Tired
of Feeling Bad? The New Science of Feelings Can Help
from
thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/19/tired-of-feeling-bad-the-new-science-of-feelings-can-help.html
Is your
emotional style getting you down? Research finds the
neural basis of your responses to life-and how you can
change them.
If you believe most pop psychology, you probably assume
that most of us react to life events in just about the
same way—there is a grieving process, a sequence of
events when we fall in love, a standard response to being
jilted.
But these one-size-fits-all assumptions are not true. In
decades of research into the neurobiology of emotion,
I’ve seen thousands of people who share similar
backgrounds respond in dramatically different ways to the
same experience. Why does one person recover quickly from
divorce while another remains mired in self-recrimination
or despair? Why does one sibling bounce back from a job
loss while another feels worthless for years? And why can
one father shrug off the botched call of a Little League
umpire who called his daughter out while another leaps
out of his seat and screams at the ump until his face
turns purple? The answer that has emerged from my
research is that these differences reflect what I call
Emotional Style—a constellation of reactions and
coping responses that differ in kind, intensity, and
duration. Just as each person has a unique fingerprint
and a unique face, each of us has a unique emotional
profile.
That may seem as obvious as stating that everyone has a
unique personality. But personality is not grounded in
identifiable neurological mechanisms; it has not been
traced to specific patterns of neural activity in the
brain. This is where the theory of Emotional Style breaks
new ground: through neuroimaging and other methodologies,
I have traced Emotional Style—and, specifically, the
six components that make it up—to patterns of
activity throughout the brain.
In making those discoveries, I have found that, in
contrast to the longstanding scientific orthodoxy,
Emotional Style arises partly from activity in regions
involved in cognition, reason, and logic—functions
that textbooks tell us are as unrelated to emotions as
apples are to squid. That has come as a shock to
defenders of the view that cognition—which many
psychologists and neuroscientists consider the most
exalted human capacity—and emotion (viewed as a
lesser, almost animalistic trait) run on separate,
mutually independent brain circuitry: the former in the
“highly evolved” frontal cortex and the latter
in the limbic system, which in humans is not much
different from that of other animals. In showing that
cognition and emotion are not so separate after all,
these discoveries have rehabilitated emotion. From a
behavior that was, as recently as the 1970s, studied for
the most part only in rats and other lab animals, human
emotion has now assumed as important a place in
neuroscience as thinking.
Locating the bases of emotion at least partly in the
brain’s seat of reason has several practical
implications. None is more intriguing than this: it is
possible to transform your Emotional Style through
systematic mental practice.
It is hard to exaggerate what a break this is from the
conventional wisdom in psychology and neuroscience. From
the earliest days of brain mapping—determining which
regions are responsible for which
functions—neuroscientists traced feelings and
thoughts to structures that were barely within hailing
distance of each other. The limbic system deep in the
brain, including the amygdala and hippocampus, seemed to
be the brain’s holy terror of a 2-year-old, the site
of anger, fear, and anxiety, as well as positive
emotions. The frontal cortex, just behind the forehead,
was the exalted thinker, where forethought and judgment,
reason and volition, attention and cognition came from.
As recently as the 1980s, neuroscientists focused almost
exclusively on cognition and the other functions of the
frontal cortex; emotions were deemed of so little
interest that neuroscience left them to psychology.
The first crack in this wall came in the 1980s. The
neurobiology of emotion was still a backwater, but a few
scientists were beginning to pay more attention to
feelings, particularly in the context of depression.
Inspired by one of them, I launched experiments using
electrodes to measure brain activity in people whose
emotional state we manipulated in the lab. By showing
them upsetting, fearful, or uplifting videos and photos,
for instance, and monitoring their response, we
discovered that how well and how quickly a person is able
to bounce back from adversity has nothing to do with
activity in what scientists identify as the brain’s
emotion centers. Instead, the ability to vanquish
feelings of grief, anger, or other negative emotions
reflects activity in the prefrontal cortex. In this
research, we found that Resilience—one of the six
elements of Emotional Style—is marked by greater
left versus right activation in the prefrontal cortex: a
lack of Resilience comes from higher right prefrontal
activation. The amount of activation in the left
prefrontal region of a Resilient person can be 30 times
that in someone who is not Resilient.
