How emotion science may help solve the world’s leading cause of preventable death

Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Intro (Jenn Lerner): Because whereas negative emotions have clear links to behavior, there have been less-clear links to positive emotions. So, it was very possible that we would find gratitude had no effect. And the fact that we found that it does have really reliable benefits in this specific way is rather novel. And this paper only just recently came out. And so the first thing we have to do is spread the word even that these experiments have been done.

But even though the paper just came out, already we have received at least one call from a private sector entity saying, “Hey, we want to build on this.” So my guess is that now we’re in a position to start to think about a lot of different ways to build on it. But it was a big surprise and it’s gonna be a big surprise as more people read the paper or hopefully listen to this podcast that that this is an available tool. 

Intro (Vaughan Rees): Going back probably early 2000s, there was a bit of formative research around the use of positive emotions in anti-tobacco communications. And the positive emotion, it wasn’t a specific emotion, but in general they used humor. And it was a satire on the Joe Camel marketing campaign that one of the tobacco manufacturers had run. It was targeted to youth, and nobody thought it was particularly funny in connection with tobacco products and it really, and it was deemed to have been a failure. And I think that sort of consolidated the field around the use of negative emotions. They have to be powerful, they have to be dramatic, and they have to essentially make people feel awful for them to have effects. And really, I think we’ve, as Jenn’s explained, we’ve turned that idea on its head.

Nat Sound (CDC “Terrie” commercial):

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): The World Health Organization says smoking is the leading cause of global preventable death, killing up to 8 million people prematurely every year—far more than die in wars and conflicts. Yet the emotions evoked by national and international anti-smoking campaigns and their impact has never been fully studied until now. HKS Professor Jennifer Lerner, a decision scientist who studies emotion, and Vaughan Rees, the director for the Center for Global Tobacco Control at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, say their research involving actual smokers in the lab shows that sadness—the emotion most often evoked in anti-smoking ads—can actually induce people to smoke more. Lerner and Rees’ research also found that evoking gratitude, an emotion that appears to function in nearly the exact opposite manner to sadness, made people want to smoke less and made them more likely to join a smoking-cessation program. Lerner and Rees join host Ralph Ranalli on the latest episode of the HKS PolicyCast to discuss their research and to offer research-backed policy recommendations—including closer collaboration between researchers who study emotion science, which is also known as affective science, and agencies like the Centers for Disease Control.

Ralph Ranalli: Jenn, Vaughn, welcome to PolicyCast.

Jenn Lerner: Glad to be here. Thank you. 

Vaughan Rees: Thanks, Ralph. 

Ralph Ranalli: You two have fascinating backgrounds as researchers and scientists coming into this. Jenn, you were the first tenured psychologist at Harvard Kennedy School, you were the Chief Decision Scientist for the United States Navy. Vaughan, you’re the Director of the Global Center for Tobacco Control. You direct the Tobacco Research Lab at the Harvard Chan School. Would you mind just both telling me how you got interested and got into the research areas that you do. And then sort of how the two of you came together on this research about the effect of emotions on smoking. Jenn, do you mind just going first? 

Jenn Lerner: Sure. So, I’ve always been fascinated by how the mind works. And there are many ways to explore the human brain, but the part that I love studying the most is decision-making. And I like studying decision-making because it’s the moment where whatever is going on inside our minds has impact in the world. It's this nice combination of understanding mental processes, and the impact that those mental processes have on others and on groups and teams and society at large. So I’ve long been interested in judgment and decision-making.

And when I came into the field as a PhD student, the field was very much a cognitively oriented field. So lots of research on information processing models of judgment and decision-making that had really no accounting for the role of emotion or affect. Affect is a term we use that encompasses emotions and moods and a variety of different feeling states. So it’s more global than emotion. And that seemed to me like a big gap. And fortunately, around that same time, in part due to the advent of really exciting neuroscience models, there started to be a real science of understanding emotion. That fascinated me and thus began my career on studying not just judgment and decision-making in general, but in particular trying to map how emotion affects judgment and decision-making.

