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I promise this is the last of the Baumeister reviews. To wrap up the book, there is a dangling loose thread around the Pollyanna principle and the positivity bias.

Chapter 8 of Baumeister and Tierney starts off with this:

Indeed, the story copped a lot of hate in its day. The moral uplift of the glad game was seen not as bravery but as denial and even manipulation. It's sentimentality as a refusal to face real world suffering.

And thats how the term "Pollyanna-ism" came to mean being unrealistically optimistic.

By the time psychologists Boucher & Osgood discovered in 1969, that "People tend to remember, evaluate, and process positive information more readily than negative information", it was understandably tempting to name it the Pollyanna Principle.

The cognitive bias they described turned out to be real, and is now named the positivity bias:

- we recall positive words and events more easily (nostalgia)

- in ambiguous situations normal brains tend to default toward optimism (rose colored glasses)

While there ARE many more negative words, humans actually use positive words more frequently. How much more? Turns out 3-4 times as much, across all languages.

A study of 100 billion tweets, showed that positive tweets are liked and retweeted more than negative ones are. Studies of people's diaries show a similar pattern, people on average have three or four good days for every bad day.

Yes i know that we just spent several posts talking about the negativity bias. And yes, this might seem like a contradiction. How can there be both a negativity bias and a positivity bias? How do we make sense of that?.

We will come back to this question, but first lets see how the story of Pollyanna plays out.

The rejoicing texts

In chapter 22, Pollyanna meets the town reverend, Mr Ford, on the path. The man is troubled by the congregation being of late mired in "petty squabbles, tumult, wrangling and back biting". That day on the path he is contemplating his upcoming sermon, which he was planning to be themed around the bitter denunciation:

Polly hearing this, offers the minister an alternative framing:

Here Pollyanna, is teaching us how to approach 'negative' situations with a focus on the positive. This is precisely and exactly what i saw Decker Cunov doing with such sophistication in those old tapes of him at work shaping AR at Boulder.

Up until this part of the story there seems to be nothing that can touch Pollyanna's inexhaustible gladness. But as the book progresses, it shows us that her optimism is indeed neither infinite nor naive. In Chapter 26 she gets hit by a car, becomes bed bound, and overhears that she will never walk again. Whereupon she finally succumbs to a great upwelling of despair.

In chapter 28, while Pollyanna is still moping in bed, the townsfolk start turning up on her doorstep in large numbers. These are the people she had co-regulated during her regulated times, that had now come back to co-regulate Pollyanna.

Positive v negative

Ok, so how do we resolve negative verses positive. Well the answer provided in chapter 8 of The power of bad, is that the negativity bias is fast circuit (LeDoux low road, Kahneman system 1). Whereas the positivity bias is high road, system 2 thinking. In the absence of threat, rose colored glasses seem to prevail. The impact of threat is indeed higher, but our nervous system seems to compensate for the stress of its tendency to overactivate, by cortically up-regulating using the pollyanna principle.

I propose a theory to maybe explain this. That our nervous system wants to find homeostasis, and given the rule of 4 impact of bads, our brain compensates by introducing 4 times more goods into the week, during times when the presence of threat is absent.

Positivity is required to restore physiological equilibrium after negative activation (Frederickson).

Think of it this way. Threats are a risk to our life, so we have to take them seriously (which involves erring on the side of caution, Feldman-Barrett's emotion as a prediction engine). Threat detection itself is fast, and metabolically cheap, because it doesn't require CPU time from our big shiny neocortex.

But the cost of the resulting dysregulation is metabolically costly. The impact of deferring digestion, immune response, growth, reproduction etc is very high, approximately equivalent to death itself. So you could say that this is why the neocortex evolved, because even though it uses a ton of calories, it can dial down the brainstem and limbic system's many false alarms via a more sophisticated cognitive capacity. The neocortex can also detect safety per se, as not just the absence of threat, but specific cues of safety that arise from being socially engaged. Appreciation and gratitude as the new brains antidote to the old brains cynicism.

Here we see the intersection of cognitive biases and PVT. When our nervous system is mediated by the ventral vagal complex, the positivity bias rules, but sub ventral, the negativity bias reigns supreme. In this way its easy to see how either a negative or a positive spiral can take root.

