No empirical evidence for critical positivity ratios

Abstract

Comments on the article by Fredrickson and Losada (see record 2005-11834-001). Fredrickson (2013) herself, in reply to Brown et al. (2013), remarked that "most valuable to the maturation of this work will be longitudinal field studies and experiments that use densely repeated measures of emotions and relevant outcomes" (p. 820). This remark raises the question of why, if Fredrickson understands that a longitudinal (within-person across-time) study is needed to test the theory, this was not acknowledged in the initial article (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005), in the book that highlights the research of that article (Fredrickson, 2009, Chapter 7), or in the correction to the original article (Fredrickson & Losada, 2013), the latter of which insisted on the validity of the results of Fredrickson and Losada's (2005) within time across-persons study. Indeed, why wasn't the appropriate study design used in the first place? After all, it has been pointed out many times over many years that the data and the analysis used to test a theory should correspond to that theory and that a test of a within-person theory nearly always requires within-person data and analysis. Doing research the wrong way, while delaying doing it the right way "until later," is not acceptable after so many years of discussions of this issue.