The Broaden-and-Build Theory: A Love Letter to Positivity—with Footnotes, Flaws, and Fallout
Saturday, August 16, 2025.
Psychology in the late 20th century was a gloomy business.
Entire careers were built on studying fear, depression, and rats in mazes.
Joy? Curiosity? Amusement? Those were treated as fluff, maybe suitable for weekend hobbies but hardly worthy of serious science.
Enter Barbara Fredrickson. In 1998, she had the audacity to ask: What good are positive emotions? (Fredrickson, 1998).
Her answer became the Broaden-and-Build Theory, a framework that suggested positive emotions aren’t trivial decorations on the evolutionary tree.
Perhaps they are, in fact, functional.
Joy, interest, love, amusement—all of them expand our mental horizons (“broaden”) and help us accumulate durable psychological and social resources (“build”).
In other words, feeling good helps you see more, connect more, and prepare better for the not-so-good times ahead.
From “Feelings Are Frivolous” to “Feelings Build Futures”
Fredrickson argued that negative emotions narrow our options. Fear triggers fight-or-flight. Disgust keeps us from eating bad clams.
Positive emotions, on the other hand, open us up. Interest makes us explore.
Joy invites play. Love encourages bonding. Over time, these moments of broadening accumulate, leaving behind a residue of resilience, friendships, and skills.
Early research seemed to confirm it.
Positive moods improved problem-solving (Isen et al., 1987). Joy helped people recover faster from stress (Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998). In experiments, people in positive emotional states literally saw more of the visual field—broadened perception made visible (Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005).
For a field that had long ignored joy, this was starting to resemble a revelation.
The Golden Ratio That Wasn’t
The high-water mark of the theory’s fame came in 2005, when Fredrickson and Losada declared that human flourishing could be mathematically captured: if your positive-to-negative emotion ratio was above 2.9-to-1, you’d thrive. Below it, you’d languish.
The claim was neat, tidy, and—it turned out—mathematical bullshit.
By 2013, the Critical Positivity Ratio Hypothesis was dismantled (Brown et al., 2013).
The model’s equations were revealed as pseudomathematics dressed up in Greek letters.
The embarrassment stung, but it didn’t negate the provocative core insight: positive emotions are useful, perhaps even necessary, for growth. But maybe just not measurable in a mathematical model.
The Cracks in the Frame
Like any good idea, Broaden-and-Build has been tested, bent, and critiqued. Here are a few of the main fissures:
The Broadening Problem: A recent network analysis tested the model directly and found that while positive emotions and resources do link together, the “broadening” piece probably isn’t quite the crucial bridge Fredrickson thought it was (Roth et al., 2024). It’s kinda like the theory’s middle plank doesn’t quite hold the weight of the argument.
Culture Truly Matters: What broadens in the U.S. doesn’t always broaden in Japan. In East Asia, exuberance can be viewed as destabilizing, while calm is prized (Miyamoto & Ma, 2011). Positive emotions don’t universally build; they’re always filtered through the attachment lens of the culture in question.
Not All Bad Emotions Are Bad: Anger builds protest movements. Guilt builds moral codes. Sadness builds intimacy. Negativity, inconveniently, also broadens and builds—just in different ways.
The Risk of Toxic Positivity: More recent critiques warn that the cultural obsession with “good vibes only” can backfire. Suppressing or denying negative emotions in the name of positivity undermines resilience rather than builds it (Wikipedia, 2025).
Integrations and Offshoots
Other researchers have tried to patch or expand the model.
Stanley (2023) suggested blending Self-Determination Theory with Broaden-and-Build Theory, framing positive emotions as a way of increasing motivation and engagement with opportunities.
Yang (2023) found that gratitude predicted stronger volunteering and altruistic behaviors—clear evidence of the “build” mechanism at work in the social domain.
In practice, Broaden-and-Build has shaped interventions in schools, workplaces, and therapy offices. Even stripped of its golden ratio, the idea that “positivity accumulates” has been a powerful and compelling idea.
Why It Still Matters
Despite the critiques, Broaden-and-Build Theory changed the way psychology talks about love, joy, and curiosity.
It pulled the field out of its pathology fixation and legitimized the study of positive emotion.
It gave researchers a framework for why fleeting micro-moments of joy or connection—what Fredrickson later called Positivity Resonance—might matter for survival as much as fear of lions once did.
But perhaps the best way to hold onto the theory is to treat it like a useful lens, not a sacred text. If we’re going to quibble, I consider Broaden and Build Theory to be a useful lie. I’m confident that eventually we will be working with a more complex model, perhaps integrating concepts of Earned Secure Attachment.
Positivity does broaden and build—sometimes. Negativity sharpens and builds too. The world, inconveniently, needs both.
Think of the Broaden-and-Build Theory as psychology’s long overdue apology to joy.
It isn’t flawless, and it certainly isn’t formulaic.
But it made the radical claim that good feelings are not frivolous; they are functional.
If nothing else, it reframed the lab rat’s grim maze into something a little more human: play a little, laugh a little, and try to stay curious.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Bastian, B. (2013). The dark side of being positive. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(10), 807–819.
Brown, N. J. L., Sokal, A. D., & Friedman, H. L. (2013). The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio. American Psychologist, 68(9), 801–813. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032850
Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 300–319. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.300
Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19(3), 313–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000238
Fredrickson, B. L., & Levenson, R. W. (1998). Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 12(2), 191–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999398379718
Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nowicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1122–1131. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.6.1122
Miyamoto, Y., & Ma, X. (2011). Dampening positive affect and positive experiences: Psychological health across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 475–493. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021342
Roth, D., Eck, J., Scheel, T., & Oschmann, A. (2024). Testing the validity of the broaden-and-build theory: A network-analytic perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1405272. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1405272
Stanley, D. (2023). Positive emotions, self-determination theory, and broadening: A conceptual integration. Current Opinion in Psychology, 47, 101517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101517
Yang, Y. (2023). Gratitude and altruistic intentions: A broaden-and-build perspective. SAGE Open, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231210372
Wikipedia. (2025). Positive psychology. Retrieved August 16, 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology