COMPLEXITY THEORY, NEUROSCIENCE AND POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: AN OVERVIEW OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS. Frank Mosca Ph.D.
This presentation will attempt to bring together a number of developments in the way in which we might understand the workings of the human psyche and the behaviors that follow on from the mind’s activity. Over the last 5 years or so, a movement called Positive Psychology has come to major prominence in the academic and gradually in the applied, clinical psychology arenas. This has happened for several reasons. As the acknowledged leader of this movement M. Seligman notes in his book Authentic Happiness: “But people want more than just to correct their weaknesses. They want lives imbued with meaning, and not just to fidget until they die….The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life’”xi
So, the assumptions and clinical strategies that dominated the 20th century [primarily derived from Freudian or psychodynamically derived approaches] began to be severely challenged with the advent of Cognitive-behavioral therapies beginning in the seventies and now that perspective is without doubt the reigning one in academic and clinical circles. Positive Psychology moves the paradigm further down the road by its emphasis on the power of energizing the strengths of human individuals to, as Frederickson says, broaden and build individual personalities and community social enterprises. [Barbara L. Fredrickson, The Value of Positive Emotions American Scientist. Volume 91 330-335] Essentially, the evidence is mounting from the many studies launched by the Positive Psychology movement to indicate that it is not only totally unnecessary to address the negative or pathological dimensions of human problems in most cases, but that to focus on them in any way only tends to degrade the broadening and building process.
It is at this point that complexity theory enters into the picture as a theoretical lens to help explain and support this controversial [from the perspective of the last century’s assumptions] way of viewing human potential. Of course, an emphasis on the positive can be found in earlier thinkers and clinicians such as Maslow, Rogers, even Adler etc., but their intuitions never were able to challenge the existing paradigm because there were no convincing evidence based studies to support them in the way that Positive Psychology has amassed and continues to amass large amounts of data from well constructed studies.
Essentially the question that has been raised by the success of some of the PP models and their associated interventions is: they work, but why [and an important connecting question which we will explore further one] how do they work? Complexity theory seems to speak well to the “why” question, whereas brain based understanding of mental functioning may well speak lucidly to the “how” question.
BRIEF REVIEW
As to the why, a short review of how complexity theory came to be applied to Positive Psychology is in order. First of course, chaos and complexity concepts have been fairly widely explored in various human behavioral contexts. Guastello’s overview article gives a fine understanding of this evolution of interest which includes a notation of my own article in the 1995 collection of articles edited by Abraham and Gilgen, “Freedom and Chaos Theory”. In that article, I offered an alternative perspective about psychotherapeutic interventions from a positive point of view, based on my own outlook that freedom is the ground of being and the ultimate attractor relevant to human experience is what might be termed the “happiness” attractor. I went further to say :
“I assert that Choice/Will/Truth/Happiness are coextensive when they are phase locked,i.e., when they are superposed in the service of implicate order creativity. It is my thesis that this occurs in the commonplace motion of everyday life when we choose to be happy, that is, to be consonant with the basic chirality or spin of the universe which I posit as the “will to happiness” which is the ultimate strange attractor in human experience. This derives from the primal inbetweeness of reality that implies asymmetries, discontinuances and therefore, strangely, hope. Hope is the understanding that since flux underlies all that is, nothing is unchangeable or fixed. The universe in its unfolding will never stop at any one informational level. Complexity is the product of the creative accumulation and structuring of information. It warrants that this moment’s vision never has to be an icon, around which a stagnant pool of linear invariance is formed. Happiness is the potential to be totally consonant with what is as it unfolds. It implies the non-judgmental transcendence of the linear blandishments of point, limit cycle or carefully tessellated tori attractors. It is the allowing of oneself to choose to go with the ontogenetic or intuitive drift of the aforementioned “vacuum” of the missing information described in Goedel’s incompleteness theorem.”