Vaughan Rees: In some respects, my story is a little bit like Jenn’s, fascinated by the brain and cognitions and behavior. But unlike Jenn, my fascination early on began with thinking about how drugs influence the function of the brain. And, in particular, I was interested in psychopharmacology. Less clinical psychopharmacology, more around behavioral psychopharmacology. How do drugs change cognitions and behaviors? And that sort of fairly soon led me to become fascinated by the processes that underpin addiction or addictive behavior. And it was interesting to me at the time as a graduate student to learn that there really was no good theory or explanation for addiction. There’s certainly even now still no grand unifying theory and it’s a field that is so critical in the human experience and impacts so many lives, yet we’re still trying to understand what is going on. 

As a graduate student, I was, I think a little more interested, perhaps, in some of the other drugs that are sort of interesting and dramatic, the illicit drugs, even alcohol. But as I was trying to put together a set of experiments, and having trouble recruiting samples of participants and the ethical issues of administering a drug of dependence in a lab, somebody said to me, “Well, why don you recruit smokers?” And I said smokers are not that interesting. I mean, smokers are they’re everywhere. And this is going back a few years, but I spent some time thinking about it. Even then I knew that, and it’s still true today, that, tobacco use accounts for more disease, more death than all other drug types put together. The processes that underpin nicotine-use disorder and nicotine dependence are very similar, if not the same, as with other drugs. So it was an ideal model for which I could do the kinds of experiments that I was interested in. 

Over time, that interest developed from one of a focus on the individual, where I became increasingly frustrated that even with smoking cessation interventions, they’ve never yielded very good outcomes. We’re not particularly good at helping people to quit over the long term. And my interest moved more towards population health interventions where we’ve seen enormous impact from policies and programs that have been implemented at scale. So that’s really been the focus of my work for quite a number of years now, using principles of behavioral science to inform public health programs and policies that can reduce the burden of harm associated with tobacco use. But along the way, I’ve maintained my interest in other forms of addictive behavior, including cannabis use, and emerging cannabis policies, as well as opioid-related issues. 

Ralph Ranalli: Tobacco use is a huge issue, it’s the leading cause of preventable death in the United States and I think the number is something like one billion premature deaths are predicted across the world by the end of the century. So obviously it’s a very important issue to try and get a handle on. How did your two paths come together, Jenn? 

Jenn Lerner: One of the reasons that I love being at Harvard is that we have really amazing people across all fields. And there’s a program at Harvard known as the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. The acronym is MBB, and I actually am on the faculty steering committee for Mind, Brain, Behavior. A number of years ago, I and some others, got the idea of forming a faculty interest group for us to study, under the auspices of the MBB program, to study emotion and decision-making from a variety of different perspectives. We wrote a little proposal, and we managed to get funding to have these dinners together. And I went in thinking, well, this will be fun to meet people. I was relatively new at the university. It turned out to be enormously beneficial in terms of generating ideas. And it’s there that I really solidified an intellectual relationship with Vaughn and with another of our collaborators, Professor Ichiro Kawachi, who’s also at the School of Public Health. We realized that there could be an important connection between the experiments I was doing, examining the effects of emotion on economic decision-making, with more general models of emotion on outcomes like craving. 

So starting with some of our studies showing that, for example, the emotion sadness elicits a particular effect on economic decisions where it makes people more financially impatient. They’re willing to take smaller, sooner amounts of money rather than larger later. They also will pay more to buy things. So we started talking about that: Could it be a more general way of thinking about craving in the case of substances? So that’s how we started talking about these ideas, was really through that discussion group, which was Harvard wide.

Vaughan Rees: That’s a good account. I know Ichiro, Dr. Kawachi, who you mentioned, he’s always sort of been very good I think at sort of drawing lines between things and I think he’s a fantastic collaborator and exactly the sort of person who makes those connections. And I think as much as anyone, Ichiro saw some potential parallels and pushed us into a room together. And that’s where the conversation started. So, I’m very appreciative of that, going back all those years now. I think Jenn’s exactly right. Jenn’s work had really focused on looking at the influence of emotions on within a financial paradigm, thinking about impatience for financial reward. Our big leap was translating that into an addictive behavior paradigm, where we saw some very compelling parallels. People who have problems with control over substance use become impatient for the gratification that drugs provide. And as we’ve shown in our work, when we induce specific emotions, including sadness, it changes people’s impatience for immediate reward versus delayed reward.

