LEARNING TO LEARN FROM POSITIVE EXPERIENCES 1

LEARNING TO LEARN FROM POSITIVE EXPERIENCES 1

Learning to Learn from Positive Experiences

Rick Hanson, Ph.D.

University of California, Berkeley, USA

Shauna Shapiro, Ph.D.

Santa Clara University, CA, USA

Emma Hutton-Thamm, M.A.

Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, San Rafael, CA, USA

Michael R. Hagerty, Ph.D.

University of California, Davis, USA

Corresponding Author

Rick Hanson: [email protected]

Acknowledgments

This study was supported with a grant from the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and

Contemplative Wisdom.


Abstract

People draw on psychological resources such as grit and compassion to cope with adversity,

pursue aims, and maintain well-being. Previous research has identified environmental,

physiological, behavioral, and mental factors that can aid the acquisition – the learning – of these

resources. Mental factors that directly engage experiences of psychological resources (e.g.,

focusing on their personal relevance) have particular advantages, such as being applicable to a

variety of settings and experiences, and subject to volitional control. Such mental factors have

the potential to increase the development of psychological resources, yet to date there has been

no formal training in their systematic use. Consequently, the Taking in the Good Course was

developed and investigated in a randomized waitlist-controlled study. Results both post-course

and at 2-month follow-up indicated that training in the systematic use of mental factors of

learning has the possibility of increasing gains from positive experiences, with implications for

both formal interventions and everyday life.

Keywords: learning, memory, emotional intelligence, mindfulness, positive psychology

Declarations

Funding: This study was supported with a grant from the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience

and Contemplative Wisdom.

Conflicts of interest/Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no conflict of

interest.

Availability of data and material (data transparency): Not applicable

Code availability (software application or custom code): Not applicable

Learning to Learn From Positive Experiences


Relatively stable psychological resources1 help us to cope and thrive. For example, traits

of self-esteem, perceived personal control, and optimism foster subjective well-being (Myers and

Diener 1995). Trait mindfulness (Shapiro, Brown, Thoresen, and Plante 2011) promotes

physiological recovery from stress (Fogarty et al. 2013) and greater well-being (Brown and Ryan

2003). Trait gratitude is associated with decreased depression (Lambert, Fincham, and Stillman

2011), increased positive emotions and post-traumatic growth among cancer patients (Ruini and

Vescovelli 2013), and better sleep (Wood, Joseph, Lloyd, and Atkins 2009).

Other psychological resources include resilience (Fletcher and Sarkar 2013), secure

attachment (Ravitz, Maunder, Hunter, Sthankiya, and Lancee 2010), executive functions

(Alvarez and Emory 2006), positive emotions (Fredrickson 2013), optimism (Goodin and Bulls

2013), self-efficacy (Bandura 2006; Usher and Pajares 2008), compassion (Fredrickson, Cohn,

Coffey, Pek, and Finkel 2008), and self-compassion (Neff and Vonk 2009). These inner

resources have been described in various ways, such as character strengths (Park, Peterson, and

Seligman 2004), virtues (Dahlsgaard, Peterson, and Seligman 2005), psychological capital

(Luthans and Youssef-Morgan 2017), and positive psychological traits (Martin, Harmell, and

Mausbach 2015).

A psychological resource can have multiple elements (Hobfoll 2002), such as thoughts

(e.g., knowledge, perspectives), perceptions (e.g., body sensations), emotions (e.g., feelings,

moods), motivations (e.g., values, intentions), or skills (e.g., impulse control). For example, in a

toddler who is upset, the resource of secure attachment could include the thought that the child’s

1 Resources are defined here functionally, by their beneficial effects on the individual who possesses

them and perhaps on others as well. A capability or tendency that is beneficial (i.e., a resource) in

one context may not be beneficial in another one (Kashdan & Biswas-Diener 2014).


mother will come when she is called, the perception of relaxation when she is present, the

emotion of love, the motivation to be comforted by her, and the skill of getting her attention.

From States to Traits

Psychological resources function as both passing states (Luthans, Avolio, Avey, and

Norman 2007) and lasting traits (Niemiec and Lissing 2016; Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson

2005). For instance, a person could experience state gratitude for a few seconds while also

having trait gratitude as an underlying personality characteristic.2 Traits are more stable and

reliable than states (e.g., Fleeson 2001; Matthews, Deary, and Whiteman 2003). If a resource

state is caused by external events or settings rather than by an underlying resource trait, it is

dependent upon its preceding causes and vulnerable to disruption if those causes diminish or end.

Previous studies have identified significant benefits in identifying and using

psychological resources such as character strengths (e.g., Peterson and Seligman 2004), which

raises the question of how we might go about acquiring them. In adulthood, about 70% of the

variation in development comes from nonheritable factors (McGue, Bacon, and Lykken 1993;

Roberts, Walton, and Viechtbauer 2006), suggesting that a large portion of a person’s trait

resources are acquired rather than innate (Loehlin, McCrae, Costa, and John 1998; Merrell 2010;

Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck 2007; Tellegen et al. 1988).

This acquisition is a process of learning in which (1) patterns of mental/neural activity

(e.g., experiences and their neural correlates) are (2) consolidated and reconsolidated into lasting

changes of neural structure and function (Brown and Craik 2005; Josselyn, Köhler, and

2 We are using the term, resource trait, in a broad sense to refer to any relatively durable and

beneficial thought, perception, emotion, motivation, or skill, or combination of these.


Frankland 2015; McGaugh 2000; Nadel, Hupbach, Gomez, and Newman-Smith 2012; Penfield

1968).3 For simplicity, we term the first stage of learning activation and the second stage

installation. Drawing on these mechanisms of learning, psychological resources are developed

by having experiences of them or related factors—activated states—that are installed as

beneficial traits.