R. M.
Schwartz[2002] used the concept of balance and ratio to model relationships
where increases in positivity ratios improved mental health and therapeutic
outcomes. Earlier, Gottman in his work with married couples soon began to
understand that the fate of relationships was tied to certain kinds of ratios
of positive to negative behaviors and these behaviors could be ascertained with
over 80% reliability after only a brief interview with the couple interacting
with one another. Gottman J. M. [1994]
The expert on forgiveness and reconciliation, Everett L. Worthington, Jr., comments on Gottman and the complexity theory approach in a Chapter “On Chaos, Fractals, and Stress,” [2000] He adds his commentary to the Gottman model of a cusp catastrophe event brought on by a gradual shift in the ratio of interactions from positive to negative. Worthington blends his views of forbearing and forgiving and reconciliation and says: “ Attitudes of forbearance, forgiveness, and reconciliation maintain positive attributions, expectations, and evaluation of marital quality.” 315
What happens when those traits degrade over time supports Gottman’s theories. Here he speaks of a hypothetical couple:” They originally lived by forbearance , forgiveness and reconciliation, but at some point they began to encounter what Gottman[1994] calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse. That is, their marriage degenerated dramatically and abruptly. The happy trinity of forbearance, forgiveness and reconciliation gave sudden way to criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling[or lack of feeling for each other]. In short love died. Death, of course, is a non-linear transformation. Death of a marriage as Gottman pointed out, is similarly a non-linear transformation.”316
Worthington goes further to say that : “Gottman has shown that the transformation is non-linear and chaotic, but he is not specific about where the non-linear transformation actually occurs. That is, at what point does an “untroubled couple” who have some troubles become a [nonlinearly different] “troubled couple? When attributions for negative events shift from largely unstable, external, and specific [untroubled couples] to stable, internal, and global[troubled couples], that is the cusp of the transformation. However, consistent with the science of chaos, the cusp is extremely sensitive to initial conditions.”318
He goes on to try to explain what could mean in this context, but not too convincingly in my opinion. However, the issue remains, how would extreme sensitivity to initial conditions play out in such a scenario? The “initial conditions” would actually be the assumptive belief base or dynamic complex of presuppositions that each person brings into a relationship. This set of conditions is often overshadowed by the ascension into attention of a very large, but temporary attractor basin called romantic love which puts a whole set of constraints upon each partner in the relationship usually by amplifying to a very large degree the intensity of what might be called affiliative, conciliative and reconciliative active constructive responses, while dampening the possibly dissonant personality points of conflict, so as to create a rather false, temporary construct whose ability to retain the attention of the person fades when the strong biological dimension that fuels that attractor state begins to lose its hold and older initial conditions begin to emerge as stronger competing attractor states.
The history of the study of
positive to negative ratios is outlined as well in the work of Gable and Haidt
[2005] with the notation that we may be hardwired to notice the negative
realities in our field and that this may account for our preoccupation with
“what’s wrong with things” rather than “what’s right with things.” “The
third reason for our field’s focus on the negative may very well lie in our own
nature and our theories about psychological processes. We will touch on that
later when we speak of the dominance of error correction in the field of awareness
and the subsequent drive to correct error.
As Baumeister and colleagues (2001) have documented,” bad is stronger
than good”. In a review of the
literature they argued that negative events have more impact than positive
events and that information about bad things is processed more thoroughly than
information about good.”
Yet, studies seem to indicate that most human interactions are positive as Haidt and Gable note yet again: “ Positive events, information, processes, and interactions simply occur more frequently than negative ones. For example, when asked how often different social events occurred in the past week from a list of eight positive (e.g., “A friend, romantic partner, or family member complimented me”) and eight negative social events (e.g., “A friend, family member, or romantic partner insulted me”), participants reported that the negative interactions occurred an average of 5.9 times and the positive interactions occurred 19.0 This yields a ratio of 3.2 positive events for every 1 negative event (Gable, 2000); and the pattern of experiencing more positive than negative events has been replicated in daily experience studies that include both social and non-social events (e.g., school, work; Gable, Reis, & Elliot, 2000).”
Gable in separate work has documented the power of the positive in recording a spectrum of responses among couples with the most positive being “active constructive responding,” and the most negative being “active and destructive responding.” Again a favorable ration of positive to negative seems to support good relationships.
Barbara Fredrickson and Michael Losada have done the most focused article on the role of chaos and complexity theory in positive psychology “Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing,” with their finding being that for a study of 188 individuals :
”Results showed
that the mean ratio of positive to negative affect was above 2.9 for individuals
classified as flourishing and below that threshold for those not flourishing.”