Jenn Lerner: I think what might have happened was Ichiro saw me give a talk on sadness and it really struck him because his observation was that a lot of the anti-tobacco public service announcements tended, in his kind of casual observation, to evoke sadness. So he thought, “Huh, it could be a problem if they’re evoking sadness given what Jenn’s experiments are showing over here.” So I think maybe that’s how he introduced us. So it might have been at that point that what I was finding in relation to sadness—we also have studies on emotion and other kinds of outcomes like risk perception, et cetera, risk taking—but it might have been at that point that what we were finding in our economic outcomes had no bearing whatsoever or no ability to predict what people using a substance would be more like to do, under an emotion like sadness. 

So, we now, so many years into it, we know that you can use the same model to make the predictions. But if we had found back then that it didn’t follow the same model, we would have been like, “Oh yeah, well that makes sense because smoking is so different from making these economic decisions.” Right? So it’s so interesting to imagine the counterfactual. And I would have thought, “Oh yeah, well that’s just a totally different thing.” But instead to find that it’s similar, that we can use the same model, is really interesting. And it also underscores, Vaughn, what you were saying earlier about how smoking can be also used to make inferences about other substances. So we’re really looking at this particular set of studies on smoking as a way to get a more general lens on phenomena like craving and making decisions to use a substance even when you don’t want to.

Vaughan Rees: I think a fairly important motivation for doing this work or thinking through these problems was that the big sort of anti-tobacco campaigns that really probably peaked about ten or fifteen years ago in terms of public exposure, public dissemination, were really focused on negative emotions. Sadness featured prominently, but so did disgust, so did fear, and there was almost an orthodoxy in the way in which these, ad spots were produced—that you generate negative emotions, you make people feel scared or feel anxious or depressed and they will work. And there wasn’t much more to it than that in terms of thinking around the theory or the mechanisms that drive behavior change. Those communications also tended to get people to call quit hotlines, telephone quit lines, and so they were deemed to be an enormous success and literally hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into these kinds of campaigns.

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah, I remember particularly the Terrie ads that the CDC put out. 

Vaughan Rees: Of course. 

Jenn Lerner: Everyone remembers Terrie. 

Ralph Ranalli: I guess if one measure of effectiveness is how an ad sticks with you, that one—at least in that narrow definition of effectiveness—it’s always stuck with me. Terrie was a woman who had a tracheotomy, and she spoke with an artificial voice box and her face was disfigured. And it was very, very sad. And then in one of the ads the words came on the screen afterwards and Terrie died at 53. I can't think of an ad that evokes, sadness much more effectively than that. So it is this sort of counterintuitive that in this very important way it didn't work.

Jenn Lerner: If I may I want to go back to what Vaughn was saying earlier. That there was this orthodoxy; in fact, they have publications within the CDC on best practices, that are about evoking negative emotions. So it was very intentional. And this campaign was started really before the field of emotion and decision-making had had much opportunity to flourish. For a variety of reasons, the whole field of emotion research got a kind of late start from a scientific perspective. And there’s a whole interesting sociology of science that explains that, but long story short, places like CDC and lots of places around the world have been intentionally evoking emotion before there were robust evidence bases for how to design the evocation of emotion and the likely effects of emotion. So it was mostly kind of a commonsense theory that if you make people feel bad about something, they’re going to associate anything they see while they're feeling bad with negativity. It’s known in the literature as mood congruent processing. 

But my research had started to show—my research along with my colleagues’—that while mood congruent processing can get you a certain amount of predictive ability, it doesn't give you all the precision you’d like. Because within negative mood, there are many different kinds of feelings, like fear versus anger versus disgust versus sadness. And there hadn’t been an overarching theory that would predict which of those emotions would you want to elicit and what effect will that emotion have? So that’s an important piece of the theory. 

Okay, so now, the studies that were done, by the CDC, a lot of them were what we call correlational studies. So, during the time when these public service announcements were airing, there are other things were happening as well, like smoking was being limited in public places. And then they were looking at rates of things like signing up at cessation programs and reductions in smoking. And so it makes it a little hard to know what the causal mechanisms were and whether in fact the public service announcement was having an impact relative to the other kinds of changes that were happening. So, two motivations for us were to try to say, can we be a little more precise here, and can we also get more causal leverage where we can infer what exactly is having what kind of impact.

Ralph Ranalli: So it was a very blunt instrument that you were trying to turn into something much more surgical. 

Jenn Lerner: Yes, we wanted to be able to have a stronger basis for drawing causal conclusions. And we also wanted to know are all these different feelings that are negative going to have one impact? Or might some have different impacts? And could any of those impacts possibly be negative, given that negative emotions in general take a toll on the human body. And so, they are aversive, not just in terms of the human subjective experience of them, but also, for example, prolonged sadness, can be associated with heightened stress, which then is associated with secretion of stress hormones, which then suppresses our immune system. There are real consequences associated with evoking negative emotions. 

Vaughan Rees: The idea evolved: Might emotions other than negative emotions, as is predicted by the theory that Jenn has developed, have the same or even better impact? So, I think to continue Jenn’s idea, can we find ways to achieve the same or better outcomes and dispense with the negativity altogether? 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. I think we're going to talk about gratitude in, in a little bit, right? 

Jenn Lerner: Absolutely. 

Ralph Ranalli: Okay. But let’s talk about the experiments themselves with sadness.

Jenn Lerner: So one of the really wonderful things that we’re able to do here at Harvard is test for causality. Because we have a laboratory; the one and only place on Harvard campus where you’re allowed to smoke is Vaughn’s lab. It’s specially equipped in a number of ways. Whereas all of the prior research that had been done on the effectiveness of public service announcements were mostly using outcome variables like the perceived efficacy of watching a particular public service announcement. So a person who smokes comes in, sees the public service announcement and then rates on a scale afterwards how effective they think it is or isn’t. And what we know from a lot of research across the board is that sometimes our judgments about the effectiveness of something don't actually predict a behavioral outcome. And so here at Harvard. we can study the actual behavioral outcome of how much people are smoking. So let me ask Vaughan, do you want to talk about some of the special things that you have in your lab?

Vaughan Rees: Sure. Well, the lab itself is interesting. A number of years ago that, we had the idea, and we were doing slightly different research. We weren’t really investigating at that point, the potential for different kinds of tobacco products to change the exposure to tobacco-related toxicants, that is, chemicals that cause disease. I really felt that we needed a place, as Jenn said, a good facility to produce that work and when I took the idea to senior administration in the School of Public Health, they said there’s no way that will ever happen, because we have strong federal laws which ban smoking in the workplace. And if you start smoking in anywhere on Harvard property it could jeopardize Harvard’s federal tax-free status. It was a fairly sort of serious issue. 

We did some more work, and we found actually there was a local ordinance. The City of Boston had put in place clean indoor air laws but provided an explicit exemption for smoking for the purpose of research. And the state had also passed a similar law. So we worked around those policies, and we got an exemption from the City of Boston which allowed us to get the lab in place. So we’ve been doing it legally and above board, smoking with very good air filtration that extracts to the outside of the building, and all has run very smoothly for quite a few years now.

Ralph Ranalli: So the long and the short of it is that, because of this unique lab, you were actually able to make people sad and watch them smoke. 

Jenn Lerner: Yes. 

Ralph Ranalli: What did you observe when you did that? 

Jenn Lerner: So, one of the beautiful things about an experiment is that when somebody comes in with an experimental design, they can be randomly assigned either to a control condition where they see variety of videos that evoke neutral emotion or randomly assigned to the sadness condition where they see videos that evoke sadness. And the nice thing about that is that then all of the other individual difference characteristics that they may have been kind of cancelled out because a person, regardless of who they are, is as likely to be in the sadness condition or the neutral condition. 

And what we discovered is that there’s about a small- to medium-size effect of sadness that increases cravings to smoke among smokers when they’re in that sadness condition and also makes them smoke with greater intensity. So, there’s a device in the lab that measures the topography of smoking so we can actually assess the duration, the intensity, the velocity, and I’m missing a dimension...

Vaughan Rees: The puff duration and the interval between puffs? 

Jenn Lerner: Yes, the interval. The inter-puff interval. And so, we can actually map the multiple dimensions of smoking. And so there we see, really quite clearly that when people are sad, they smoke more. 

Vaughan Rees: Well, they puff more intensively, they take deeper puffs, they take longer puffs. So they’re consuming in effect more smoke, for more nicotine reward. So we interpret that as more intensive smoking, which I think can be explained as greater impatience for nicotine reward.

Ralph Ranalli: What is it about sadness? I know you have some thoughts on what is it specifically about sadness as an emotion that sets it apart from those other negative emotions that creates this need for an increased, consumption of tobacco? 

