Barbara Fredrickson, Positive Psychology

Transcription of the video

Q1

Which domain or aspect of social life will show the most significant positive societal and/or psychological change in response to the pandemic?

People become more aware of the importance of the expression of positive emotions when they’re in ordinary day to day interactions with others.

Q2

What kind of wisdom will people need to capitalize on the positive societal and/or psychological change after the pandemic?

The kind of wisdom people will need is to when they’re wearing a face mask to compensate for the expression of positive affect, because making eye contact with somebody is very much without a smile, viewed as threatening, but with a face mask eye contact could be viewed as threatening unless we compensate that with more verbal expression of positive affect or other nonverbal signs, maybe holding your hand on your heart while you’re looking at somebody or otherwise, making the gesture gentle, so we’ll need to find other ways to compensate for the reduced expression of positive emotion.

Q3

Which domain or aspect of social life will show the most significant negative societal and/or psychological change in response to the pandemic?

The negative change that I worry about is that people will slowly begin to ignore unfamiliar people within their social network. As we practice social distancing, we hang back from unfamiliar people. And our day to day interactions with people we don’t know are a huge contributor to our own mental health and also to societal health in terms of building our pro social tendencies.

Q4

What kind of wisdom will people need to master to overcome major negative societal and/or psychological changes after the pandemic?

The wisdom to avoid these outcomes is to keep in mind how vital interactions with strangers, acquaintances less familiar coworkers are for our own mental health and for societal health. And just consciously, deliberately put ourselves in those situations even when they’re awkward, and communicate warmth and positivity, even masked as much as we can and if we make those a priority, we’ll keep our own individual and collective well being guarded.

Q5

What piece of wisdom do people need to make it through the pandemic?

It’s really important not to let social distancing become social isolation or worse. Social indifference. We very much need our day to day ordinary, mild, brief, positive interactions with people, including unfamiliar people to become our best selves.

Barbara Fredrickson, Positive Psychology

Biography

Positive Psychology

Barbara
Fredrickson

Social Connectedness

Sympathy & Compassion

Optimism / Positivity

Improve Communication

Estrangement & Alienation

Decreased Well-Being

A time-capsule of scientists’ hopes and worries about the post-Covid future.

Igor Grossmann, Ph.D.
Founder

Project Team

Wisdom & Culture Lab