But while an activated state is a necessary condition for learning, it is not a sufficient one.

Experiencing does not equal learning. There must also be installation. Otherwise, no matter how

useful or enjoyable an experience may be at the time, there is no further development of

psychological resources. For instance, people may understand the ideas and advice offered by

psychotherapists or other healthcare providers during meetings with them, but memory for this

information is generally poor (Harvey et al. 2014). Experiential state to experiential state

processes—or related processes of experiential state to behavior to experiential state—may spiral

upward for a time (Garland et al. 2010; Garland, Farb, Goldin, and Fredrickson 2015; Ramsey

and Gentzler 2015), but they are not themselves evidence of growth in trait inner resources such

as resilience or self-worth.

The conversion rate from beneficial states to beneficial traits is relevant for both formal

interventions and everyday life. To use psychotherapy as an example, the past few decades have

seen much research, a focus on evidence-based treatments, and the development of new methods.

Nonetheless, there is no clear trend of improvement in therapeutic outcomes during this time. In

3 Trait resource acquisition may also involve changes elsewhere in the body as well, such as in the

immune (Davidson et al. 2004; Kaliman et al. 2014), cardiovascular (Thayer, Åhs, Fredrikson,

Sollers, & Wager 2012), or musculoskeletal (Damasio, Everitt, & Bishop, 1996) systems. We will

focus on changes in the nervous system and their mental correlates.


fact, there are some signs of decline in effect sizes and in the efficiency of methods (Carey et al.

2017; Harvey et al. 2014; Johnsen and Friborg 2015). Therapists may be helping their clients to

have improved experiences, but there has been no apparent general increase in the transformation

of these experiences into durable gains and growth. At this point, developing new therapeutic

experiences may have diminishing returns, with greater opportunities in improving their

installation.

In principle, the acquisition of psychological resources can be fostered in two ways: By

increasing experiences of them and related factors, and by increasing the conversion of these

experiences to lasting changes of neural structure and function. In practice, a focus on

installation could be particularly beneficial for several reasons. First, it might increase the gains

from experiences that people are already having, including those that have come from their own

efforts or those of helping professionals. Second, it could compensate for the impact of past

stresses or traumas on the hippocampus and neurotrophic factors (Duman and Monteggia 2006)

that may impair a person’s capacity to grow from their experiences. Third, it could highlight

learning factors that are applicable to a wide range of situations. For example, interventions

aimed at enhancing declarative memory formation have shown promising results in clinical

settings (Hitchcock, Werner-Seidler, Blackwell, and Dalgleish. 2017; Kredlow, Eichenbaum, and

Otto 2018). One reason may be that a particular learning factor such as improving memory for a

therapist’s advice could be transdiagnostic and transtreatment, and thus useful for a variety of

conditions and during a variety of interventions (Harvey et al. 2016).

Finally, focusing on installation may help compensate for the negativity bias. While there

is generally an activation effect for positive experiences in that they typically outnumber


negative ones (Walker, Skowronski, and Thompson 2003), there tends to be an installation effect

for negative experiences (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs 2001; Rozin and

Royzman 2001), particularly for nonautobiographical memory (Walker et al. 2003) and in

younger individuals (Reed, Cahn, and Mikels 2014). Emotionally negative experiences tend to

sensitize individuals to stressors, in part through cortisol-related alterations in hippocampal and

amygdala structure and function (Harkness, Hayden, and Lopez-Duran 2015; Lupien et al.

2015); this may make them more vulnerable and reactive in the future, which could sensitize

them further in a vicious cycle. Many experiences of psychological resources (e.g., secure

attachment, optimism, gratitude) are emotionally positive or at least neutral rather than negative.

Consequently, compared to the impact of negative experiences, the brain is relatively inefficient

at translating these experiences into the lasting neurological changes that underlie the acquisition

of psychological resources. In effect, we are good at learning from “bad” experiences but bad at

learning from “good” ones.

Mental Learning Factors

Four types of factors may promote the installation phase of learning:

(1) Physiological—e.g., sleep (Zalta et al. 2013), exercise (Firth et al. 2017), pharmacology

(Otto et al. 2016)

(2) Environmental—e.g., physical setting (O’Brien 2009), social support (Groh, Jason, and

Keys 2008)

(3) Behavioral—e.g., journaling (Kerner and Fitzpatrick 2007), dance (Mastrominico et al.

2018), movement (Shuper-Engelhard and Vulcan 2019)


(4) Mental—e.g., motivation (Colquitt, LePine, and Noe 2000), arousal (Steidl, Mohi-uddin,

and Anderson 2006), experience of reward (Wächter, Lungu, Liu, Willingham, and Ashe,

2009), personal relevance (Holland and Kensinger 2010)

Of these, mental factors have certain advantages. First, they can be used in a wide variety

of situations and actions, unlike environmental and behavioral factors that are more restricted.

For example, focusing on what is personally meaningful about an experience can be done in

almost any setting or activity. Second, a single mental learning factor can be applied to many

kinds of experiences. Third, a facility with mental factors could help people be effective in

developing psychological resources on their own, independent of a helping professional. Fourth,

mental factors—especially those that are most directly engaged with our experiences—are

internal psychological processes that are potentially under volitional control and may be initiated

at will.

Consequently, we will focus on mental learning factors, which can be grouped into two

types. Contextual factors are global and relatively constant temperamental, personality,

attitudinal, or motivational attributes that shape how we approach an experience and thus how

much we might gain from it. Examples include openness to experience (Fetterman, Curtis, Carre,

and Sassenberg 2019), the metatrait of “plasticity” (Hirsh, DeYoung, and Peterson 2009), and a

growth mindset (Dweck 2006). Engagement factors are more immediately involved with

regulating an experience, and they operate on a shorter time scale, as in the process model of

emotion regulation (Gross 1998). We draw on engagement factors to sustain or intensify an

experience, bring attention to specific features of it, apply particular perspectives to it, or

encourage new aspects of it to emerge. Examples include focusing on the rewarding qualities of


an experience (Wise 2004) and identifying its personal relevance (Cunningham, Arbuckle, Jahn,

Mowrer, and Abduljalil 2010).

