As I’ve progressed through graduate school, I’ve had to face the sad reality that as I learn more, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain to the world just what it is that I’ve dedicated my life to studying. Not only have I become so entrenched in my specific area of study, but I’ve also spent the majority of the past five years immersed among academics who speak the same obscure language. This isn’t a problem until I’m in the company of non-academics and someone asks me what I do and I start rattling off some mumbo jumbo about health communication and media effects and Lazarus and Folkman’s classic cognitive phenomenological theory of stress and wait…what? Or worse, if I’m in mixed company and I make a joke about the likelihood that the Yankees will win the game once Mariano Rivera comes out from the bullpen being significant at the p < .001 level and I’m like “Haha, I’m funny!” and mostly everyone else is like “Wait…what?” because they either don’t know that Mariano Rivera is the greatest closer of all time (Comm grads, I’m looking at most of you), or they’re not familiar with p-values.
Anyhow, the above is a disclaimer, because in service of telling you about Thank You Card #3, I have to write about what it is that I study. I’ll attempt to write it as non-snooze inducingly as possible if you try to stay awake. Here goes: broadly, I study health communication and media effects—this means I look at the ways that people use media (tv, internet, etc.) to communicate health information or promote positive health outcomes, such as behavior change or stress reduction. Over the past couple years, I’ve become increasingly interested in the latter, and as such, the dissertation I’ve developed is a media-based intervention designed to generate positive emotional experiences for people who are coping with chronic illness. That is a fancy way to say I’m using YouTube clips to make people feel happy or hopeful (depending on the condition to which they’re randomly assigned). But okay, so they feel happy…then what? And this is where the recipient of Thank You Card #3 comes in.
My dissertation is an applied research project (which means it might be useful in the real-world), but it is grounded in theory so I can make predictions about what should happen. The main theoretical rationale that underpins this project is Richard Lazarus’s cognitive appraisal of emotions. He argues that each emotion has its own “plot.” When you feel angry, for example, it’s because you perceive that someone has committed a demeaning offense against you or yours. Emotions also have action tendencies, which means that they typically motivate specific behavioral responses. Now that you’re all angry, your likely course of action is to retaliate (though this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to act on this motivation, just that it’s there). So, for each emotion you have the cognitive experience and a behavioral motivation. This is really cool, and it’s been the basis of so much amazing work, the bulk of which has focused on negative emotions — which is why I’m sending a heartfelt thank you to Barbara Fredrickson for her “broaden-and-build” hypothesis of positive emotions.
The B&B hypothesis says that positive emotions momentarily “broaden” one’s outlook, and over time, these expanded mindsets build psychological, social, and physical resources, all of which can help people cope with stressors. I love this work not only because it fills the gap of addressing positive emotions, but also because it makes predictions for both the immediate and long term effects of positive emotional experiences. (It’s also pretty easy to understand, no?). Furthermore, Fredrickson has conducted some very cool studies to test the “build” hypothesis. For instance, she and her team developed a meditation program designed to cultivate positive emotional experiences for a group of CompuServe employees during their lunch breaks over the course of a few months. The intervention increased daily experiences of positive emotions, which over time built resources such as social support; distal outcomes included enhanced life satisfaction and decreased symptoms of depression relative to control groups. That’s awesome! So, to take stock, Barbara Fredrickson has not only identified a giant gap in the emotion literature – no one really paid attention to positive emotions – but she also thought hard about how positive emotions are different in nature from negative emotions, not just in terms of their valence, but in terms of the cognitive and behavioral patterns they motivate. She then took it a step further and argued that positive emotional experiences are beneficial, and showed that they could actually counteract some of the damages of negative emotions. This is not even taking into consideration that her work has been with “real people” (i.e., not undergraduate samples) and conducted over time.
So, I owe a lot to Barbara Fredrickson, because not only does my dissertation borrow from her theorizing (as well as Lazarus’s) to make predictions about the cognitions and behaviors that hope should motivate versus those that joy should motivate, but also because I’m inspired by the way she conducts research. I feel it’s not often enough that you find the combination of someone who can do amazing theoretical work and take the time to apply it in real-world contexts to see if it actually works. She has done both, and for that reason she’s one of my academic heroes. And any time you find an academic hero, you have to thank that person, because he or she can represent a beacon of light in the long tunnel that is grad school.
