This week's Awakin reading is by Barbara Frederickson titled 'Love Is Not An Emotion': Love, defined as micro moments of positivity resonance, may thus be the most generative and consequential of all positive emotions. By virtue of being a single state, distributed across and reverberating between two or more brains and bodies at once, love’s ability to broaden mind-sets and build resources may have substantially greater reach. Love, then, is not simply another positive emotion. Rather, it is the momentary phenomenon through which we feel and become part of something larger than ourselves. Meaning in life may thus emerge not from the grand and unrealistic utopian ideals of “happily-ever-after” love, but from what art historian Nicholas Bourriaud calls the “day-today micro-utopias” of shared positivity. Seeing love as positivity resonance also blurs the boundaries that surround the concept of emotion. Many, if not most, scientific descriptions of emotions locate these affective phenomena within individuals, confined within one person’s mind and skin. By contrast, the concept of positivity ... [Read more]