Both types of factors may increase the installation of experiences of psychological

resources. Additionally, engagement factors could have unique benefits. First, they can be

mobilized in the moment through deliberate effort, unlike more trait-like contextual factors that

take longer to develop. Second, contextual factors have relatively diffuse effects on experiences,

while engagement factors have direct regulatory involvement (e.g., Quoidbach, Mikolajczak, and

Gross 2015), thus potentially increasing a person’s influence over an experience and what is

gained from it. Third, learning depends mainly on neural activity during an experience (Craik

and Lockhart 1972; Takeuchi, Duszkiewicz, and Morris 2013), and engagement factors influence

specific processes of encoding and consolidation while experiences are occurring. Fourth, using

engagement factors could increase an individual’s sense of being an active learner in the

acquisition of psychological resources, which might increase motivation and feeling of

ownership of the results. Last, engagement factors are used mainly in relatively brief experiential

episodes. Consequently, people can deepen their involvement with specific beneficial

experiences many times a day.

The HEAL Framework

Individual engagement factors may be present in various psychotherapies, psychosocial

programs, and personal growth trainings. But to our knowledge they have not been gathered

together in a single framework and taught systematically. To organize many engagement factors

within the two-stage process of learning, the first author developed the HEAL model (Hanson

2013), with these four steps:


Activation

1. Have a beneficial experience.

Installation

2. Enrich it.

3. Absorb it.

4. Link positive and negative material. (optional)

This framework is the basis of the Taking in the Good Course investigated by the authors

(Hanson et al. 2020) and in other research (Jacob and DeGuzman 2016). A summary of each step

follows, with relevant engagement factors identified for it.

Have a Beneficial Experience

There are two ways to have a beneficial experience. First, such an experience could

already be occurring—e.g., a sense of grit and determination—and the person can simply notice

it. Second, one could deliberately create an experience (Livingstone and Srivastava 2012), such

as by relaxing the body (Klainin-Yobas, Oo, Suzanne Yew, and Lau 2015), calling up

compassion (Hofmann, Grossman, and Hinton 2011), sharing positive experiences with others

(Gable, Reis, Impett, and Asher 2004), and taking action (e.g., drinking water when thirsty). As

people internalize beneficial experiences, their capacity to create such experiences grows

(Quoidbach et al. 2015), promoting a positive cycle.

Attention can be trained in order to notice or intentionally create particular kinds of

experiences. For example, Attention-Bias Modification Training increases awareness of positive

stimuli and thus the frequency and type of positive experiences (Hakamata et al. 2010; Yang,

Ding, Dai, Peng, and Zhang 2015), and related trainings in cognitive bias modification can have


similar results (Becker et al. 2016). Noticing something enjoyable or useful in the background of

awareness and then deliberately focusing on it involves “attentional deployment,” an aspect of

the process of emotional regulation (Gross 1998). Similarly, some of the ways that people create

positive experiences draw on attentional deployment, such as remembering a happy time

(Josephson 1996) or looking for objects in one’s setting that are beautiful.4

When a person has an experience, it can be installed in two subjectively and objectively

distinct ways, termed here enriching and absorbing. Subjectively, enriching an experience

involves exploring, sustaining, and intensifying it, and absorbing it involves relishing the

rewards of the experience while intending and sensing that it is received into oneself.

Objectively, enriching5 an experience increases the breadth, intensity, and duration of activity in

its neural correlates, while absorbing primes, sensitizes, and promotes neuroplastic factors for

heightened encoding and consolidation. To put it metaphorically, enriching is like increasing the

amount and concentration of a green liquid poured onto a sponge while absorbing is like

increasing the receptivity of the sponge itself.

Enrich It

Five kinds of factors can be used, singly or in combination, to enrich an experience in

order to increase its installation:

Duration. Humans are able to deliberately sustain and lengthen mental states, including

4 Attentional deployment may also be used during the installation phase of learning. For example, the

frequent use of attentional deployment aimed at emotionally positive experiences can increase the

inner resource of positive mood over time (Quoidbach et al. 2015).

5 After the HEAL framework was developed, it was found that Fergus Craik (2002) had previously

used the term ‘enriching’ for the elaboration of the meaning of information during encoding.


emotionally or somatically rich ones (Waugh, Lemus, and Gotlib 2014), through processes of

regulation such as rehearsal (Smith and Jonides 1999), maintenance (d’Esposito, Postle, Ballard,

and Lease 1999), and attentional deployment (Gross 1998). Neurologically, depending on the

primary elements of the experience (e.g., thoughts, emotions), extending the duration of

experiences may involve sustained activation in the medial frontal cortex, amygdala, and insula,

guided by executive activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) (Waugh et al. 2014).

Maintaining attention to stimuli tends to deepen associative learning (Zhu et al. 2018).

Sustaining attention to positive stimuli is a factor of vantage sensitivity that increases the

beneficial effects of these stimuli (Pluess and Belsky 2013). Overall, as the duration of contents

held in working memory is extended, the conversion to long-term memory is increased

(Ranganath, Cohen, and Brozinsky 2005).

