One of the greatest positive emotions is love. When it comes to love, poets outdo positive psychology researchers because poets capture the passion, beauty, and awe of love (especially romantic love). One of the most famous poems about love is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, seen above. She begins with the all-encompassing feelings of love and shows how neither time nor place nor level of existence will ever change her feelings of love. Barrett Browning’s level of love connection is awe-inspiring. In her words:
“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.”
She brings us to that sense of self-transcendence through our connection with another. Here, I think she is describing not only a POP (Pocket of Positivity), the sensation of feeling love in and of itself, but also a MOM, an above-self Moment of Meaning, mattering, and purpose.
Barbara Fredrickson describes the emotion of love this way: “Love draws you out of your cocoon of self-absorption to attune to others. Love allows you to really see another person holistically, with care, concern, and compassion.” She defines “love-the-emotion as a micro-moment of positivity resonance in which three core elements appear—(1) shared positive emotion, (2) mutual care, and (3) biobehavioral synchrony—(these) emerge with temporal coherence between and among people.” Here, she is describing the emotion as well as the ingredients of the relationship, and she explains that love can be a spiritual, self-transcendent state. She uses the metaphor of a mirror to illustrate that, in that moment, you mirror each other’s positive emotional state, gestures, biochemistry, and care and concern for each other. “For just a moment, you each become something larger than yourself.”
Part of the biochemistry created is the increase in oxytocin, often called the love hormone, which makes us feel closer to others and physiologically regulates our cardiovascular system (Fredrickson, 2018). Oxytocin also decreases inflammation (produced by proinflammatory cytokines), and research has shown that with higher oxytocin levels, we also see higher cardiac vagal tone and lower hypertension. These represent the Physical (the second “P” in PIPS—psychological, intellectual, physical, and/or social) resources we get from positive emotions like love. Additionally, when intranasal oxytocin was delivered to subjects vs. controls, results showed a boost in positive emotions during a loving-kindness meditation and a mindfulness meditation.
Thus, oxytocin can increase positive emotions when we meditate. If we meditate with emotions such as awe, gratitude, inspiration, and love, these effects can be more clearly seen. Here again, we see, on a physiological level, that positive emotions have a generative effect. In this case, the generative effect is to make positive emotions more pronounced under some conditions. This research tells us that there is a dynamic relationship with positive emotions on a biological, psychological, and social level.
As mentioned in Fredrickson’s work, researchers have found that negative psychological or social conditions are associated with increased proinflammatory cytokines (a marker of inflammation) and a decreased expression of genes associated with antiviral responses and IGg antibody synthesis. However, research has found that positive emotions and purpose are significantly related to the opposite of the negative gene expression above. In other words, inducing purpose-laden positive emotions may decrease proinflammatory cytokines (inflammation) and increase antiviral and antibody responses in our body.
A perfect example of a purpose-laden positive emotion is the loving-kindness meditation. Loving-kindness meditation can influence our physiology, spirituality, and subjective well-being. An interesting study done by Chao Liu and others (2020) taught a loving-kindness meditation to flight attendants to see its effects on spirituality, mindfulness, and subjective well-being. They postulated that flight attendants undergo much stress due to their working conditions and the emotional labor needed to be happy and friendly no matter the circumstances.
They posited that mindfulness, spirituality, and a sense of subjective well-being would help them maintain emotional regulation and overall happiness while doing their job. This would then translate to better service provided to customers. The experimental group received loving-kindness meditation training, while the waitlist control group did not. The results showed that the loving-kindness intervention significantly affected both spirituality and subjective well-being in the flight attendants.
Other research by Fredrickson et al. (2017) showed that loving-kindness meditation increases positive emotions over time, along with mindfulness meditation; however, only the loving-kindness meditation showed greater and stronger effects for individuals who practiced more frequently. Interestingly, neither mindfulness nor loving-kindness meditation had any effect on changing negative emotions.
The loving-kindness meditation is an efficient way to experience love, increase eudaimonia, influence physical health, and increase spirituality and well-being. This meditation has multiple benefits:
♡ It also sets an intention to love and creates a purpose to care for all.
♡ It reminds us that we matter, and so do others.
♡ It increases our feelings of connectedness with others and our social resources.
- the psychological resource of loving and being loved, which can promote flourishing and subjective well-being;
- the intellectual resource of broadening our outlook and intention to love ourselves and to love others, even those whom we do not know or get along with;
- the physical benefits of the parasympathetic nervous system, to calm ourselves and to replenish ourselves by putting reserves back into our system rather than spending them as the sympathetic nervous system does; and finally,
- the increase in social resources because by setting an intention to love and be kind to others, we are increasing our feeling of connectedness with others.
I also resonate with Thich Nhat Hanh’s view of love. That we “understand” the other’s suffering fully, whether it is physical, psycho-emotional, or spiritual. Thus, his quote, “Understanding is love’s other name,” has been cited many times. He says that we find love by being able to love ourselves, but without understanding ourselves, we tend to have illusory infatuations. Here are his exact words:
“Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong. We expect and hope for something much better, so we’ll feel less alone and less empty. The desire to understand ourselves and to understand life is a deep thirst. There’s also the deep Thirst to love and be loved. … When you love someone, you have to have trust and confidence. Love without trust is Not yet love. Of course, first, you have to trust, respect, and have confidence in yourself. Trust that you have a good and compassionate nature…You are part of the universe; you are made of stars. When you look at your loved one, you see that he is also made of stars and carries eternity inside.”