Jenn Lerner: Yeah. It’s a wonderful question. And we have some clues about it. We know that sadness as an emotion arises when people experience loss. So lots of negative things can happen in life. And if something negative happens and it’s because somebody did that negative thing to me, we tend to feel anger, for example. But sadness we tend to feel when we’ve lost something. And it seems that this experience of loss sets a kind of, sets up a kind of implicit goal of replacing loss. So when people have experienced profound loss, we see across the board in a variety of studies on consumer behavior, they’re more likely to try to acquire things, and so they exhibit behavior associated with replacing loss.

This is all literature within the past 10 years, so we have a long way to go. So we also know when we create statistical models. That the more people focus on themselves when they’re sad, the more impatient they become for reward. And the more money they’re willing to pay to acquire goods. And so, sadness is an emotion that automatically triggers focus on the self. It’s one of its most distinguishing characteristics. So we know that that seems to be a factor. And then, of course, it is an unpleasant state. And that, we think, factors into this desire to change the state. And so, initiating behavior, like using a substance that might change the state and improve the mood, those three things seem to be the major mechanisms that we’re identifying so far.

Ralph Ranalli: And this is getting back to something that you said, Vaughn, there seems to be almost an anti-sadness, which is gratitude. 

Jenn Lerner: Mm hmm. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right? That they almost have this interesting inverse relationship with each other, both in how people experience them, but also in what their effect is on behavior. Can you talk about gratitude for a second and what you found about that? 

Vaughan Rees: Absolutely. I think I’ll leave Jenn to describe the mechanism that helps us to understand the way in which gratitude exerts its effects. But essentially, we’ve done the same experiments that Jenn described in the lab, where we’ve induced gratitude. And compared with a neutral control stimulus we find that gratitude reduces people’s craving to smoke. It changes their temporal perspective from being present-biased to thinking more about future consequences and reduces the intensity of their puffing behavior. So their impatience for nicotine reward is obviously reduced as well. So gratitude seems to be having the kind of impacts that we would hope that these mass media public health communications should have on changing people’s motivation to smoke, but in fact are not featured in any of those kinds of communications.

Jenn Lerner: So if I can follow up on that, gratitude is a kind of anti-sadness in that whereas sadness is a negative emotion, gratitude is a positive emotion. Whereas sadness is very much associated with focus on self, gratitude is associated with focus on others. And then the third difference is that whereas sadness arises from loss, gratitude arises from having gained something. And so those three underlying dimensions, which we refer to as appraisal dimensions—part of a set of theories on emotion—turn out to be very important. And it’s why we went to gratitude. We didn’t say to ourselves: “Maybe there’s a positive emotion.” That's not how we got there. We got there precisely because on those key dimensions, gratitude is the opposite of sadness. And we knew from the sadness studies that those dimensions matter.

Ralph Ranalli: And gratitude—I think you also described it as a pro-social emotion, which is almost an added bonus of it. Can you talk about that for a second? What that means for perhaps people quitting smoking? 

Jenn Lerner: Yeah, so there’s a fair amount of research on gratitude showing that it’s a very social emotion. When people experience gratitude, they’re more likely to help others, not just the people who helped them initially, but they kind of pay it forward and help new people. Gratitude makes people more likely to want to affiliate with others. There’s work by Barbara Fredrickson, an emotion theorist, who has a broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion. And gratitude is one of those emotions, it makes people... They broaden their aperture, they’re broadening their social experiences, and then they’re building relationships. And the idea for all of that goes back to what we call social functional theories of emotion, that we have emotions for evolutionarily adaptive reasons. They’re time-tested solutions to problems in living, is the way to think about social functional theories of emotion. It doesn’t mean they’re adaptive for every situation, but there are feelings like gratitude that serve a number of social roles.

That led us to realize that we wanted to find a cessation program that had a very social orientation. You can go on the internet and find lots of information about that will make you believe that it’s like a panacea. And just get grateful and it’s going to solve all your life problems. Which is not how we see gratitude at all. We think that gratitude in our research at least, had this wonderful benefit of making people more likely to sign up for a smoking cessation program known as Become an Ex, which is affiliated with the Mayo Clinic, in part because that program emphasizes a social component. And we highlighted that social component to the participants in our study, the adults who smoke, and so we think that that’s another reason why gratitude had a benefit. 

