My whole life has always been someone who will go walk up to someone he
doesn't know and just strike up a conversation and it, it was always short.
He wasn't trying to take up too much of anyone's time but he would go,
make a connection, smile.
He'd usually try to make a joke of some sort.
Some of these jokes were better than others, but, he was always, you know,
his intention was to, you know, just get to know someone briefly.
And he would take time everyday to drive around town,
and he had all of his little stops where he would go and.
He'd just pop in and, you know,
say hi or pick up some popcorn from the local car dealership.
There was food strategically placed at a lot of these areas that he liked.
But, I just remember thinking that, that's something that I learned from him is
that this can be a really rewarding thing to, you know, you get an opportunity to
meet people in your community and share a brief moment of this positive connection.
And I think he, he really, utilizes that throughout his whole life to, really.
You know, use those opportunities to, to connect with others in the community and
I think it had a lot of great impact on him too, you know.
He, he was always a happy guy and, I just was, you know,
thinking about him recently and realized oh my gosh,
I'm researching these brief micromoments of positivity and
my grandfather is the perfect example of this.
>> Yeah.
>> so.
>> So tell us what your research is saying or
is poised to say about what the importance of these kinds of moments are.
>> Yeah. So we are, have a couple studies in
the process right now and we are, asking people to kind of take some time and
reflect on their positive social interactions.
And we are hoping to find what we're hypothesizing is that people,
their physical health is going to improve as they, continue to reflect upon these
positive social interactions and there's some research that already shows that.
But we don't know why, the,
this daily thinking about your positive social interactions.
Why is that good for your health?
So we have some theories on why we think that might happen and
one of them is that we think perhaps people are you know,
interacting with greater variety of people.
Maybe they're seeking out new friendships and
these new friendships are providing support for them when they need it.
Or maybe it's changing the way people think about their existing relationships.
So if you spend some time reflecting on your positive relationships,
then you can kind of find new meaning in the relationships you already have and
you can experience those a little more fully and.