Pollyanna-ism as an affect mismatch

Let's look again at how Mary Pickford, the 27 year old producer and lead actor (as the 11 year old), and Frances Marion the screenwriter, describe their distaste of the glad game.

As it happens, i have noticed a number of times during practice where stems containing appreciation can trigger adverse reactions in some people.

For example the introductory practice series has the stem, "Ways i'm strong at honor self and other are" This is intended as a broaden and build, develop my strengths rather than fix my weaknesses design. It's also a chance to pat my self on the back, in other words to nurture a state of ventral regulation.

However, what if i show up at practice, and that just isn't where my head is at. I've had the most atrocious day or week. I'm maybe extra attuned to my trauma. Maybe i am grieving. In these cases there is the very real potential for such a person to not feel seen or held. For there to be, an affect mismatch. This person might even call such an invitation "nauseating" or "confining".

So, by implication, this theory might also suggest that it is going to be hard to give enthusiastic appreciation (or reflect in a natural way) if my present nervous system state is not already somewhat established in ventral. Conversely, if my affect is rooted in low level underlying states of defense (either sympathetic or dorsal), then invitations into a ventral headspace may be dissonant or scary.

This realization has made me start offering alternative stems, and to adopt language like "We love appreciation for its regulatory value, but we also get that sometimes its just not where my head is at. In that case i invite you to use an alternative stem, such as "what is interesting about".

Sail verses keel

On the one hand: build a positive spiral, develop strengths, focus on the positive, prioritise regulation. On the other hand lean into edges, welcome everything, embrace discomfort, attend to grief, post traumatic growth etc. Hey, make up your mind already, which is it to be? This paradox has sat in my awareness for more than a little bit.

The simplest possible answer is that provided by Barbara Fredrickson, another of the champions of positive psychology. She describes the positivity measures as the sail, and embracing discomfort as the keel. One powers us forward, and the other keeps us going straight.

We need both, and the ratio matters.

3,4,5, or 20 to 1, which is it?

Baumeisters rule of 4 is a short hand for the average of a large number of studies across both biology and sociology. In biology, 3 is typical, whereas in sociology 5 is more common. They then rounded it to 4, and called it good.

Gottmans lovelab data showed 5, but its now clear from their last book that this was the ratio present during conflict. Couples who were still together 10 years after their lab work, had ratios averaging or exceeding 20:1.

I have a theory for these higher numbers. If i can achieve 5:1 during a fight, then i clearly understand the value of regulation and staying connected. Once i understand that, the glad game becomes even easier to practice, and it becomes a self reinforcing cycle where more glad begets yet more glad, until eventually it dominates and yields these very high ratios. ie. there isn't something magical or deterministic about the number 20, its just what was typically present in secure ventrally situated couples.

Wrap up

I believe that the story of Pollyanna has survived to this day because it offers us something important: an emotional strategy for offsetting the negativity bias.

We need an attraction towards positivity because without it, the negativity bias would crash our nervous systems.

I do not see Pollyanna's optimism as naive. In the story she demonstrates vulnerability, disappointment, and grief. The Glad Game is not: "Everything is great!" its "Everything is actually kind of awful, but I can still locate one point of meaning or dignity so I don't collapse." In this way it seems like a deliberate, trauma-informed regulatory tool that i am glad to have in my toolbox.

Also as a note to self, Pollyanna doesn't demand gratitude. She meets people where they are. She models the glad game rather than prescribing it. She allows others to reject it until they choose otherwise.

Pollyanna is a natural communicator and connector. She is adept at noticing what wounded people avoid, offering companionship in a non-threatening childlike way, and provides unconditional co-regulation. I see that as a model of therapeutic attunement.

She also shows us how to use our wise mind's ability to cognitively re-frame, in order to cope with real hardship, and at the same time achieve resilience and growth.

I confess to having found Pollyanna surprisingly refreshing for a story that is now over 110 years old. The story is inspiring.

I will also say that in spite of the flak, the original text of the book contains no gratuitous violence nor a preponderance of interpersonal dysfunction. Both dominant themes in fictional media today. Instead, a uniformly respectful dialog between all the characters, even the terse Aunt Polly. Not to forget that thing we love, an overriding arch of growth and development.

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Read more

Of the three different film adaptations the one i most prefer, and which seems closest to the book, is the 2003 BBC version.

• Pollyanna 2003 BBC version
• Pollyanna audiobook
• The Power of Bad