Vaughan Rees: I might just add to this and Jenn, I’m not even sure we’ve really had this discussion, but I’ve been very interested in work that's been developed, I suppose, over almost a couple of decades now that has shown that... we talk about risk factors for substance use, and we’re often pointing at very specific demographic factors, or sort of recent experiences using drugs, the idea that somebody who's been using tobacco is at greater risk for using other drugs, perhaps vaping or something. But, I’m more compelled by theories of common risk, arguments that suggest that earlier experiences in life are very important in terms of building what we call strong pro-social bonds or strong conventional bonds with pro social institutions, and almost inevitably there we see people who have had an opportunity through life experiences, through having the advantage or the benefit  of a nurturing, positive family life, strong connections with school, with sporting, cultural, perhaps faith-based organizations are far better protected in terms of their risk for substance use than those who don’t have those sorts of experiences or opportunities. 

And so I think casting it in that kind of framework, I think gratitude almost certainly is protective and the sorts of experiences that may lead to people experiencing opportunities to find gratitude or experience gratitude I think are part of a very complex set of factors that may influence or shape people's propensity to engage in risky behaviors as they are approaching or moving through adolescence. So there’s a sort of a big picture here that I would really like to sort of talk, think more and see how we might sort of connect those dots.

Jenn Lerner: Absolutely. Where gratitude is kind of one of the mechanisms that helps create the relationship between the early childhood experience and then the risk propensity. 

Vaughan Rees: Yeah. Well, I think the way I would think about it is without critical experiences or opportunities, it’s difficult to acquire or to experience gratitude. Sadly, there are some kids that just don’t have opportunities or experiences that readily lend themselves to those kinds of feelings or experiences, you know? Sometimes, I think those kids that are at greater risk for substance use, they’ve got little to lose by engaging in substance use. And many of their peers face similar sorts of circumstances. 

Jenn Lerner: Yeah, that’s super interesting and there’s a good deal of research showing that early childhood affective experiences can be predictive a long time later in adult life of subsequent affective dispositions.

Ralph Ranalli: So I’d like to get into the practical applications of the work and sort where you’re headed with that. And it was interesting because I don’t know if this is precisely on point with gratitude or not, but the other smoking ad that stuck with me was an ad I saw where it was a dad and you were watching him cut out a picture of his kids and he was tucking it in the cellophane outer wrapper of his cigarette pack so he would see his kids every time he went for a cigarette. Are you starting to think about ways to practically apply your research findings to make these messages more effective? And how are you doing that? 

Vaughan Rees: So part of the emotion induction that we have right now involves people viewing a brief video stimulus. So it takes time—not a long time—but we need to immerse people in the experience to properly induce the emotional target that we’re looking for. We’ve seen graphic health warnings on tobacco packs introduced pretty much all around the world, unfortunately, except the United States. At one point we thought perhaps those graphic health warnings, which trigger certain levels of emotional response, might be sufficient. I’m not sure that they are. I think that we are going to get most traction if we can disseminate the kind of good quality video stimuli that we’ve been using in our experiments through digital media. So we can do this now through social media, through other technological platforms to target specific kinds of people, specific populations, perhaps even to personalize messages. So there’s a lot of opportunity to do that. 

I think there may also be opportunity to develop components of cessation interventions that include emotion induction perhaps that are pushed to people, again through digital devices, at high-risk times of the day or when they’re in high risk situations. So, I think there’s enormous possibility, but most of those opportunities I think are probably founded on using digital technologies. 

Jenn Lerner: I also want to take a step back and say that, when we went into this research with the idea of studying gratitude, we looked at all of the meta analyses that were out there, which were trying to sum up the effects from lots and lots of studies on positive emotion, to try to reduce a class of behavior known as appetitive risk behavior. So this is stuff like using drugs. And the conclusion of all of those meta-analyses was that positive affect has no benefit. In fact, in emotion theory, one paper was published entitled, “What Good Are Positive Emotions?” Because whereas negative emotions have clear links to behavior, there have been less-clear links to positive emotions. So, it was very possible that we would find gratitude had no effect. And the fact that we found that it does have really reliable benefits in this specific way is rather novel. And this paper only just recently came out. And so the first thing we have to do is spread the word even that these experiments have been done.

