Positive and Negative Sentiment Override
Since the 1980s, psychologist John Gottman has had some four thousand married couples in his laboratory at the University of Washington. In his “love lab,” couples are videotaped as they engage in a kind of couples therapy session. After analyzing an hour of a husband and wife talking, Gottman has predicted with 95 percent accuracy whether they will still be together in fifteen years. If he watches a couple communicate for just fifteen minutes, his prediction rate is around 90 percent. Among other things, Gottman looks to see which one of two states a couple is in. “The first,” Gottman explains, “is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that the partner says gets perceived as negative … For example, I’m talking with my wife, and she says, ‘Will you shut up and let me finish?’ In positive sentiment override, I say, ‘Sorry, go ahead.’ In negative sentiment override, I say, ‘To hell with you, I’m not getting a chance to finish either. You’re such a bitch, you remind me of your mother.’” Once either party begins regularly overriding interactions, situations, and perceptions with negative sentiments, the relationship starts going down. “Once they start going down,” Gottman said, “ninety-five percent will continue going down.”
Overriding interactions, situations, and perceptions with positive sentiments—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
What Is Your Through Line?
Maya Shankar started playing the violin at the age of 6. At 9, she auditioned and was accepted into the famous performing arts school, The Juilliard School, where she was taken on as the private student of a legendary violinist named Itzhak Perlman. For the next six years, Shankar travelled the world, winning concerto competitions, soloing with elite orchestras, and wowing crowds with her violin.
But then, one morning when she was 15, she was practicing a challenging solo piece by the Italian composer Niccolò Paganini. “I struggled to get this one passage right,” Shankar explains, “and I overstretched my finger on a single note and heard a pop.” It was not a string on her violin but a tendon in her finger that popped. After an unsuccessful surgery, doctors told her she had to stop playing the violin.
Just like that, her musical career was over.
Worse than losing the ability to play the violin, Shankar said, was losing the ability to say she was a violinist. “My identity was completely tethered to being a violinist. When I met people, it was first, ‘I’m a violinist,’ and second, ‘I’m Maya.’ So when I got injured, suddenly, there was this profound loss of identity.”
She was experiencing what is known in cognitive science as “identity paralysis”—when we define ourselves by something we do, if suddenly we can no longer do that thing, it’s paralyzing. It’s destabilizing. It’s hard to imagine ourselves in a future without that thing.
As Shankar sat in this state of paralysis, day after day, she went in and out of a number of negative sentiments: anger, frustration, and hopelessness. In the depths of despair, Maya would find brief moments of happiness thinking about some of her favorite memories as a violinist. She slowly noticed a curious fact about her various favorite recollections, which was that in them, she was rarely playing the violin. Instead, in her favorite memories, she was learning from her teachers, laughing with her fellow musicians, or connecting with the people she performed for.
“It turned out that at the root of my passion for music was human connection,” Shankar said. “A hopeful message emerged from this insight: Although I had lost the ability to play the violin, I could still find this underlying love of human connection in other pursuits.” With this positive insight, Shankar was able to override the negative sentiments that had been paralyzing her, realizing, “I could anchor my identity to why I do the things I do rather than what I do.”
She went looking for that underlying feature—human connection—and found it embedded in many other pursuits. She went back to school, getting a PhD in cognitive science with a focus on studying the science of human connection and emotion. In 2015, Dr. Shankar sent a cold email to an advisor in the Obama administration, pitching what was established by Executive Order as “The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team”—a group of cognitive and behavioral scientists that translated findings from social and behavioral science into practical applications (Federal programs, policies, and improvements). After years of working in public policy, Dr. Shankar created “A Slight Change of Plans”—a podcast that helps people navigate life-changing events.
“Even though it looks like I’ve done very disparate things—a violinist, an academic, a cognitive scientist, a public policy worker, a podcaster—there’s actually a powerful through line that connects all of them: my love of human connection,” Dr. Shankar said.
