http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=5419"...The bedrock for my approach to love is the science of emotions. For more than two decades, I’ve investigated that subset of emotions that feel good to you, those pleasing states — of joy, amusement, gratitude, hope, and the like — that simultaneously infuse your mind and body. Odds are you shift into and out of states such as these dozens of times each day, sometimes when you’re alone, sometimes when you’re with others.
Even though you experience positive emotions as exquisitely subtle and brief, such moments can ignite powerful forces of growth in your life. They do this first by opening you up: your outlook quite literally expands as you come under the influence of any of several positive emotions. With this momentarily broadened, more encompassing mindset, you become more flexible, attuned to others, creative, and wise. Over time, you also become more resourceful. In fact, my research and that of others shows that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become a better version of yourself.
Positive emotions are the tiny engines that drive an intricate, ever-churning positivity system. They are the active ingredients that set the rest in motion. When I step back from the proverbial microscope to examine the larger system that orbits around your positive emotions, I see how positive emotions knit you into the fabric of life, the social fabric that unites you with others, and how they orchestrate the ways you grow and rebound through changing circumstances. I needed a new word to encompass that broader system, and that’s positivity.
Love, and its absence, fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is steeped
Keeping an eye on this fuller positivity system enables a more precise definition of love. Love — like all the other positive emotions — follows the ancestral logic of broaden and build: those pleasant yet fleeting moments of connection that you experience with others expand your awareness in ways that accrue to create lasting and beneficial changes in your life. Love, as I see it, is found in those moments of warmth, connection and openness to another person. It energises this whole system and sets it into motion.
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