Category: Emotion

Cracks in Our Rose-Tinted Glasses?

In the last week, several media outlets have addressed research that presents an alternative view on the happy emphasis on positive psychology and self-help that has swept through America in the past few years.  I’ll just excerpt some pieces from each, not a lot of commentary this time. 

First, three pieces from Sharon Begley’s article “Happiness: Enough Already” in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569 

Excerpt #1: While careful not to extol depression—which is marked not only by chronic sadness but also by apathy, lethargy and an increased risk of suicide—[Diener] praises melancholia for generating “a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.” This is not romantic claptrap. Studies show that when you are in a negative mood, says Diener, “you become more analytical, more critical and more innovative. You need negative emotions, including sadness, to direct your thinking” 
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Anger and Healing

“Anger slows healing process after injury: study” is one of today’s headlines.  Here’s the main point:

Researchers at the University of Ohio inflicted minor burns on the forearms of 98 volunteers who were then monitored over eight days to see how quickly the skin repaired itself… The results were startlingly clear: individuals who had trouble controlling expressions of anger were four times likelier to need more than four days for their wounds to heal, compared with counterparts who could master their anger.

 Anger, not surprisingly, is more nuanced than an on/off state.  “Subjects described as showing ‘anger out’ (regular outbursts of aggression or hostility) or ‘anger in’ (repressed rage) healed almost as quickly as individuals who ranked low on all anger scales.”  

Indeed only one group had significantly slower healing:

Only those who tried but failed to hold in their feelings of upset and distemper took longer to heal. This same group also showed a higher secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, which could at least partly explain the difference in healing time, the study noted… High levels of cortisol appears to decrease the production at the point of injury of two cytokines crucial to the repair process, suggests the study. Cytokines are proteins released by immune-system cells. They act as signallers to generate a wider immune response.

 So, it is not so much “anger” that matters, but anger management.  Trying and failing is the key variable, not so much anger itself.  That appears to be what is stressful, the lack of control and the uncertainty, rather than experiencing anger itself. 

Here’s the abstract of the original article.

Denial

Today I will lecture to my students in my Alcohol and Drugs class on denial.  We had a provocative discussion of the topic last Thursday, building off our reading of the wonderful and powerful memoir Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. 

A group of students opened last Thursday’s class with a presentation that framed denial in the two ways it is generally discussed in addiction (in the US).  As I wrote to this group to help in preparing their presentation, “There is a basic debate in the addictions field (particularly alcoholism) on the role and importance of denial in addiction and recovery.  On the one side, denial is seen as a defining feature of addiction and breaking through denial as a core component of successful recovery.  On the other side, denial is seen as a marginal feature of addiction, likely the result of some other internal problem or even of social relations.  In this approach, attacking denial can backfire, causing anger in the substance abuser while not addressing either addiction itself or the promotion of therapeutic change.” 

After the students gave their presentation, I wanted to encourage class discussion, and used a technique I often employ, getting them to reflect on their own everyday lives and what that can tell us about ourselves.  I asked the class to write down an example of someone they knew “in denial,” and then give their gut reaction about why they think that person reacted that way.  In other words, I wanted some ethnographic data and some culturally-framed “explanations” to generate discussion.  It worked. 
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Dopamine and Addiction – Part One

By Daniel Lende 

The Pathway 

In your brain you have a system that comes up from some of the oldest evolved parts of your brain to some of the most recently evolved parts.  Reptile parts to ape parts.  In brain research on addiction, it’s generally called the mesolimbic dopamine pathway or system.  All the main addictive drugs affect this system, making the mesolimbic pathway a core component in addictive behavior.  Addictive experiences—gambling, shopping, eating and sex—also impact the mesolimbic dopamine system. 

In both scientific research and the popular press, the dopamine system is often cast in the role of “bad boy,” a hard-wired brain circuit that has gotten out of control, self-indulging in an orgy of pleasure.  That neat story tells us a lot about how we cast our own morals onto the brain, selectively picking out research to provide a nice scientific sheen.  Hard-wired for hedonism, we have to work even harder at self-control.   

It strikes me as the same sort of story that addicts know how to spin so well.  So let’s be blunt.  Denial! 
Continue reading “Dopamine and Addiction – Part One”

Visual Rewards

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchWhy will we study a favored painting again and again?  Or gaze on our lover’s face with such pleasure, even after years and lines have mounted?

 I came across an article, “Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain,” by Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel in American Scientist.  They studied the distribution of mu-opioid receptors, associated with the modulation of pleasure and pain, in the visual cortex.  Their basic result: “The receptors are sparsest in the early stages of this [central visual] pathway, the so-called V1 to V4 areas, where an image is processed as local bits of contour, color and texture.  Intermediate stages of visual processing, such as the lateral occipital area and ventral occipito-temporal cortex, which integrate local information to detect surfaces, objects, faces and places, contain greater number of opioid receptors.  The receptors are densest in the later stages of recognition, in the parahippocampal cortex and rhinal cortex, where visual information engages our memories.”

 Thus, they argue, “a visual stimulus that elicits many episodic or semantic memories should be more pleasing (or more interesting) than a stimulus that brings forth fewer mental associations.” 

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Mice brains on stress

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchIn February 2006, a research team at University of Texas and Tufts University published a piece in Science on how experience could modify the structures in the brain that affect the production of dopamine through brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) (abstract here). The research team used ‘social defeat’ to explore ‘the neurobiological mechanisms through which psychosocial experience alters the activity of the mesolimbic dopamine pathway’; in other words, the malleable system that can induce structural changes in the brains of mice in response to persistent patterns of social interaction.The abstract, while a little thick, suggests all sorts of intriguing possibilities:

Mice experiencing repeated aggression develop a long-lasting aversion to social contact, which can be normalized by chronic, but not acute, administration of antidepressant. Using viral-mediated, mesolimbic dopamine pathway–specific knockdown of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), we showed that BDNF is required for the development of this experience-dependent social aversion. Gene profiling in the nucleus accumbens indicates that local knockdown of BDNF obliterates most of the effects of repeated aggression on gene expression within this circuit, with similar effects being produced by chronic treatment with antidepressant. These results establish an essential role for BDNF in mediating long-term neural and behavioral plasticity in response to aversive social experiences.  

Continue reading “Mice brains on stress”