Category: Stress

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.

Taking Play Seriously

When I lived in Nigeria, I used to cross the city of Calabar to visit the defunct zoo, taking food for the animals—a constrictor snake, some crocodiles, a male drill monkey—still trapped in cages.  Jacob, a large juvenile chimpanzee, lived in that zoo in a cage roughly ten feet by ten feet.  As I walked onto the zoo grounds, Jacob would greet me with an exuberant pant-hoot and I would respond back (my Intro to Anthro students are endlessly amused when I demonstrate my pant-hooting skills).  Though I carried food for him, what Jacob most wanted to do was play with me. 

Jacob loved to play tag first, swinging back and forth across the front of his thickly barred cage, sticking a hand out to see if I could catch it.  We would rush back and forth together, Jacob generally favoring the role of being chased.  Then we’d settle down for some tickling.  Believe me, being tickled by a chimpanzee is, I am sure, rather what my boys feel when I get overly excited about tickling them. 

Jacob’s fingers were powerful, and his arms more so, but I made myself laugh in the chortling sound of chimpanzees.  If he got too strong, I could simply let out a sound of pain and he’d stop.  Then we’d get started again, because of course I loved to tickle him back.  I remember times, our heads together, pressed against the bars, his hand at the back of my neck, my fingers digging into his ribs.  It was such fun, yet I never could quite shake the thought in that moment that he could crush my head so easily against the bars. 
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Poverty Poisons the Brain

Paul Krugman writes today that “Poverty Is Poison,” building off an article from the Financial Times that discussed last Friday’s session, “Poverty and Brain Development” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Krugman writes: 

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life. So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

The Financial Times article, “Poverty mars formation of infant brains,” provides some more detail about the impact of poverty through stress, inadequate nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins: “Studies by several US universities have revealed the pervasive harm done to the brain, particularly between the ages of six months and three years, from low socio-economic status.  Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s centre for cognitive neuroscience, said: ‘The biggest effects are on language and memory. The finding about memory impairment – the ability to encounter a pattern and remember it – really surprised us’.” 
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Addiction and Our Faultlines

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchDrugs are what cause drug addiction, or so is the story we often hear in the United States.  But what if social conditions mattered as much or more in who used and abused drugs?

 Many anthropologists and other social scientists have shown that social conditions matter, including Phillippe Bourgois, Merrill Singer, and Elliott Currie.  Bourgois’ book In Search of Respect, Singer’s article Why Does Juan Garcia Have A Drinking Problem, and Currie’s Reckoning are powerful testaments to a basic point: Addiction runs along the fault lines of society.

 However, it has been relatively easy for neuroscientists to isolate themselves from that view, and to argue that drugs run along the pharmacological fault lines of the brain, generating terrible problems on their own.  Social conditions are one thing, drugs and brains are another.

 The research by Michael Nader, Morgan Drake and colleagues shows convincingly that social conditions matter, and matter a great deal, at the basic level of the brain.  This same line of research also highlights that individual differences, whether genetic or social, make a difference in addiction.  The trick is that the research is done with monkeys.

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Cellular effects of exercise

I just came across a news report on the Times Online website by Nigel Hawkes, entitled, Exercise really can make you younger, study shows. A team from King’s College London looked at telomeres, a section of repeating DNA at the end of chromosomes, in twins to judge how exercise affected them. Telomeres protect the end of chromosomes, and they shorten over our lives (however, long telomeres may increase the likelihood of cancer, so there’s a trade-off between cancer susceptibility and aging). A study in 2002 even showed that telomere length could be used in forensic anthropology to tell the age of remains. The researchers used questionnaires, but they also looked at data from twin studies, to try to isolate the effects of exercise, controlling for BMI, smoking, diet, and even genetic inheritance (hence, the twins).

The difference could be pretty significant. Dr Lynn Cherkas from King’s College explained: ‘Overall, the difference in telomere length between the most active subjects and the inactive subjects corresponds to around nine years of ageing.’ According to the researchers, their results ‘show that adults who partake in regular physical activity are biologically younger than sedentary individuals.

‘The only reason I point out the research on the Neuroanthropology blog is that here we have another cellular-level mechanism that profoundly affects very basic body functioning that can be manipulated by individuals, behaviour, cultural ideals, social fads, and even moral panics. The amount of exercise we get affects the speed at which our cells age; but the amount of exercise we get is, in turn, affected by a whole range of things, from changing policy and budget concerns at schools, to safety concerns about transportation, housing patterns, leisure activities, public health campaigns… In other words, we have a wonderful example in the current discussion of exercise, and the effects of exercise on our telomeres, of a way that sociological-scale phenomena might affect very microscopic-scale qualities of the human body. The shape of our DNA is not just a cause of our physiology, but also an effect of our physical activity.

The Stress Eraser. Only $299

Sometimes an example comes along that just captures everything you want to say, yet makes it all so horribly funny, sad and real at the same time.  Do culture, biology, the body, and technology all combine?  Look no further than the Stress Eraser, a gizmo with the slogan, “Finally, Stress Relief that Actually Works.”

Do we really need this?  The answer appears yes, at least according to Men’s Vogue.  Here’s the lead-in: “Last fall, the American Psychological Association released a major study that told us what we already knew—21st-century America is the most stressed-out place on Earth. A third of American adults are living with ‘extreme stress,’ and nearly half believe that their stress levels have increased in the past five years.” 
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