For “those in the throes of change and feeling that threat to identity,” she said, to override the negative sentiments, “What I would recommend is to try to figure out what your through line is. What are the underlying features of the things that you used to do, that you used to absolutely love? And can you find expressions of those features in other things?”
The Flash Gordon Thing
Growing up, George Lucas loved the space adventure superhero, Flash Gordon. In the early 1970s, he tried to buy the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie. He took a trip to New York and the offices of King Features, owner of the Flash Gordon rights, to plead his case. At the time, Lucas had only directed an experimental film called THX 1138, which received mixed reviews and flopped at the box office. So King Features rejected Lucas, saying they wanted Flash Gordon only in the hands of “big-name directors.” Instead of letting the insult frustrate, discourage, or paralyze him, Lucas said, “I began researching.” After the unsuccessful trip to New York, Lucas read the great works of mythology and folklore, and slowly, he began to recognize a through line, certain “psychological underpinnings and motifs” repeated in many of those great works. “I wanted to take those psychological underpinnings and motifs of mythology,” he explained, “and combine them with the exciting action adventure of a Flash Gordon serial.” “By denying Lucas Flash,” Lucas’ biographer writes, “King Features had inadvertently sent him down the path toward creating Star Wars.” After years of writing, in 1974, Lucas completed a draft of a “space opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon.” His “Flash Gordon thing,” as Lucas referred to it, was released on May 25, 1977—said to be the day “movies and movie fandom changed forever.”
They Aren’t Punk. They’re New Wave!
The band, Talking Heads, was discovered by Seymour Stein in 1976. Stein signed them to his label, and in 1977, Talking Heads put out their first album. It was a commercial failure. It failed, Stein realized, because there was a song called “Psycho Killer” on the album. So most people, without listening to the music, assumed that Talking Heads was a punk band. “And punk had bad connotations,” Stein explains in Siren Song: My Life in Music. At the time, radio stations refused to play punk music. To try to override the public’s negative association with Talking Heads, Stein said, “I tried to come up with a different phrase than ‘punk.’” He coined the term “New Wave,” and then called radio stations all over the country. “Talking Heads aren’t punk,” he told radio program directors. “They’re New Wave!” “It worked very well,” one member of Talking Heads said. “Suddenly, almost overnight, we went from being a punk band to being a New Wave band [that] got played on the radio.” Stein took the term “New Wave” from the “French New Wave” filmmaking movement. New Wave filmmakers were highly regarded, so instead of being negatively associated with punk, Talking Heads became positively associated with a high art form. When they re-released “Psycho Killer” as a single in December 1977, it charted on the Billboard Hot 100 and launched Talking Heads into the mainstream.
And Beautiful Things Can Come From That
On sets shooting movies like The Dark Knight or Inception, the director Christopher Nolan has a reputation among filmmakers for getting incredibly lucky with the weather. Nolan himself says it’s not true. “It’s completely untrue,” Nolan said. “I’m very unlucky with the weather. But I made a decision early on that whatever the weather is, I will shoot.” Whether it’s a negative, a positive, or a relatively neutral thing, actor Cillian Murphy says in The Story of Our Time: The Making of Oppenheimer, “his philosophy is, ‘Just shoot.’ Like I’ve shot on the side of a mountain with Chris in a snowstorm.” “We just shoot,” Nolan said. “Whether it’s pouring rain or the sun is out. And beautiful things can come from that.”
They Turned Me Around And Moved Me Forward
Reflecting on the many setbacks throughout a career that eventually led him to starting Noma, a restaurant that’s been named the number 1 restaurant in the world multiple times, the chef René Redzepi said, “In hindsight, they weren’t setbacks.” Since he always found ways to positive sentiment override, “They didn’t set me back. They turned me around and moved me forward, in a different direction.” Once you begin regularly overriding interactions, situations, and perceptions with positive sentiments, things start going up. And beautiful things—a meandering career with a powerful through line, a space opera fantasy film in the vein of Flash Gordon, a New Wave, a reputation for getting incredibly lucky—can come from that.