Fredrickson had already published a good deal in support of her “broaden and
build” theory that showed for example that “initially positive attitudes –like
interest and curiosity—produce more accurate subsequent knowledge than do
initially negative attitudes like boredom and cynicism. Positivity, by
prompting approach and exploration, creates experiential learning opportunities
that confirm or correct initial expectations. By contrast, because negativity
promotes avoidance, opportunities to correct false impressions are passed by.”
This leads to more accurate cognitive mapping of reality and of potentials for further growth[correlates with attention density later]. Fredrickson says that the non-linear model best captures the dynamics of the recursive loop built by a positive affect system, i.e. “just as positive thinking and positive actions can trigger pleasant feeling states, so too can pleasant feeling states trigger positive thinking and positive actions.”
Also sensitive dependence on initial conditions is mirrored in the findings that “even mild and fleeting positive affect can produce large benefits in the long run,” for example in the long term “nun” study done by Danner et. all 2001.
Also, the complementary concept of local unpredictability and global stability is congenial to the findings in positive affect studies, following Freeman’s observations : “Chaos underlies the ability of the brain to respond flexibly to the outside world and to generate novel activity patterns, including those that are experienced as fresh ideas.” So the important notion that local resilience, flexibility and tolerance of unpredictability is a hallmark of how a system will be adaptive and successfully self sustaining.
The co- author Michael Losada displays the out come of work he had done with a series of teams in a business setting. The data coming out of the study was plotted to show a large chaotic attractor reflecting the teams with the highest positivity ratio, while those with the lowest degraded into a fixed limit cycle attractor. The behavior represented by these phase portraits were congruent with the portrait, i.e. the highest positivity groups were the most generative, happy, cooperative, resilient displaying the maximum degrees of freedom, while those with the lowest were argumentative, non creative, and focused on themselves and their own self advocacy to the detriment of the team effort. Losada’s conclusions in that study were that “higher levels of positivity are linked with a], broader behavioral repertoires, b] greater flexibility and resilience to adversity, c] more social resources, and d] optimal functioning.”
In a more recent article co authored with Christian Waugh, “ Nice to know you: Positive emotions, self-other overlap, and complex understanding in the formation of a new relationship,” Fredrickson takes these findings and extends the research into the interpersonal setting with the following proposal:
Specifically,
we propose that, when people feel positive emotions, over time, these
positive emotions become associated with greater feelings of self–other overlap
and ‘‘oneness,’’and
this broadened sense of self may predict a more complex understanding of
others. To explain the logic of this new perspective, we review relevant
findings about the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson,
1998, 2001) and the self-expansion theory of close relationships
(Aron & Aron, 1986).94
She re-emphasizes her thesis that the broaden and build momentum of positive affectivity will overcome the gravitational tug of negative emotion which may kick in as a result of atavistic residue from evolutionary tendencies required for survival and asserts:
In
the context of modern day social relationships ,the broaden-and-build theory
predicts that positive emotions broaden people’s sense of self to include
others, which over time may produce greater feelings of self–other overlap and
‘‘oneness.’’ These feelings
of self–other overlap may in
turn predict a more complex understanding of others. Having a more complex
understanding of others may then smooth the progress of the relationship,
allowing each person to better appreciate the other and continue to become
closer.94
The study ratified these predictions and added to the weight of findings that frequency rather than intensity produces the greater life satisfaction:
The
observation that, in low doses, positivity appears inert,
whereas in doses above a critical threshold (i.e.,the proposal that the processes underlying the broaden-and-build effects of positive emotions may indeed be nonlinear (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005).These findings also speak to the distinction between the intensity and frequency of positive emotions. Diener and colleagues argue that it is the frequency, and flourishing (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005).
She also makes the point about the importance of permeable self boundaries as part of a positive, self efficacious and interpersonally rewarding self system:
These cognitive effects of positive emotions may in turn account for the self-expansion reported here. Positive emotions may, for instance, broaden people’s attention to external stimuli that have potential to become part of the self, and instill people with the cognitive flexibility to see these external stimuli as relevant to self-development. Considering close others, these cognitive effects of positive emotions may allow the characteristics, perspectives, and resources of the close other to more completely merge with the self. People with flexible self-images, and for whom the boundaries between self and other is blurred, have a greater propensity to assimilate other’s positive characteristics into their own self-concept (Stapel & Koomen,)
So we have looked at two dimensions of PP: the first is that it works, and here the reader is invited to dip into the large fund of published material to satisfy themselves that this is indeed the case. Second, we have posited why it works and the answer here is reflected in the sinews of chaos and complexity theory. That is, that the fabric of reality is constructed in such a manner that there are built in bifurcation points, thresholds of emergence [many ways of describing this] which ratify the understanding that certain ratios of relationships will produce a shift in the phase portrait or possibility space of some dimension of reality under certain conditions. These conditions are fulfilled in the case of human self and other relating in either the direction of positive to negative states or negative to positive states when the mean measurement of the interaction exceeds 2.9 in either direction.[the positive to negative ratio is more by inference than study; there is some work to ratify that this is indeed a two way interaction, but the work of Gottman would seem to support what is implied in the work of Fredrickson and Losada].
