Debunked, apparently. Ran across a reference to the Losada Line in The Happiness Advantage today – the idea that for you (or your team) to flourish, you need roughly 3 positive interactions for every negative interaction. 2.9013 positive interactions, to be precise.
We do not here call into question the idea that positive emotions are more likely to build resilience than negative emotions, or that a higher positivity ratio is ordinarily more desirable than a lower one. But to suggest that some form of discontinuity sets in at some special value of the positivity ratio — especially one that is independent of all demographic and cultural factors — seems far-fetched. We cannot, of course, prove that no such “tipping point” exists; but we believe that we have adequately demonstrated here that even if it does, Fredrickson and Losada’s (2005) article — based on a series of erroneous and, for the most part, completely illusory “applications” of mathematics — has not moved science any nearer to finding it.
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