The Broaden and Build Theory of Positive emotion
Up until the dawn of the positive psychology movement in 2000, clinical psychology and psychiatry had viewed psychological wellbeing largely through the lens of what is wrong with us. So, when someone sought psychological help for, say, depression or anxiety, we would be primarily focused on what was going wrong for or with the person, and what they had a deficit in. Positive Psychology sought to create an academic, and then practical, arena in which we understood more deeply the role that positive emotions, positive personality attributes and virtuous living play in the human experience. That is, Positive Psychology sought to understand what was good and positive about us.
One of the main barriers to understanding positive human experiences was that we couldn’t understand the psychological function of positive emotions in the same way as we understood negative emotions. Negative emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness carry with them an “action tendency”. An action tendency is an immediate set of, somewhat specific, actions which are primed by an emotional response. An example of this being the emotion of Fear. When we feel fear, our body typically goes into a threat response, broadly making us either fight or escape from the perceived danger. But positive emotions don’t appear to work in the same way. Emotions like love, joy, interest, or compassion don’t have an immediately obvious action tendency. The consequence of this was that positive emotions, because they didn’t fit into the paradigm of which emotions were understood where left out in the cold, so to speak.
The Broaden and build theory of positive emotion was important in that it presented a new understanding of the function of positive emotions. Developed by Barbara Fredrickson, the broaden and build theory made two main claims:
- Positive emotions broaden awareness to allow new aspects of thought to creep in.
- New thoughts create opportunities to build new resources, thus enhancing survival fitness and increasing resilience to adversities.
The Broaden and Build model of positive emotion (Fredrickson, 2001).
This meant that rather that understanding positive emotions in terms of just “action tendencies” we could instead understand them in terms of “thought-action tendencies.” Simply, positive emotions broaden our range of awareness to have new, more generative thoughts and appraisals, which leads to greater opportunities to build resources.
The impact of this upon psychology and psychiatry is that new models of treatment for mental distress could consider the function of positive emotions within them. For instance, in depression, characterised by flatness of emotion, sadness and reduced motivation, we could now build upon existing treatments (behavioural activation for instance) with interventions designed to savour, develop, and enhance positive emotion, on top of addressing the negative. This is one of the aims of positive psychotherapy and my own positive psychology interest, positive psychology coaching.
In summary, Broaden and build theory has given justification to us wanting to explore and enhance positive emotions in pursuit of a meaningful life, and gives us a wider more encompassing approach to understanding the human condition.
By George Maxwell,
BABCP Accredited CBT Therapist
EMDR Association UK Accredited EMDR Therapist
MSc Positive Psychology
References
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. The American psychologist, 56(3), 218. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3122271/
