? Was it mutual fascination or awe? Or was it instead a peaceful moment of serenity or shared relief? Maybe it was some other flavor on the positivity menu. Although it might be easier to call up the day you first met or “clicked” with your best friend or spouse, the generation-spanning bonds you share with a parent or child were also forged through accumulated micro-moments of felt security and affection, communicated variously through synchronized gaze, touch, and vocalizations. One after the other, micro-moments of positivity resonance like these formed the pathways toward the relationships that you now take for granted as the most solid sources of comfort, support, and companionship in your life.

The study that Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk conducted with me, described above, tells us that as relationships are first budding, two people begin to share not only their emotions but also their motions. Spontaneously and nonconsciously, they begin to gesture in synchrony, as a unified duo. Indeed, these nonverbal signs of unity forecast a shared subjective appreciation of oneness, connection, and an embodied sense of rapport. The more that positivity resonance orchestrates shared movements between people, the data show, the more likely a relationship is to take root. Following this logic further, some choices for first dates are better than others. Dancing or canoeing (assuming you each take up an oar) could be better bets for bonding than simply catching a movie or sharing a meal. The same would go for galvanizing a work team. Whether it’s through initial icebreaker activities, a nature retreat, or ritualized ways of sharing good news and appreciations, the platforms you create for shared motions and positive emotions are what allow a team to gel.