Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

will eagerly cross the surface, risking potential harm, to be in the warm, reassuring midst of their mother’s smile: J. F. Sorce, R. N. Emde, Joseph Campos, and M. D. Klinnert, “Maternal Emotional Signaling: Its Effect on the Visual Cliff Behavior of One-Year-Olds,” Developmental Psychiatry 21 (1985): 195–200; M. D. Klinnert, R. N. Emde, P. Butterfield, J. Campos, “Social Referencing: The Infant’s Use of Emotional Signals from a Friendly Adult with Mother Present,” Developmental Psychology 22 (1986): 427–32.

when people emit D smiles when experiencing stress: B. L. Fredrickson and R. W. Levenson, “Positive Emotions Speed Recovery from the Cardiovascular Sequelae of Negative Emotions,” Cognition and Emotion 12 (1998): 191–220.

The definitive work on this topic: For a review of this superb work, see U. Dimberg and A. Öhman, “Behold the Wrath: Psychophysiological Responses to Facial Stimuli,” Motivation and Emotion 20 (1996): 149–82.

suggest that perceiving smiles in others, most likely of the Duchenne variety, triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine: R. Depue and J. Morrone-Strupinsky, “A Neurobehavioral Model of Affiliative Bonding: Implications for Conceptualizing a Human Trait of Affiliation,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2005): 313–95.

As one illustration: C. Senior, “Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder,” Neuron 38 (2004): 525–28.

Undaunted, LeeAnne Harker and I took a week to code the yearbook photos: L. A. Harker and D. Keltner, “Expressions of Positive Emotion in Women’s College Yearbook Pictures and their Relationship to Personality and Life Outcomes across Adulthood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (2001): 112–24.

Dozens of scientific studies have found that people who are led to experience brief positive emotions are more creative: Research by Alice Isen and Barbara Fredrickson dispels many myths about the thoughtlessness of positive emotion. Instead, the consistent theme to emerge is that positive emotions make our thought processes more creative and sophisticated. Fredrickson, “What Good Are Positive Emotions?” Review of General Psychology 2 (1998): 300–19, and “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” American Psychologist 56 (2001): 218–26; A. M. Isen, K. A. Daubman, and G. P. Nowicki, “Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1987): 1122–31; A. M. Isen, “Positive Affect, Cognitive Processes, and Social Behavior,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Leonard Berkowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1987), 203–53.

Much has been made of the toxic effects on marriages of negative emotions: For a summary of Gottman and Levenson’s research, see Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

Here Gottman and colleagues are starting to show: Gottman and R. W. Levenson, “Rebound from Marital Conflict and Divorce Prediction,” Family Processes 38 (1999): 287–92, and “The Timing of Divorce: Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce over a Fourteen-Year Period,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2001): 737–45; Gottman et al., “Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60, no. 1 (1998): 5–22.

Physical attractiveness has been shown to have a host of benefits: K. K. Dion, E. Berscheid, and E. Walster, “What Is a Beautiful Good,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 285–90.

For example, Silvan Tomkins: Tomkins, “Affect Theory.”

For Freud, many pleasurable experiences: Sigmund. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 5, trans. J. Strachey et al., (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975); Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (London: Hogarth Press, 1937).

Terror management theory, a widely influential theory in social psychology: J. Greenberg et al., “Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 308–18.