Where a person ends up in terms of self created attractor states is not a matter of inevitability or ineluctability. Our next portion of this paper will demonstrate the critical relevance of a strange attractor, i.e., the heart, the very engine of all attitudinal alterations, human freedom. Freedom drives/creates the momentum to move people towards and across thresholds. Once the threshold potentials are evoked then the outcomes are critically over determined as bifurcations, ranging from mild “aha” insights to grand conversion-like epiphanies. This is also true in the mechanics of a negative, downward spiral as well.
The next issue that arises is the question how it works. Here we are helped by the latest developments in neuroscience. The work of Jeff Schwartz of USC Medical School hones in on the essence of the matter. Originally, his clinical experience with Obsessive/compulsive patients led him to postulate that what people thought about continuously really mattered, not just in the obvious frame of the psychological, but more to the point here, in the realm of the physiological, the brain in particular. [Schwartz 2002]
In another article with the physicist, Henry Stapp, the statement is made succinctly that active mental activity alters physiology. This actually explains the concept of momentum, i.e., how experience is processed and transits from one neuronal context to another, picking up speed and complexity as it acquires greater attention density: “….the conscious act of willfully altering the mode by which experiential information is processed itself changes in systematic ways, the cerebral mechanisms utilized….These willfully induced brain changes are generally accomplished through training in, and the applied use of cognitive reattribution and the attentional re-contextualization of conscious experience. Furthermore, an accelerating number of studies in the neuroimging literature significantly support the thesis that, again, with appropriate training and effort, people can systematically alter neural circuitry associated with a variety of mental and physical states that are frankly pathological[Schwartz et al. 1996; Schwartz1998; Musso et al. 1999; Paquette et al. 2003]”p5
The ability to alter brain states in support of positive functioning of course presupposes the ability to alter brain states in the opposite direction. This is where the connection with PP enters with its emphasis on positive affect and the promotion, development and application of an individual’s strengths on behalf of positive change.
The reason why the paradigm shift has taken place is because PP has demonstrated the viability of an emphasis on the positive, but with the addition of neuroscientific evidence about the nature of attention and the ability of the mind to alter underlying brain physiology, we now have an even broader and deeper reason for understanding the rationale for such a shift. To focus on the negative literally has physiological implications for how the brain self organizes. It self organizes around foci of attention and those foci get all the synaptic, neuronal growth and expansion through the direction of blood, glucose, insulin and other nutrients to support that expansion and complexification. Thus any intervention which keeps attention focused on the negative events and experiences of a person’s life is actually feeding the very system generating the problematics in the first place. Schwartz uses the term “self directed neuroplasticity” to describe the capability of humans to alter their underlying brain physiology and through alteration of attention to create alternative configurations supportive of a more equanimity compatible way of self experiencing.
Daniel Siegel takes the same tack
and develops the notion of the critical importance of people creating a
“coherent self narrative,
” that essentially is the way
they explain themselves both to themselves and to the world: “Coherent
narratives can be seen to reflect the ability of the ‘interpreting’ left
hemisphere to utilize the autobiographical, mentalizing, and primary emotional
processes of the right hemisphere in the production of ‘coherent’ autonoesis,
or self-knowledge. The capacity to achieve such internal coherence may reveal
that individual’s ability to allow for the maximal complexity to be achieved
within an interhemispheric form of integration within the brain. In this
manner, the spontaneous , free flow of information and energy between both of
the parent’s hemispheres reflects a core process of integration that enables
coherent autonoesis.89
The further development of the thesis by Schwartz and Stapp involves the assertion that brain functioning is basically a quantum event, governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and not by the classical laws of Newtonian physics. Here is their reasoning:
The advantages
for neuroscience and neuropsychology of utilizing the conceptual framework of
contemporary physics, as opposed to that of classical physics, stem from five
basic facts. First, terms such as "feeling," "knowing" and
"effort," because they are intrinsically mentalistic and
experiential, cannot be described exclusively in terms of material structure.
