Barbara Fredrickson
She is also the Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (PEPLab) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"[2][3] Fredrickson was unable to reproduce the math behind her research published with Losada and in a later response the mathematical models for the paper were formally withdrawn.
Fredrickson's 2005 paper, co-authored with Marcial Losada, argued that there exist precise values of an individual's emotional positivity-to-negativity ratio, outside of which they will fail to flourish.
[7] Fredrickson has agreed that the mathematical modelling is "questionable", but stands by the more general idea that a high emotional positivity-to-negativity ratio is beneficial.
Brown et al. argue that Losada's conclusions in previous papers using modelling from fluid dynamics, and those in his paper co-authored with Fredrickson,[6] are not only based on poorly-reported experiments – they argue that it is difficult to draw any conclusions from some previous studies by Losada because critical details are omitted, and "interpretations of results are made with little or no justification" (p. 5) – but are based on elementary errors in the use of differential equations.
When people experience stress, they show increased heart rate, higher blood sugar, immunosuppression, and other adaptations optimized for immediate action.
[9] Past research has shown that anger, fear and sadness each elicit distinct responses in the autonomic nervous system.
Prior to her work on positive emotions, Fredrickson researched social and environmental cues that can carry sexist messages and enhance stereotypical gender differences.
She found that when women are randomly assigned dress in a way that calls attention to their bodies, they show impaired performance on a math task and were literally more likely to "throw like a girl".
A paper published in 2008 showed that LKM produces enduring increases in positive emotions, which in turn builds a range of consequential personal resources that augment life satisfaction and curb depressive symptoms.
