What Makes Individuals, Relationships and Work Teams Flourish?

"Extending Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and Losada’s model of team performance, the authors predict that a ratio of positive to negative affect at or above 3 to 1 will characterize individuals in flourishing mental health.

Participants completed an initial survey to identify flourishing mental health and then provided daily reports of experienced positive and negative emotions over 28 days. Results showed that the mean ratio of positive to negative affect was above 2.9 for individuals classified as flourishing and below that threshold for those not flourishing.

Past research has shown that for individuals, this ratio predicts subjective well-being. Pushing further, we hypothesize that—for individuals, relationships, and teams—positivity ratios that meet or exceed a certain threshold characterize human flourishing.

Although both negative and positive affect can produce adaptive and maladaptive outcomes, a review of the benefits of positive affect provides a particularly useful backdrop for our theorizing.

Despite the momentary unpredictability of affect and behavior, over time, people who regularly experience positive affect exhibit greater resilience to adversity.

Within married couples, greater marital happiness is associated with less predictability from moment to moment as spouses interact, and yet, over time, these marriages are the ones most likely to last.

Within business teams, higher levels of expressed positivity among group members have been linked to greater behavioral variability within moment-to-moment interactions as well as to long-range indicators of business success.

And within organizations, positive experiences have been linked to broader information processing strategies and greater variability in perspectives across organizational members as well as to organizational resilience in the face of threat.

Several recent research reviews have concurred that “bad is stronger than good.” The implication is that to overcome the toxicity of negative affect and to promote flourishing, experiences of positivity may need to outnumber experiences of negativity, optimal mental health is associated with high ratios of positive to negative affect.

According to this model, normal functioning is characterized by ratios near 3 to 1 whereas optimal functioning is characterized by ratios near 4 to 1.

Summarizing two decades of observational research on marriages, Gottman (1994) concluded that unless a couple is able to maintain a high ratio of positive to negative affect (5 to 1), it is highly likely that their marriage will end."

Barbara Fredrickson, 2004