Second, in order to explain the observable properties of large physical systems
that depend sensitively upon the behaviors of their atomic constituents the
founders of contemporary physical theory were led to introduce explicitly into
the basic causal structure of physics certain important choices made by human
beings about how
they
will act. Third, within this altered conceptual framework these choices are
described in mentalistic (i.e., psychological) language. Fourth, terminology of
precisely this kind is critically necessary for the design and execution of the
experiments in which the data demonstrating the core phenomena of self-directed
neuroplasticity are acquired and described. Fifth, the injection of
psychologically described choices on the part of human agents into the causal
theoretical structure can be achieved for experiments in neuroscience by applying
the same mathematical rules that were developed to account for the structure of
phenomena in the realm of atomic science.”29
Thus human choice is not only a non trivial event in
evoking this process, but it is at the heart of the observer, agent based
reality of the quantum world. The ability to overcome decoherence and sustain a
global stability in the face of a chaotic, unpredictable smear of possibilities
is what choice is all about. It’s constant bifurcative activity, its attention
density, is what sustains these configurations in being, as they note:
“Active Process
1 intervention has, according to the quantum model described here, a
distinctive form. It consists of a sequence of intentional purposeful actions,
the rapidity of which can be increased with effort. Such an increase in
Attention Density, defined as an increase in the number of observations per
unit time, can bring into play the Quantum Zeno Effect, which tends to hold in
place both those aspects of the state of the brain that are fixed by the
sequence of intentional actions, and also the felt intentional focus of these
actions. Attention Density is not controlled by any physical rule of orthodox
contemporary quantum theory, but is taken both in orthodox theory and in our
model to be subject to subjective volitional control. This application in this
way of the basic principles of physics to neuroscience constitutes our model of
the mind-brain connection “54
The authors value the findings of H. Pashler [the Psychology of Attention 1998 Cambridge Mass, MIT press] and the differences between perceptual processes and post perceptual processes :
“A striking
difference that emerges from the analysis of the many sophisticated experiments
is that the perceptual processes proceed essentially in parallel, whereas the
post-perceptual processes of planning and executing actions form a single
queue. This is in line with the distinction between “passive” and “active”
processes. The former are essentially a passive stream of essentially one-shot
Process 1 events, whereas the “active” processes involve effort-induced rapid
sequences of Process 1 events that can saturate a given capacity. This idea of
a limited capacity for serial processing of effort-based inputs is the main
conclusion of Pashler’s book. It is in accord with the quantum-based model,
supplemented by the condition that there is a limit to how many effortful
Process 1 events per second a person can produce, during a particular stage of
his development. “
Indeed, that is why focus is important to produce effects; mental effort actually reduces the amount of physical force a person has at their disposal and vice versa:
The queuing effect is illustrated in a nineteenth century result described by Pashler: mental exertion reduces the amount of physical force that a person can apply. He notes that “This puzzling phenomenon remains unexplained.” [p. 387]. However, it is an automatic consequence of the physics-based theory: creating physical force by muscle contraction requires an effort that opposes the physical tendencies generated by the Schröedinger equation (Process 2). This opposing tendency is produced by the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE), and is roughly proportional to the number of bits per second of central processing capacity that is devoted to the task. So if part of this processing capacity is directed to another task, then the applied force will diminish.”56
A key conclusion for interventions of any kind and particularly for PP is the following appraisal of the authors:
“Quantum theory was designed to deal with
cases, in which the conscious action of an agent – to perform some particular
probing action - enters into the dynamics in an essential way. Within the
context of the experiment by Ochsner et al. (2002), quantum theory provides,
via the Process 1 mechanism, an explicit means whereby the successful effort to
“rethink feelings” actually causes - by catching and actively holding in place
- the prefrontal activations critical to the experimentally observed
deactivation of the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex. The resulting
intention-induced modulation of limbic mechanisms that putatively generate the
frightening aversive feelings associated with passively attending to the target
stimuli is the key factor necessary for the achievement of the emotional
self-regulation seen in the active cognitive reappraisal condition.”65
Now we can see in outline the three dimensions of PP’s success brought into focus, i.e. that it works, why it works and how it works. Several other issues remain to be explored. In approaching a person who deems themselves to be in a problematic state of some sort, what are the optimal likely strategies that might help?
