The goods in everyday love: Positivity resonance builds prosociality.

Abstract

The positivity resonance theory of coexperienced positive affect (Fredrickson, 2016) identifies the emotion of love as a collective state. This state, termed positive resonance, is defined by the presence of three key features: shared positive affect, caring nonverbal synchrony, and biological synchrony. The current study examined whether a modest behavioral intervention focused on increasing social connectedness could increase study participants' perceptions of day-to-day positivity resonance with corollary impacts on their tendencies for prosociality and self-centeredness. Adults (N = 416, M age = 33.8) were randomized to one of four study conditions: either of two variants of the social connectedness intervention or either of two control groups. Positivity resonance, prosociality, and self-centeredness were measured nightly for 35 consecutive days. Dynamic multilevel factor models of nightly reports showed significant growth in positivity resonance, relative to a passive control group, for the two intervention groups and higher mean levels of prosociality for one of them. In addition, significant dose-response relations were evident (both between persons and within persons), linking positivity resonance to both prosociality and self-centeredness. The within-persons effect for prosociality (but not self-centeredness) was significantly stronger for those randomized to the intervention groups, relative to both passive and active control groups. Taken together, findings suggest that the affective quality of people's day-to-day social encounters may have implications for community flourishing. Discussion centers on theoretical and practical implications as well as directions for future research.

Does Shared Positivity Make Life More Meaningful? Perceived Positivity Resonance is Uniquely Associated with Perceived Meaning in Life

“…Yet, as shown in Studies 1-2, mindfulness meditation practices can boost positivity resonance. Although in (Zhou et al, 2022) we had hypothesized that instructing participants to focus specifically on creating moments of positive social connection would have a larger effect on positivity resonance, the effect of this intervention did not differ significantly from that of the Mindfulness intervention. Hence, for present purposes, and in accordance with our pre-registered analysis plan, we collapsed the Mindfulness and Social Connectedness conditions into a single Experimental group (n = 303).…”

“…Past work indicates that positivity resonance and its components are associated with a variety of social resources, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally . Self-reports of perceived positivity resonance are associated with and less loneliness cross-sectionally (Major et al, 2018), and stronger prosocial tendencies (West et al, 2021;Zhou et al, 2022) cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Observer ratings of behavioral indicators of positivity resonance are crosssectionally associated with marital satisfaction in long-term couples (Otero et al, 2020).…”

“…Participants indicated the proportion of time (from 0% to 100%) that they "...experienced a mutual sense of warmth and concern toward one another" and "...felt 'in sync' with the other(s)". We chose these items because they encompass the key features of positivity resonance (i.e., shared positive affect, mutual care, synchrony), and because this 2-item scale was extremely highly correlated (r = .97) with the full scale in another study (Zhou et al, 2022). This episode-level measure displayed good internal reliability (coefficient 𝜔 = .92/.86 between-/within-person for both students and adults).…”

“…Further details regarding this larger experiment and previous analyses have been reported elsewhere(Zhou et al, 2022). Does Shared Positivity Make Life More Meaningful?…”

Positivity resonance in long-term married couples: Multimodal characteristics and consequences for health and longevity.

“…Considering mounting evidence underscoring the importance of high-quality social connections in daily life, positivity resonance should be evaluated as a potential intervention target to determine if it can lead to improvements in health and well-being throughout society (cf. Zhou et al, 2021).…”