Hi everybody. My name is Mandy O'Neill and I'm an Associate Professor of Management at George Mason University, and a senior scientist at the school's Center for the Advancement of well-being. My research focuses on positive emotional culture. Positive is in some ways the opposite of negative, but it's not just pleasantness, it's also what can help an organization survive and thrive, and we need to think about that now, especially during crisis times. The second piece is organizational culture. Organizational culture is the values, the artifacts, the assumptions. They comprise an organization and then help people give meaning to their experience. It's stable over time, it's often shared across people, although there's sometimes pockets of disagreement, and if you put the two together, you have positive emotional culture, which has to do with the positive emotions that are expressed and regulated in an organization. So what do we mean by positive, that sounds very abstract. There are actually 135 discrete emotions that can be recognized, and about 40 or 50 percent of them are positive. So these include emotions like one that I've spent the past decades studying, which is companionate love, and that's affection, caring, compassion, and tenderness. Another emotion I spent several years studying is joviality, which is kind of humor and joviality, merriments has a little aspects of enthusiasm and excitement in it too. Then another emotion that certainly has been average for some time is gratitude. So this is feelings of appreciation when someone did something helpful or kind or beneficial to you. But it turns out there are so many other emotions that are important at this time too including awe. So awe is this experience of the small self, amazement and wonder, and some of you might be feeling it when you go into your walk, to the extent that you have tall trees in your backyard, when you're staring up at them, you might be experiencing awe. So there's so many emotions that we can pick and choose from during this crisis time, and it's very important at this time because it's very easy to slip into negative emotions. I find this in organizations, I find this in families, I find this in friendships, it's very easy for people to generate automatically times when they were feeling the plethora of negative emotions, including anger or anxiety, or fear, or guilt or shame. These are emotions that are part of the big palette that can comprise an emotional culture and certainly our own experiences of fleeting emotions, but they're ones that seemed to really come to the surface quickly during times of crisis, and so it's more important than ever during times of crisis to think about those positive emotions that can serve as helper emotions in some cases, or they can really serve as amplifiers of other positive emotions. To give you an example, when there's a lot of anxiety, it's really tempting to fight or flight, to freeze, to dig your feet in the sand or hide, but there's another tendency that involves reaching out and connecting, what some people call calming and connecting to the people for whom you feel affection, caring, and you feel that in return. It turns out that emotion can actually help buffer the feelings of anxiety. Another emotion that's really helpful in this regard is gratitude, so you might be feeling really annoyed or frustrated with whoever is sharing your space right now, whichever coworkers, whether they're eight years old or 80 years old or something in between, you may be feeling annoyed and frustrated. So one of the things that I find helpful is to actually, not avoid or deny or pretend that those emotions aren't there, but to acknowledge them, to recognize them and then to think about why you're actually grateful for that relationship. I mean, this is someone in your life for a reason and that person has had a positive influence somewhere sometime in you and you wouldn't be who you are without that person. So in thinking about that, I've dug out some cases and it really does help to make the anger, for example, less important, less present, and really focus on the deep ones of caring affection that are also never more important than during a time of crisis.
