Blogs

My desire here is to weave together some of Roy Baumeister's positive psychology, with the children's book Pollyanna, written by Eleanor H. Porter in 1913. I find a surprising amount of overlap.

Sparkling sunshine

Lets look at an example of how Pollyanna leans into her unique "sparkle of sunshine". In the story this warmth would come, in time, to enliven the whole town. In chapter 6, she addresses her tightly wrapped aunt:

Listening to the audiobook version, the difference in vocal prosody between Pollyanna and her aunt is clear. One is bright, warm and un-self-conscious, the other is measured and curt. Here i do not see Pollyanna as naively or superficially cheerful, nor cheerful for cheerful's sake. I detect no hidden agenda nor sense of submission. Instead, i see her intentionally practicing something that is relationally quite sophisticated.

Now, in chapter seven of The Power of Bad, Baumeister and Tierney explore this exact same issue, when they relate how the manager of the Casablanca hotel in New York combats negative reviews online. The hotel chain has a number of times won TripAdvisor's number one hotel worldwide.

Both Pollyanna and the Casablanca manager are expressing this idea that their appreciation is not just random positivity. It is a practice of reorienting from grievance to gratitude, from helplessness to agency, and from collapse to curiosity. It is a deliberately ventral practice. Pollyanna calls it the glad game. The hotel manager calls it sparkling sunshine. Baumeister et al call it countering the negativity bias.

Self up-regulation

The book opens with Pollyanna who is perhaps 10 years old, immediately upon the death of her sole remaining parent. It was this person, her father, who had taught her the glad game. And now she is consciously using it to shape her emotional landscape. Aunt Polly for her own reasons had forebidden talk of her father. So, in essence Pollyanna is self-regulating her grief through the medium of language. Along the way, she accidentally lights up the hearts of everyone around her.

Her wisdom seems far beyond her years. So, i imagine that Porter is clearly constructing a parable here. One of the chief lessons of the parable, for me personally, is that Pollyanna does not collapse if others around her fail to reciprocate her gladness. She holds her center, in a very grounded and regulating manner. Which becomes disarming in its own way, breaking through even the crustiest of the towns people, like gruff old 'the man' on the path.

To me the word and emotion 'glad' are the epitome of the ventral vagal state. Hence, I would love to start using the word more.

Different forms of glad

I am noticing that Pollyanna uses four main forms of the glad word. And that they map onto our AR relational toolset in a rather coherent way.

1. "I'm so glad that I..."

Here she attunes to a sense of internalised gratitude, and celebrates her wellbeing, agency, and learning.

2. "I'm so glad that you..."

Here she offers appreciation, as gratitude out loud. It signals: i see you, i value you. It functions as co-regulation.

3. "I'd be so glad if you would..."

This form, as we saw in my recent post on the anatomy of a request is an AR form of invitation where there is a reinforced element of non-directiveness. It expresses desire, oooh, juicy, and it's nonverbals are all about cues of safety. It says my needs matter, and, so do yours.

4. "I'd have thought you'd be glad if..."

Here Pollyanna slips into assuming knowledge of the others desire. It's subtext is a subtle demand or expectation. But, most of the time she catches herself when she does this, like she realises that she has bent the game in a way that it wasn't meant to be bent.

Mitigating co-dysregulation

Now Baumeister makes the point, i think convincingly, in The Power of Bad that our brains are designed so that negative affect propagates to others. The loudest signal in the room wins. We might even go as far as calling this phenomenon: nervous system co-dysregulation. It takes place when we encounter someone presenting dysregulated nonverbals, even before i have a narrative about why. Lacking better information about the exact nature of the threat (is it a lion?), my nervous system's threat centers light up, automatically, via a system of nervous system entrainment. This involves mirror neurons, motor mimicry, the facial feedback hypothesis and other neuroceptive mechanisms that science doesn't yet fully understand.

He speaks of this (in many ways unfortunate) asymmetry as: where negative affect creates four times the brain activity; where negative affect registers several orders of magnitude faster than does positive affect.

This asymmetry is old. It made much more sense in a world where there were bears and marauding cannibals. Erring on the side of threat detection is what kept our genes and us alive. The huge amount of false alarms cost little, but missing a single threat might well cost us our life. This is the brain as a prediction engine, that Lisa Feldman-Barratt writes about.

Appreciating our way to a ventral headspace

Baumeister et al's conclusion is very simple: A flourishing emotional state requires intentional over-representation of positive affect to counter this asymmetry.

He cites dozens of studies that show things like: good mood rewards more good mood; acts of kindness promote connection; that a positive outlook increases success, and success makes us happy.

So what if we framed Pollyanna's deliberate use of appreciation as a tool to help keep (self and group) dysregulation at bay? As a technique for countering an ancient biological imbalance. As a strategy for ventral up-regulation in environments where our hyper sensitive threat circuitry is already super ready to fire?

If our brains are so highly tuned to threat, and ventral states are a evolutionary afterthought, something that only occurred when the tribe was fed, warm, and dry, and safe from predators, then practicing the glad game might be a way to help create those very same conditions of safety for each other, today in this rather different modern world. A world where practitioners are attempting to co-inhabit and co-develop new kinds of relationships.

That's just some of what strikes me as being at the heart of this parable. But i have a sense that it wont be my last word on Pollyanna. For sure, for sure.