First and most obviously, you want to find a way to help the person decohere that brain configuration that supports the unwanted way of self experiencing. Clearly, any continuing focus upon the mental aspect of distress will feed the brain based configuration supporting and mediating it. Thus a serious mental effort has to be made to alter that condition which is outlined in Schwartz’s work elsewhere, but involves several mental steps in consonance with what has been written in previous paragraphs, the foremost being a reattribution of attention to something else, i.e the construction of an alternative attractor state which can then begin to compete for attention with the dysfunctional one. Thus all change begins with attention as an attractor. The idea is to make the attractor as strong and evocative as possible so as to create as much assurance that the effort will succeed.
This is where the art of intervention enters the scene. Now attention can override even the most intractable obsessions and phobias. Attention might be defined as the necessary psychic energy resource that either moves in negentropic or entropic directions as indicated by the internal assumptive dynamics of that particular dimension of the self system that is driving the process. I have had many years of experience dealing with different client populations as a clinician and more recently as a coach. What is critical is the level of motivation aided by the nature of the therapeutic or helping relationship and the skill at accessing that person’s strengths so they can be applied to the specifics of the life context; all these are self activating and critical roles for freedom, which enters in under the Libet et. al. findings as the ability to veto apparent decisions already set in motion by other parts of the brain in a more autonomic manner. That is something Schwartz describes as freedom to wont, or veto power over all urges and psychic movements toward actions of any kind. I describe it in my own work as attitudinal freedom, i.e. the ability to take up an attitude toward whatever is presented to us from our own internal psychic economy or from outside or in any combination thereof. We can establish how we are going to be with this and that liberates our attention for utilization on whatever we feel will best aid us in that endeavor of attitude creation and action follow though based on that attitude.[Mosca 2002]]
Fredrickson does a marvelous job of looking at the literature and taking various kinds of interventions with a view to re interpreting them in the light of her broaden and build model:” An important feature of positive emotions is that their effects do not end once suffering is prevented or alleviated. The repercussions of experiencing positive emotions resonate further; I hypothesize that positive emotions, when tapped effectively, can optimize health, subjective well-being, and psychological resilience.”[2000]
She notes that negative emotions tend to a momentum toward narrowly focused responses, which corresponds well with the attractor states that accompany them, whereas positive emotions do have a specific goal or tendency but are expansive with a whole range of possibilities, again congruent with the attractor model involved: Negative emotions narrow a person’s momentary thought-action repertoire…..positive emotions broaden a person’s momentary thought-action repertoire.”
In speaking of joy she notes: “In other words, joy creates the urge to play and be playful in the broadest sense of the word, encompassing not only physical and social play but also intellectual and artistic play. Play, especially imaginative play, is to a large degree unscripted….Joy and related positive emotions [e.g., exhilaration and amusement] can thus be described as broadening an individual’s thought-action repertoire.”
She even notes that positive emotions like joy drive the physiological brain based configurations in the sense that Schwartz and Stapp speak of , “joy….over time….can have the incidental effect of building an individual’s physical, intellectual, and social resources.” They also represent a kind of emotional bank of resources that can be drawn upon, all of which supports the attractor model as well as the attention density concepts being presented here.
Another key concept she introduces is the “undoing effect” of positive emotions, i.e how they dampen and deconstruct negative emotional inclinations. Here is the specific mechanism she sees as operating:
Broadening may
turn out to be the operative mechanism. By broadening the momentary
thought-action repertoire, positive emotions may loosen the hold that [no
longer relevant] negative emotions gain on an individual’s mind and body by
dismantling or undoing the narrowed psychological and physiological preparation
for specific action.” This again is directly compatible with the complex
attractor model conceptualization and with the relative weights of attention
density from a brain based point of view.
She tested the model successfully: “Building on this reasoning, my colleagues and I hypothesized that positive emotions should have a unique ability to down-regulate the lingering cardiovascular aftereffects of negative emotions.” The concept of an upward spiral or positive momentum is relevant here. Her perspective posits that feeling good tends to predict further experiences of feeling good. This again jibes with what I have been saying as well about the recursive loop for both positive and negative trends.
Ultimately the drive for meaning is critically supported by the upward spiral of positive affectivity: “ I propose that the broadening effects associated with experiences of positive emotions explain the therapeutic benefit attributed to finding positive meaning. Again, the broaden and build model suggests that the momentarily broadened thought-action repertoire characteristic of positive emotions is psychologically incompatible with the narrowed thought –action repertoire characteristic of negative emotions.”
Her summary statement relevant to interventions is “ A mixed set of intervention strategies then can be woven together by the idea that each is effective because it capitalizes on positive emotions. Put differently, the broaden-and-build model provides a parsimonious explanation for how these distinct intervention strategies work to alleviate negative emotions.”
As an example I offer my work with severely phobic individuals. I would often say to them that no agoraphobic, though they may have not left the room in the house they occupied for 30 years, has ever been killed in a house fire by refusing to leave because they were afraid. No, of course not, the magnitude of the event overrides the normal imprisoning fear and brain state which would ordinarily preclude the person leaving the premises. Additionally, a cure for them was to be found in a cusp catastrophe event [perhaps metastrophe event would better describe it] in a positive direction. I would note that it would be impossible for them to panic if they were to position themselves attitudinally in a particular place with respect to their dread of feeling the panic. The way the physiology of panic operates there are only two possible states the brain recognizes: okay or not okay. You cannot possibly panic when your mental attitude is one of being okay. Now of course this took a huge amount of motivation and trust in my appraisal of the situation and it was counter-intuitive to the manner in which their panic developed over the years. Those who were able to muster up the courage to create the attitude that they were going to move past any boundaries that formerly believed to be invisibly set in stone and encounter whatever bodily feeling they might encounter with equanimity because they were absolutely possessed of the certainty that they wanted to get beyond their limitations, found to their incredible delight and wonder that their panic disappeared when they formed the appropriate mental conditions, created the attractor with enough strange qualities of unpredictability and degrees of freedom. Their change of mind/attitude altered their brain state and set in motion a rapid reversal of an often decades long enthrallment to a dread driven brain state.[illustration]
Now PP utilizes as well the notion that each person is endowed with innate strengths, what Seligman and Peterson designate as signature strengths from out of 26 basic strengths that have been distilled painstakingly from an exhaustive cross cultural review. The notion is that when a person is actively utilizing his or her signature [top 5 or so] strengths, that they are then creating in effect a personal attractor state that has the maximum of resilience, flexibility and potential creative engagement with self and the world. This is a concept that I inculcated into my own approach to helping people many years ago. Perhaps the most startling example of the use of a personal strength to alter emotional destiny is to be found in the following clinical anecdote.
An example comes to mind of my work with a man who was paranoid because of his use of a substance employed to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. This was a brilliant, eccentric scholar, who would come in and share the “horrors” of what the voices had told him to do that day. At times they told him to kill everyone in the department, or to destroy New York. Often, as you might imagine, he was quite distraught. Part of our interactions revolved around jokes; when the voices permitted, he was an excellent raconteur with a large repertoire of truly funny stories.
Now these voices represented a kind of internal committee of grim individuals given to bloody and mirthless imperatives. On one occasion I said to him: “look, why don’t you tell them some jokes?” He first looked at me rather aghast, underlining how irreverent that might be taken to be, much like getting silly in church during a sermon about hellfire and damnation. But with encouragement he undertook to do what I suggested. At first, as he would “go inside” in a typical paranoid movement of head and eyes, and return saying that nothing had changed. I urged him to keep at it. He did. Finally, many minutes later he returned to his “normal” facial set, and he broke out into a broad puckish grin “You know the one on the very end, well, he just cracked a smile.” We collapsed into peals of laughter and he then understood that there was an in-betweeness even in his psychotic inscape; and so, he became a standup comic for his internal paranoid self, with, I might add, ever increasing success.
The power of humor to both gain and focus attention is legendary. How many speakers begin their talks with a joke simply to get people’s attention. The physiology of humor shows that it is a whole brain event as well with probable GBA, i.e. Gamma Band Activity, implications. The following set of observations drawn from a scholarly blog about the physiology of humor makes relevant points:
1. The cognitive and affective components of jokes are reflected in the different brain areas that are activated, with humor activating areas used for language processing, reward, and emotion.
