# Broaden-and-build theory > Broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions widen what you notice and consider doing, and that this widening accumulates lasting resources. Source: https://www.begrateful.co.in/glossary/broaden-and-build-theory Published: 2026-08-20 Come out of a good conversation and watch what you do next. You take the longer route home, you answer a message you had been putting off, you consider something that would not have occurred to you an hour earlier. The mood is the obvious part. The widening is the part this theory is about. ## The two halves of the claim Broaden-and-build theory was set out by Barbara Fredrickson in [the 2001 paper that named it](https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218), and it makes two claims that are worth keeping apart. The first is about the moment. Positive emotions *broaden* — they widen the range of what you attend to and the set of actions that present themselves as available. Negative emotions do the opposite, narrowing toward one specific and useful response: fear toward escape, anger toward confrontation. The narrowing is not a defect. It is what makes a negative emotion good at its job. The second is about accumulation. Repeated broadening is said to *build* durable personal resources — skills, knowledge, relationships — which outlast the mood that produced them. That is a claim about months and years, and it is a far harder thing to demonstrate than the first. ## What has held up, and what has not The broadening half has direct experimental support. Fredrickson and Branigan [tested it against neutral and negative comparison conditions](https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000238), using a visual task that distinguishes attention to the whole from attention to the parts, alongside an open-ended measure of how many actions people could list wanting to do. Positive emotion widened both. The building half is thinner. It rests largely on longitudinal and correlational work rather than direct demonstration, and is better read as a well-motivated framework than a settled result. Some of the more quantitative claims that grew out of this research programme have also not survived scrutiny. One widely repeated numerical threshold was shown to rest on a mathematical error and was partly retracted, and several effect sizes in this literature have come out smaller on re-examination. The distinction between broadening and narrowing is in considerably better shape than the arithmetic that got built on top of it. ## What it would mean for a journal This is the part most likely to be overstated. On this account, an entry that records something specific and good is not merely a pleasant few minutes. It is a brief, deliberate return to a broadened state, and broadening is the thing the theory says compounds. That is a mechanism story and should be labelled as one. Broaden-and-build was not developed on [journaling](/glossary/gratitude-journaling) and has not been tested on it. Nobody has shown that three lines in the evening produce the resource accumulation the theory describes. What the theory supplies is a reason why noticing good things might not stop at feeling better for ten minutes — a hypothesis about why, not a finding that it happens. ## Where it sits among the other terms [Negativity bias](/glossary/negativity-bias) is the neighbouring claim: bad events carry more weight than good ones of the same size. The narrowing half of this theory is roughly what that weighting looks like at the level of attention. [Savoring](/glossary/savoring) is the deliberate version — extending a positive state on purpose, where broadening is what the state does regardless. And [hedonic adaptation](/glossary/hedonic-adaptation) is the constraint any accumulation claim has to answer, since the feeling itself reliably fades back to baseline. Between them, the positive side of the ledger stops being a mood to maintain and starts being something with mechanics — which is the only kind of reason worth writing anything down for. ## Research - [The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions](https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218) — Fredrickson, B. L. (2001) - [Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires](https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000238) — Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005) ## Related terms - [Gratitude journaling](https://www.begrateful.co.in/glossary/gratitude-journaling) - [Savoring](https://www.begrateful.co.in/glossary/savoring) - [Negativity bias](https://www.begrateful.co.in/glossary/negativity-bias) ## Related reading - [Why gratitude journaling works: the one bad review](https://www.begrateful.co.in/blog/why-gratitude-journaling-works) ## FAQ ### What is broaden-and-build theory? It is an account of what positive emotions are for, proposed by Barbara Fredrickson in 2001. The claim has two parts. In the moment, a positive emotion broadens — it widens the range of what you attend to and the range of actions that seem available to you, where a negative emotion narrows toward one specific response. Over time, repeated broadening is said to build durable personal resources such as skills, knowledge and relationships that outlast the mood that produced them. ### How is broadening different from building? Broadening is immediate and measurable in a single session — it happens over minutes, and you can put someone in a lab and test whether their attention has widened. Building is the long-run claim, spanning months or years, that those widened moments leave something permanent behind. Popular summaries usually fuse the two into a single statement, which makes the theory sound better evidenced than it is. The broadening half has direct experimental support; the building half is largely inferred. ### Is broaden-and-build theory well supported? The core distinction is in reasonable shape. Positive emotions widening attentional scope has been shown experimentally, and the idea that negative emotions narrow toward specific survival responses is uncontroversial. What is weaker is the layer of specific quantitative claims that grew out of this research programme — one widely repeated numerical threshold was found to rest on a mathematical error and was partly retracted, and several effect sizes in this literature have come out smaller on re-examination. Treat the broaden and narrow distinction as reasonably solid and any precise number attached to it as not. ### Does broaden-and-build theory explain why gratitude journaling works? It offers a plausible mechanism, not a demonstrated one. If noticing something good briefly broadens what you attend to, then an entry is a small deliberate return to that state, and broadening is the thing the theory says compounds. But the theory was not developed on journaling and has not been tested on it. No one has shown that three lines in the evening produce the resource accumulation the theory describes, so this is a reason the effect might extend beyond the moment, not evidence that it does. ### Is broaden-and-build the same as savoring? No, though they concern the same territory. Broadening is something a positive emotion does to your attention whether or not you notice it happening. Savoring is deliberate — staying with a positive state on purpose in order to extend or intensify it. One is a proposed function of the emotion, the other a technique applied to it, and the theory is what would explain why the technique might be worth the trouble.