Intensity. People can intentionally increase the intensity of experiences through

up-regulating emotions (Quoidbach et al. 2015)—drawing on dorsal medial frontal cortex

(Ochsner et al. 2004) and the amygdala and ventral striatum (Kim and Hamann 2007)—as well

as by imagining that relevant stimuli are physically closer (Kim and Hamann 2007). As

experiences intensify and arousal increases, norepinephrine and cortisol activity in the brain

increases as well (McGaugh and Roozendaal 2008; Sara 2009). Heightened norepinephrine

strengthens engagement with an experience, through increasing awareness of its sensory features

(Berridge and Waterhouse 2003) and increasing attention to and sustained working memory of it

(Arnsten and Li 2005). Greater norepinephrine activity during an experience of a psychological

resource might also facilitate retrieval of related resources (Sara 2009).

The amygdala and hippocampus play a major role in learning (Dudai 2004; Hamann, Ely,


Grafton, and Kilts 1999; Murty, Ritchey, Adcock, and LaBar 2010). Both regions have receptors

for norepinephrine and cortisol, and increased activity at these receptor sites related to

physically- or emotionally-based arousal heightens the formation of explicit and implicit

memory (Cahill and McGaugh 1996). As the intensity of an experience increases, including with

positive valence, amygdala activation tends to increase as well (Bonnet et al. 2015). Heightened

amygdala activation improves memory formation mediated by the hippocampus (LaBar and

Phelps 1998) and the caudate nucleus (Cahill and McGaugh 1996). The effects of intensity on

learning (including emotional and procedural learning) generally follow an inverted-U, in which

moderate intensity has the greatest effects (Cahill and McGaugh 1996).

Multi-modality. This term refers to awareness of different aspects of an experience,

which can be categorized as thought, perception, emotion, desire, and action. For instance, if

someone wished to enrich an experience of feeling cared about, this person could bring attention

to the meaning (thought) and somatic sensations (perception) of it, as well as to related feelings

of love (emotion), inclinations to be closer (desire), and expressions of affection (action).

Focusing attention on particular aspects of an experience might increase the internalization (i.e.,

learning) of those aspects. For example, deliberately attending to feelings related to gratitude

(e.g., thankfulness, appreciation of others)—distinct from thoughts about what one has

received—might strengthen emotional aspects of trait gratitude. Additionally, focusing on

different aspects of an experience could engage learning factors specifically related to each

aspect, thereby potentially increasing installation of the experience, as seen in these examples:

Thought. Reflecting on the meaning of an experience engages deeper levels of

processing (Craik 2002). As the depth of processing increases, learning and memory tend to


increase as well (Ekuni, Vaz, and Bueno 2011).

Perception. Focusing attention on internal sensations related to breathing and heartrate

might stimulate the vagus nerve complex that regulates these physiological functions (Porges

2012), and vagal stimulation has been shown to increase certain kinds of learning (Cahill and

McGaugh 1996).

Emotion. Emotionally rich experiences have heightened encoding (Lee, Greening, and

Mather 2015) and more durable consolidation (Talmi 2013; Yonelinas and Ritchey 2015), even

when activity of the amygdala and hippocampus is minimized (Phelps, LaBar, and Spencer

1997).

Desire. As the sense of motivationally relevant aspects of an experience increases,

amygdala activity tends to increase as well (Olney, Warlow, Naffziger, and Berridge 2018),

which is associated with increased learning from experiences.

Action. Examples of actions include smiling, using rituals to mark a special occasion, and

telling others about a positive experience. The richness and effects of an experience can be

influenced by facial expression, posture, and other aspects of behavior (Niedenthal 2007).

Positive emotions can be up-regulated by modulating one’s behavior, such as expressing positive

feelings (Quoidbach et al. 2015). Simply imagining doing an activity (e.g., motor imagery) can

enhance memory for it (Madan and Singhal 2012).

Novelty. As perceived novelty of an experience increases, so does hippocampal

activation (van Elzakker, Fevurly, Breindel, and Spencer 2008), signaling the ventral tegmental

area (VTA) in the brainstem to release dopamine in the hippocampus, promoting synaptic

consolidation and memory formation (Lisman and Grace 2005). Reward prediction errors shape


learning, and novel – and thus unexpected –rewards lead to increased VTA dopamine release

(Simen and Matell 2016). Unpredictability increases activity in the amygdala (Herry et al. 2007),

which may increase hippocampus regulated encoding and consolidation of experiences. Novel

experiences are associated with heightened hippocampal “replay” activity and cortical

consolidation during sleep (Buhry, Azizi, and Cheng 2011).

Salience. Experiences that seem significant or otherwise personally relevant tend to be

remembered best (Holland and Kensinger 2010) and to have the greatest impact on associative

learning (Zhu et al. 2018) and memory consolidation (McGaugh 2013). The conferring and

experiencing of personal relevance involve an underlying salience network that includes the

ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and

paraventricular thalamus (Pais-Vieira, Wing, and Cabeza 2016; Roy, Shohamy, and Wager

2012). Amygdala activation increases as perceived salience increases (Cunningham et al. 2010).

The effect of salience is particularly marked for positive stimuli, which may not foster much

amygdala activity unless there is also a sense of personal relevance (Stillman, van Bayel, and

Cunningham 2015). As noted, heightened amygdala activity tends to increase

hippocampus-based memory formation.

Absorb It

This step involves relishing the rewards of an experience while intending and sensing that

it is received into oneself.

Reward. The neural basis for experiences of reward is distinct from that which underlies

experiences of intensity (Kensinger and Corkin 2004), which are categorized above under

Enriching. Reward sensitivity is a factor of vantage sensitivity, the capacity to benefit from


environments and experiences (Pluess and Belsky 2013). As the sense of reward associated with

an experience grows, learning from the experience tends to rise as well (Madan 2013; Wittmann

et al. 2005). Norepinephrine activity increases with reward (Sara and Segal 1991), and

norepinephrine promotes synaptic formation (Harley 2007). Dopamine activity also increases

with rising expectations of and experiences of reward (McDonald and Hong 2013), which in the

hippocampus increases the protein synthesis necessary for long-term potentiation at synapses and

the formation of memory (Takeuchi et al. 2013).