2. The time course of activation, as we would expect, goes from cognitive to affective areas
3. Some of the cognitive areas activated by jokes are associated with ambiguity resolution
httP://mixing memory. Bolgspot.com/2004/11/by-request-congnitive –science-of-humor.html Saturday, November 27, 2004.
[Perhaps the best exploration of the power of humor in a socio cultural sense can be found in the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin’s work The Dialogic Imagination.]
The understanding that whole brain events accompanied by GBA may be bifurcations from less complex to more complex states of mind brain experience is advanced in the paper by Ford et. al. “Reduced gamma-band coherence to distorted feedback during speech when what you say is not what you hear,” The primary point of the paper is that “Gamma-band front-temporal synchrony may reflect a ‘binding of expectation with experience.’”
This is further elaborated as demonstrating how resonances, oscillations in the brain are the key to coding and integrating information and that attention is a powerful resonantial tool to create such informational complexity:
“…evidence
is accumulating that gamma range [20-50Hz] oscillations in neurons and groups
of neurons, and synchrony of the oscillations between neurons and neuronal
groups, are a fundamental mechanism by which information is coded and
integrated in the mammalian brain… For example, attention is associated with an
increase in synchrony, not a change in firing rates, and when expected events
are experienced, there is an increase in synchrony. Such synchronous oscillations
may reflect higher-order perceptual and cognitive functions involved in making
sense of a chaotic environment, binding disparate information into a single
percept, and forming new memories. In particular, synchronous, or correlated,
neuronal firing in the gamma range may signal communication across distant
brain regions.” 144
In any event, the use of strengths to gain and focus attention is a powerful dimension of the PP perspective and both complexity theory and neuroscience support this notion very well.
My own questioning method called the Option Method is designed to alter attention by bringing the person through a series of questions to a symmetry or bifurcative dialogical moment in the spirit of Socrates. Although it seems to start by talking about what the person perceives to be their problems, what it does is lead the person rather quickly to what I call the “I don’t know” state, which is exactly where Socrates led all his interlocutors; I call it the SSS approach or the “Socratic Subversive Strategy.” The idea is that you break the hold of the attitudinal brainlock configuration and create growing decoherence by having the person demonstrate to themselves that what they say they are unhappy about is not at all what they originally believed and that eventually they have to admit that they don’t really know why they would be unhappy about what they reduce their problem to through the questioning. In complexity theory terms, what is happening is that you are introducing uncertainty and discontinuances through the dialogue into the otherwise intransigent attractor state thereby increasing the coefficient of assumption decay, weakening its hold and moving it toward a more far from equilibrium state and possible imminent decoherence as the QZE is dampened considerably. In this state the question I pose in several variants is “What are you afraid would happen if you were not unhappy about……? Or “do you think it would mean anything about you were you not to be unhappy about …..?”
At that point their facial expressions usually demonstrate a complex configuration of puzzlement and then a dawning and quite possibly extreme “ah ha” response. The assumptive basis of their negative feelings is now exposed for what it is: simply a belief in the necessity of feeling that way for a whole complex of personal/cultural reasons based on imperatives inculcated since early life and established as guiding attractor states for feelings and behaviors over the years.
Now a new template of possibilities is opened up as they see their unhappiness as an optional reality, not one genetically or environmentally hardwired in as emotional destiny for them. This can be the beginning of an upward spiral of self liberation as the attention freed from the constraints of the old attractor system, is now turned to create a new configuration/ attractor state with open ended degrees of freedom and coherence shaped by freedom. This approach is combined with a utilization of strengths that takes on much more momentum when the person feels more fully liberated from any distracting beliefs that would degrade the momentum of their incipient upward spiral of positive affect, actions and meaning attunement.
CONCLUSION: Thus, we have given some evidence for the three dimensions of PP with a particular focus on the why and how dimensions of its efficacy. We have also suggested that by viewing PP in this way, researchers and clinicians may be better positioned to make hypotheses about both studies and interventions with greater assurance of more congenial outcomes because they will be guided by known and reliable ratios and thresholds as guides and goals and as well will have the advantage of understanding how attention and its impact on brain states can be used to fashion more effective means of helping people alter unwanted personal and interpersonal ways of being, and move in an upward spiral to unheralded heights of personal efficacy, meaning and happiness.
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