But even though the paper just came out, already we have received at least one call from a private sector entity saying, “Hey, we want to build on this.” So my guess is that now we’re in a position to start to think about a lot of different ways to build on it. But it was a big surprise and it’s gonna be a big surprise as more people read the paper or hopefully listen to this podcast that this is an available tool. And what’s so exciting is that it doesn’t come with the downsides of the subjective experience of having a negative emotion and the bodily wear and tear of having negative emotions. 

Vaughan Rees: Just a little anecdote on the positive emotional thing—going back probably early 2000s, there was a bit of formative research around the use of positive emotions in anti-tobacco communications. And the positive emotion, it wasn’t a specific emotion, but in general they used humor. And it was a satire on the Joe Camel marketing campaign that one of the tobacco manufacturers had run. It was targeted to youth, and nobody thought it was particularly funny in connection with tobacco products and it really, and it was deemed to have been a failure. And I think that sort of consolidated the field around the use of negative emotions. They have to be powerful, they have to be dramatic, and they have to essentially make people feel awful for them to have effects. And really I think we’ve, as Jenn’s explained, we’ve turned that idea on its head.

Ralph Ranalli: And we’re opening our minds to a rethink here, and you heard it on PolicyCast. So speaking of PolicyCast, this is the point in the show where I ask you for some specific policy recommendations. If you were controlling the levers of policy for a day, what policies would you institute that would help push things forward in a positive way, given what you’ve discovered in your research.

Jenn Lerner: One thing I’d love to see is much more blending of communication and work between researchers like us and the practitioners at places like the CDC, the FDA, who are designing these public service announcements. Because we can come out with this work, but they’re already invested in lots of other ongoing contracts based on the way they’ve been producing them for many, many years. And if we could instead be integrated and be able to co-create, then we can bring them the latest science with the ability to test causality, with the ability to work with real adults who smoke. And now in our newest work, we’re studying young adults and possibly also youth. So we can turn this stuff around with real behavior and very solid research designs and solid statistical analyses that allow them to generalize to the population at large. But the problem is we’re in these silos. So that’s the first thing I would love to do is to be able to integrate there. 

Vaughan Rees: I completely agree with that and I think that really is a critical starting point. But, assuming that kind of framework or infrastructure could be put in place, I think then it could lend itself to all sorts of interesting policy kinds of interventions. Among other things, among transforming digital media communications, public service announcements, I’d love to think about how opportunities to induce gratitude in adolescents, perhaps in school-based prevention programs, might help to change the trajectory for those kids who are at highest risk. I think that could be relevant not just to tobacco use, but to other substance use, and in fact, other forms of risky behavior. Risky sexual behavior, for example. I think there are opportunities perhaps to build in emotion-based components in other forms of cessation support, counselling, which could help to strengthen people’s capacity to manage high risk situations and to maintain abstinence in people who’ve been successful in quitting. I think there are all sorts of ways in which this work might be translated. 

Jenn Lerner: And another—this isn’t so much a policy recommendation—but I think an important point to take away for all of us is that the field of affective science has now matured to a point where people don’t need to use their own intuition about what might work with emotion. We actually have some useful theories, some models that are reasonably predictive. And we now, because emotion has such direct links to behavior, the emotion behavior links in the brain are extremely strong, and emotion travels faster in the brain than cognition. I mean, when something happens, we feel before we think. So, we’re really kind of at the beginning of this age of affective science where we can harness these insights for helping people in a number of ways and translating them into policy and translating them into useful behavioral interventions. So it’s time to recognize that, there is a science and to start to partnership in many different ways.

Ralph Ranalli: Well, humans are emotional beings and I’m glad that your work is helping us better understand what that means. And I want to thank you both for being here. This has been a really interesting, but also encouraging conversation. Whenever you see new avenues of possibility opening up to tackle a really thorny, difficult problem, that’s always exciting. So thank you so much for being here and good luck. 

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please check out some of the other great policy podcasts produced at the Kennedy School, like the Justice Matters podcast from the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which in recent episodes has also featured conversations about global LGBTQI+ rights, but also about other human rights-related topics. Check them out on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. And while you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to PolicyCast, so you don’t miss any of our important upcoming episode. And please leave us a review. Join us for our next episode when we’ll talk to HKS Professor Malcolm Sparrow about the global explosion in legal gambling and ways to mitigate it’s negative effects on society. And until then, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.