One way to increase the sense of reward in an experience is through play or playfulness,

which promotes the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and insulin-like growth factor

(Gordon, Burke, Akil, Watson, and Panksepp 2003; Panksepp 2008). These neurotrophic factors

support the formation of new synapses, in effect increasing the modifiability of a person’s brain

by their experiences. Reward promotes “liking” via opioid neurotransmission in the nucleus

accumbens and “wanting” via dopamine release in the same region (Berridge and Robinson

2003), and associating reward with beneficial experiences could increase tendencies toward the

actions that foster such experiences.

Intending. We tend to remember what we want to remember (Oyarzún, Packard, de

Diego-Balaguer, Fuentemilla 2016). The amygdala reacts to stimuli in terms of the motivations

of the individual (Cunningham and Brosch 2012; Cunningham, van Bayel, and Johnsen 2008).

Increasing motivation through intending to internalize an experience may increase amygdala

activity related to it, and thus foster the registration of the experience in memory.

Sensing. Attention turned inward to one’s emotional or somatic state engages the insula

and anterior cingulate cortex, and this interoceptive self-orienting heightens memory formation


(Pais-Vieira et al. 2016).

Link Positive and Negative Material

This fourth step in the HEAL framework involves focusing on something beneficial in

the foreground of awareness along with related painful or harmful psychological material in the

background of awareness. For example, a person could focus on the sense of relaxing during

long slow exhalations while there are also feelings of anxiety “off to the side” of awareness. In

the HEAL framework, the Link step is optional for two reasons: The first three steps alone may

help increase the acquisition of trait resources, and any attention to negative material could be

too challenging (such as retriggering) for someone. To use the Link step, a person must be able

to deliberately hold two things in awareness at the same time, keep the positive material more

prominent than the negative material, and disengage from the negative material if flooded or

hijacked by it.

While optional, the Link step may be helpful when it is used appropriately. Linking

positive and negative material is common in psychotherapy (e.g., Lane, Ryan, Nadel, and

Greenberg 2015)—such as a client experiencing the therapist’s unconditional positive regard

while talking about old feelings of inadequacy—as well as in everyday life, such as using

positive reappraisal as a way of coping with negative events (Folkman and Moskowitz 2000).

Linking may be beneficial through associating positive to negative (e.g., soothing), as well as by

reducing the extent to which negative material reconsolidates in neural networks (Alberini 2011;

Elsey, van Ast, and Kindt 2018). Because this may potentially decrease reconsolidation, people

using the Link step are encouraged to be aware of the emotional, somatic, or conceptual

discrepancies—e.g., prediction errors (Sevenster, Beckers, and Kindt 2013)—between the


negative material and the positive material that contradicts, disconfirms, or contextualizes it

(Ecker 2015).

Preliminary Evidence

Given the potential benefits of engagement-type learning factors discussed above,

training in these factors and then using them may help develop psychological resources such as

mindfulness and gratitude, which might in turn reduce anxiety and lift mood. To explore this

possibility, the first author developed the 18-hour Taking in the Good Course, taught in six

3-hour classes, with supplemental written materials in a Participant Handbook.6

In this course, participants learn and practice the HEAL steps. They also apply these steps

to experiences of specific inner resources related managing three fundamental needs, for safety,

satisfaction, and connection (e.g., Newman and Harris 2009; Porges 2007; Higgins 2000; Gilbert

2009). For example, they used the HEAL framework for experiences of protection, relaxation,

and determination to potentially increase psychological resources for safety. Participants also

identified individualized “key resources” that could be useful for their personal challenges or

issues (e.g., recent divorce, anxious temperament, feelings of inadequacy), and they explored

ways to activate and install experiences of these inner strengths. The course included discussions

of common blocks to having and internalizing beneficial experiences (e.g., feeling undeserving,

fear of lowering one’s guard) and how to address these. Overall, participants were taught to

approach experiences with an attitude of receptive appreciation while also letting them flow,

change, and eventually pass away, since trying to hold on to emotionally positive experiences

may actually lower well-being (Du Pont, Welker, Gilbert, and Gruber 2016).

6 For scripts of the classes and a copy of the Participant Handbook, please contact the first author.


To our knowledge, the HEAL model is the first to organize many engagement-type

learning factors in a single framework, and the Taking in the Good Course (TGC) is the first

intervention to teach these factors systematically. A randomized control trial design was used to

evaluate the Taking in the Good Course (Hanson, et al. 2020). In comparison to a randomized

waitlist control group, preliminary data indicate that people who completed the course reported a

significant increase in scales related to gratitude, self-esteem, contentment, savoring, and

satisfaction with life, with borderline significantly increased positive emotions and decreased

negative emotions. At 2-month follow-up, compared to the control group, the TGC participants

continued to report significant increases in both self-esteem and in using reappraisal as an

emotion regulation strategy.

When the waitlist group did take the course—increasing the number of subjects in the

intervention group and thus the statistical power of our analyses—this combined sample reported

significant increases in nearly every variable considered, including gratitude, self-esteem,

mindfulness, self-compassion, joy, contentment, compassion, awe, savoring, satisfaction with

life, and subjective happiness. They also reported significant decreases in anxiety and

depression. Two months after the seven-week course ended, this overall pattern of results

persisted. The psychological resources investigated showed increases that were stable at least

over the nearly four-month period from participants beginning to train and use engagement

factors to the final assessment.

In sum, as hypothesized, significant improvements were found in a wide range of

psychological resources after taking a course designed to teach methods for increasing learning

from experiences of such resources. The breadth of these results and their stability two months


post-intervention suggests that a common underlying factor could be at work—namely, learning

how to increase one’s learning from beneficial experiences.

Types of Benefits of Engagement Learning Factors

The potential benefits of using engagement factors can be placed in four categories.

Increasing psychological resources

Repeatedly applying engagement factors to experiences of a psychological resource may

help develop it as a trait. This acquisition could in turn foster more experiences of the resource

and thus more opportunities to reinforce it, in a positive cycle. This process could proceed ad hoc

as a person deepens engagement with various beneficial experiences as they occur. Additionally,

a person could purposefully pursue developing a particular inner strength that is matched to an

external or internal challenge. For example, one might seek to increase trait self-worth to deal

with a disapproving boss, or one could develop trait relaxation for an anxious temperament.

Positive side effects

While using engagement factors, other mental processes could be implicitly present, and

these may be beneficial as well. They include taking a stance of support toward oneself,

practicing the regulation of attention, staying in the present moment (Killingsworth and Gilbert

2010), sustaining mindfulness, having a sense of agency inside one’s mind, and being self-aware.

During experiences of these other mental processes, engagement factors could be applied to

them, too, in order to reinforce them.

In particular, applying engagement factors to experiences of psychological resources may

lower stress, since stress tends to decline as a person’s sense of resources increases (Lazarus and

Folkman 1984). With repeated practice of focusing on inner resources, a person’s self-concept


might develop a greater recognition of capabilities and other positive qualities, which could

improve self-worth, as well as increase confidence and thereby lower stress when facing

challenges in the future. Further, using engagement factors involves an approach to experiences

that frequently highlights their enjoyable qualities. Upsetting, painful, even traumatic

experiences tend to weaken an approach orientation in life and strengthen an avoidance

orientation (Nasser and McNally 2012). With repetition, a person may develop more of an

approach orientation that might also help regulate maladaptive avoidance behaviors and anxiety.

Increased sensitivity to beneficial experiences

As noted, past stresses can impair hippocampal and neurotrophic activity (Duman and

Monteggia 2006), thereby decreasing a person’s capacity to learn and grow. Insofar as using

engagement factors may help compensate for this impairment, they could increase the brain’s

functional sensitivity to positive experiences. Further, there might be specific sensitization of the

amygdala to positive stimuli. The amygdala can be sensitized to negative stimuli such as stress or

pain (Li et al. 2016; Rajbhandari, Baldo, and Bakshi. 2015), and there are preliminary indications

that it may be possible to sensitize it to rewarding stimuli, such as by upregulating opioid

receptor activity (Bie et al. 2012). Happier people tend to have amygdalae that are more

responsive to positive stimuli than the amygdalae of those who are less happy (Cunningham and

Brosch 2012; Cunningham and Kirkland 2013), and it is possible that this difference is not

entirely innate but is based in part on an acquired sensitization to positive stimuli. More

generally, multiple subcortical and brainstem regions, including the amygdala, interact in

sensitization to appetitive reward (Correia and Goosens 2016), which is relevant for some

aspects of positive experiences. This possibility of neural sensitization to positive


experiences—so that learning from them may occur more efficiently, rapidly, and

intensively—is intriguing and hopeful, and calls for further study.

Positive cycles

As psychological resources grow, positive cycles could develop both internally and

externally. Internally, the trait-like inclination and capability for taking in the good—for

deliberately internalizing beneficial experiences—is itself a psychological resource. Repeatedly

using this resource would tend to foster various rewards associated with experiencing and

developing other mental resources, which would reinforce “taking in” as a trait, in a virtuous

circle. In effect, we may be able to get better—at getting better. Externally, the development of

psychological resources such as social or emotional intelligence could lead a person to think and

act differently in relationships and occupational settings. For example, increased self-worth

could lead a person to accept a new opportunity at work, and in the managing of this challenge

deepen that sense of worth.

Effects of Negative Events and Experiences

Having focused on the potential value of deliberately installing positive experiences, it is

appropriate to step back and consider the value of negative experiences. Negative life events

such as being injured may indeed lead to developing psychological resources through

stress-related (Park and Folkman 1997) or post-traumatic (Tedeschi and Calhoun 2004) growth.

Nonetheless, any growth from negative events is enabled by positive resources such as

meaning-making (Park and Folkman 1997) and integrative processes (Damian and Roberts

2014). We need to have some inner resources already in place to develop more inner resources

from life’s challenges.


Contrary to the notion that it is primarily through adversity that we grow, positive life

events can also be a significant source of psychological growth (Roepke 2013;

Taubman-Ben-Ari, Shlomo, and Findler 2012). For example, a recent meta-analysis found that

both positive and negative events led to growth in self-esteem, environmental mastery, and sense

of connection with others (Mangelsdorf, Eid, and Luhmann 2019).

Applications and Adaptations

People in helping professions can promote learning factors for positive experiences in

two ways. First, they can be fostered implicitly. For instance, a psychotherapist could ask a client

to describe what it is like to feel accepted by the therapist, which would extend the duration of

the experience without drawing attention to this engagement factor per se. Second, mental

learning factors can be taught explicitly, and their use could be encouraged. For example, at the

beginning of a stress management program, a human resources trainer could describe why

engagement factors may increase a person’s gains from the program, explain how to apply them,

and then as appropriate remind participants to use them.

To use engagement factors, a person needs three capabilities: The intention to internalize

an experience, mindfulness of it, and executive functions that enable the deliberate mobilization

of specific learning factors. These capabilities are psychological resources themselves that can be

developed. Meanwhile, “scaffolding” can be provided as needed. For example, with an

individual who has limited executive functions such as a young child, another person could offer

cues to support the enriching aspects of installation, perhaps by encouraging that individual to

stay with the experience and be aware of what feels good about it. Even when these three

capabilities are intact, instruction in mental learning factors may need to be adapted with


different populations. For instance, with children, concrete metaphors might be useful, such as

imagining that internalizing an experience is like putting a jewel in a treasure chest in the heart.

There could also be important differences in the extent to which people are using

engagement factors at all. In intervention studies, while main effect gains might be enough to

find statistically significant differences from control groups, there is variance in these gains.

Individuals whose gains are at the high end of this range—and whose gains are the primary

source of statistical significance—might already be using engagement-type learning factors on

their own. On the other hand, individuals whose gains are at the low end of this range might not

be using engagement factors or might have other characteristics that flatten their growth (e.g., de

Villiers, Lionetti, and Pluess 2018), and their gains could be strengthened by a focus on

engagement factors.

More specifically, different engagement factors may have different benefits for various

groups and issues. For example, individuals who are highly distractible or stimulation-seeking

may move rapidly from one experience to another before the first experience has had enough

time to begin its process of neural consolidation, thereby reducing the potential installation of

beneficial experiences as psychological resources. Consequently, learning how to extend the

duration of experiences and to keep refocusing on what is rewarding about them (factors of

Enriching and Absorbing in the HEAL framework) might be particularly helpful for these

individuals. In another example, people with high expression of the serotonin transporter gene

tend to have lower vantage sensitivity (Pluess and Belsky 2013)—and thus lower responsivity to

positive experiences—and are less able to develop a positive attentional bias (Fox, Zougkou,

Ridgewell, and Ganner 2011). For this group, learning to increase the intensity of their


experiences (part of Enriching), might enhance their responsivity and steepen individual growth

curves. Further research on these possibilities could be fruitful.

Similarly, it may be useful to emphasize particular engagement factors in different

psychosocial programs and forms of psychotherapy. For instance, in those that focus on behavior

change (e.g., Michie et al. 2015), emphasizing the deliberate enriching and absorbing of

experiences of reward during valued actions (e.g., going for a walk instead of smoking) might

help increase motivation for those actions and the formation of healthier habits. Programs and

therapies that emphasize declarative learning, such as memory for “treatment points” made by a

healthcare educator or a psychotherapist (e.g., Harvey et al. 2016), may gain most from

engagement factors that target this kind of learning, such as reflecting on the personal meaning

of information presented.

Finally, the TGC is one of many ways to teach engagement factors. In addition to

informal instruction woven into psychotherapy or psychosocial programs, these factors could be

taught in relatively brief in-person workshops. Additionally, given the evidence that online

personal growth programs can be beneficial (e.g., Spijkerman, Pots, and Bohlmeijer 2016), it

may be useful to adapt the TGC or related trainings to online formats that would be more

accessible to people who, for various reasons, will not attend in-person programs.

Counter-indications and Cautions

In the case of severe clinical depression, the effort to create or sustain attention to

emotionally positive experiences will likely be unsuccessful and potentially distressing, and thus

counter-indicated. Nonetheless, with this population it might be possible to apply engagement

factors to simple positive sensory experiences such as tasting something sweet or getting warmer


when chilled. Further, with regard to dysthymic disorder or mild to moderate clinical depression,

some treatments employ methods that are also in the HEAL framework, such as generating

useful experiences (e.g., increasing activity) and promoting their lasting effects (e.g., focusing on

an enjoyable sense of vitality). In fact, depressed individuals may get particular benefits from

interventions that foster positive experiences and engagement with them (Sin and Lyubomirsky

2009).

People with bipolar disorder (type 1) should be cautious about seeking or sustaining

intensely enjoyable experiences since these might trigger a manic episode (Gruber 2011). Yet

mildly to moderately pleasurable experiences do not necessarily pose risks for manic episodes.

Additionally, applying engagement factors to experiences of key psychological resources such as

self-calming and other aspects of emotion regulation may help strengthen these resources in

ways that are useful for all types of bipolar disorder.

Related Ideas and Methods

The deliberate use of engagement learning factors is related to but distinct from several

important ideas and methods that are relevant to developing psychological resources. For

example, consider the growth mindset, the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions,

social-emotional learning, savoring, and vantage sensitivity.

Growth mindset. The growth mindset—the belief that abilities can be developed through

dedication and practice (Dweck 2006)—is a contextual learning factor. It may foster the use of

engagement factors, but such use is not an inherent feature of it. In fact, a person’s growth

mindset could potentially be developed as a psychological resource by applying engagement

factors to experiences of it.


Broaden-and-build theory. Positive emotions have many benefits, including the

broadening of the perceptual field and a person’s awareness of opportunities (Fredrickson 1998

2000 2013). In terms of their “build” effect, first, emotionally positive experiences can foster

other beneficial mental states such as broad-minded coping that in turn lead to additional

emotionally positive experiences in an upward spiral (Fredrickson and Joiner 2002). In this case,

what is built is a cascade of positive states, and beneficial as these are, they are not themselves

trait-like psychological resources. Second, building can involve the “incidental” (Fredrickson

2004) acquisition of durable psychological resources such as a sense of social connectedness

(Kok and Fredrickson 2010). Without conscious effort, emotionally positive experiences may

add to psychological resources. But the conversion rate of such positive states to positive traits is

an open question. On average, it might be very low. If the incidental conversion were high, one

might expect to see a more steeply upward trend in individual well-being over the lifespan than

is widely evident, given the fact that most people report mainly neutral to positive experiences

throughout the day (Carstensen, Pasupathi, Mayr, and Nesselroade 2000). The intentional and

consciously regulated use of engagement factors is not incidental, and it may tap even more of

the potential value in emotionally positive experiences. Third, the build effects of positive

emotions occur only when they are present, and many experiences a person might want to

internalize do not necessarily involve positive emotions, such as the determination to assert

oneself with an anxiety-provoking authority figure.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Numerous SEL competencies have been identified

(Taylor, Oberle, Durlak, and Weissberg 2017), including the summary from the Collaborative for

Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) (Lawson, McKenzie, Becker, Selby, and


Hoover 2018; https://casel.org/core-competencies/). Using this summary as a mainstream

example, its core competencies are presented as the results of SEL rather than sources of it, even

though some (e.g., self-efficacy) might function as contextual learning factors. Engagement

factors of learning are not included. In effect, the capabilities that might promote

social-emotional learning have not themselves been commonly identified as a SEL competency.

Savoring. Studies on savoring generally approach it as a way to deepen enjoyable

experiences as they are occurring and to have such experiences more often (Bryant 2003; Bryant

and Veroff 2017), rather than as a method—i.e., a learning factor—for acquiring inner resources

such as resilience that persist after the experience passes. Savoring could still be used as an

effective engagement factor to extend and intensify pleasurable experiences, and over time it can

increase aspects of trait well-being (Quoidbach, Berry, Hansenne, and Mikolaiczak 2010).

Nonetheless, as valuable as savoring is, it is difficult to imagine applying it to many of the

experiences that one could grow from, notably those that are conceptual, procedural, and

emotionally neutral or negative. Examples, respectively, include the idea that exercise is good for

one’s health, a stance of assertiveness, the sense of awareness as spacious, and appropriate

remorse about hurting someone. In these cases, other engagement factors, such as fostering

conviction about an important idea, may have more impact on learning than savoring would.

Vantage Sensitivity. This is the capacity of a person to benefit from positive

environments due to endogenous genetic, physiological, and behavioral factors (Pluess and

Belsky 2013; Sweitzer et al. 2013), which is distinct from the deliberate use of engagement

factors in several ways. First, vantage sensitivity (VS) is defined in terms of responses to

external stimuli (de Villiers et al. 2018), which is not sensitivity to experiences that are relatively


independent of the environment, such as meditating on the sensations of breathing. Engagement

factors can be used with any kind of experience and thus have a broader application than VS.

Second, the genetic factors of VS are essentially fixed. The physiological (e.g., cortisol stress

reactivity; van de Wiel, van Goozen, Matthys, Snoek, and van Engeland 2004) and behavioral

(e.g., sensory-processing sensitivity; Aron, Aron, and Jagiellowicz 2012) factors are also

relatively stable. As noted, engagement factors can be applied at will and their use can be readily

increased over time. Third, the behavioral factors of VS—including high-sensitive personality

(Aron et al. 2012), conscientiousness, and introversion (de Villiers et al. 2018)—are contextual

learning factors, not engagement factors. Fourth, while a person’s vantage sensitivity may be

increased due to environmental influences such as childrearing (Pluess and Belsky 2013), these

are external factors not internal mental processes.

On the other hand, certain “vantage sensitivity factors”—notably, attention to visual or

emotionally relevant stimuli, reward sensitivity, cognitive engagement, and responsiveness to

social influences (Pluess and Belsky 2013)—could function as engagement factors. As these

factors are employed in situations, that would increase state VS. If vantage sensitivity factors can

be developed as durable psychological resources, individuals could increase their trait VS. As

research on vantage sensitivity indicates, people vary in their gains from experiences, this

variation is due in part to internal factors, and these factors can be strengthened (de Villiers et al.

2018). While these studies focus on external influences that might strengthen VS factors, their

findings lend credence to the possibility that people might become increasingly effective agents

of their own growth by mobilizing internal engagement-type learning factors.

Directions for Future Research


It could be useful to identify which elements of the HEAL framework have the largest

effects, including for different groups. For example, it may be that the Link step—holding both

positive and negative material in awareness at the same time—is particularly beneficial for

individuals dealing with trauma or an anxiety disorder. Further, it would be useful to learn more

about personality characteristics that lead to especially strong or weak benefits from engagement

factors in general, such as elevated scores on the Highly Sensitive Person scale (Aron and Aron

1997), or from a particular engagement factor. For example, individuals who are “spirited” or

diagnosed with ADD/ADHD might gain the most from the Multi-modality and Novelty aspects

of the Enrich step.

In psychotherapy, it would be valuable to determine whether systematically teaching and

encouraging the use of engagement factors could improve treatment outcomes. Similar

investigations could be fruitful in terms of teaching these skills in structured programs such as

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or group-based approaches to addiction and recovery.

Relevant questions include: Does the increased use of engagement factors impact individual

response to treatment? Does it increase compliance with professional recommendations? Does it

reduce dropouts in psychosocial programs or premature termination in psychotherapy? Does it

help prevent relapse?

Overall, there has been relatively little research on the deliberate use of internal mental

factors to heighten social and emotional learning in both structured interventions and everyday

life. To take psychotherapy as an example, there has been extensive work on the potential effects

of therapist and client characteristics, and of methods and settings, but little focus on what clients

are actually doing inside their minds to increase the healing and growth from the experiences


they are having. For instance, in a recent review of common factors in psychotherapy (Cuijpers,

Reijnders, and Huibers 2019), a summary of 32 factors adapted from Lambert and Ogles (2004)

did not include the clients’ own conscious efforts to register, value, engage, and install

experiences in or related to therapy. (This process of deliberate internalization may have been

implicit in some of the common factors listed, but it was not explicitly identified as a factor in its

own right, and one that is worthy of study.)

Most psychotherapy aims at beneficial changes in the internal world of the client, with

norms of respect for the autonomy of that individual. Much the same could be said for most other

psychosocial interventions. Consequently, it seems ironic that there has not been more study of

how people can be active agents in their own process of lasting internal change. This is a subject

that is full of opportunity.

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