Almost immediately, we faced a new question: what does
the prefrontal cortex do when it comes to emotion? After
all, the prefrontal cortex was, and is, known to be the
site of the highest of higher-order cognitive activity,
the seat of judgment, planning, and other executive
functions. How could it possibly play a role in a key
element of our emotional lives?
One clue came from the large bundles of neurons running
between certain regions of the prefrontal cortex and the
amygdala. The amygdala is involved in, among other
things, negative emotion and distress, snapping to
attention and activity when we feel anxious, afraid, or
threatened. Perhaps the left prefrontal cortex inhibits
the amygdala and, through this mechanism, helps to
facilitate rapid recovery from adversity.
In a major experiment testing this idea, my colleagues
and I fitted volunteers with electrodes to measure their
brain activity and then showed them 51 pictures on a
video monitor. One third of the pictures depicted
upsetting images such as a baby with a tumor growing out
of his eye; one third showed something happy, such as a
radiant mother embracing her infant; one third showed a
neutral scene such as a nondescript room. Sometimes
during or after a picture, the volunteer would hear a
short burst of noise that made him blink involuntarily. A
large body of research had established that when people
are in a negative emotional state, these blinks are a
little stronger than when we are in a neutral emotional
state, and much stronger than in a positive state.
What we found, in a nutshell, is that people with greater
activation on the left side of the prefrontal cortex
recovered much more quickly even from the strongest
feelings of disgust, anger, and fear evoked by the
images. From this, we inferred that the left prefrontal
sends inhibitory signals to the amygdala, instructing it
to quiet down. Activity in the left prefrontal cortex
actually shortens the period of amygdala activation,
allowing the brain to bounce back from an upsetting
experience.
Thanks to MRI, we now also know that there is a second
element at play: the more axons you have connecting one
neuron to another between the prefrontal cortex and the
amygdala, the more resilient you are. The less of this
“white matter”—that is, the fewer the
highways leading from the prefrontal cortex to the
amygdala—the less resilient you are.
In other words, both prefrontal-cortex activity and the
number of pathways sending calming signals to the
amygdala determine just how easily a person will bounce
back from adversity. Through these two mechanisms, our
“thinking brain” is able to calm our
“feeling” self, enabling the brain to plan and
act effectively without being distracted by negative
emotion—not a bad working definition of Resilience.
This is the kind of statement that makes people worry: Oh
great, I must not have many connections between my
prefrontal cortex and amygdala, so I’m doomed to
melt into a neurotic puddle every time I experience
adversity. And indeed, for decades, neuroscientists
assumed that the adult brain is essentially fixed in form
and function.
We now know that this picture is wrong. Instead, the
brain has a property called neuroplasticity, the ability
to change its structure and function in significant ways.
The brains of virtuoso violinists, for example, show a
measurable increase in the size and activity of areas
that control the fingers, and the brains of London
taxicab drivers, who learn to navigate the complicated
network of streets in that city, show a significant
growth in the hippocampus, an area associated with
context and spatial memory. But the brain can also change
in response to messages generated internally—in
other words, to our thoughts and intentions. In my
favorite example of how “mere” thought can
change the brain in fundamental ways, scientists led by
Alvaro Pascual—Leone of Harvard University had
volunteers imagine practicing a simple five-finger
keyboard piece over and over for a week. Result: the
region of the brain’s motor cortex that controls the
fingers of the right hand expanded. Thinking, and
thinking alone, had increased the amount of space the
motor cortex devoted to a specific function.
When it comes to your Emotional Style, we know that
changes to the neural structure of the brain are
possible. We don’t know exactly how much plasticity
the brain has, but we do know that some neurally inspired
interventions—forms of mental training that target
patterns of brain activity—can work. Mental
activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior
therapy, can help you develop a broader awareness of
social signals, a deeper sensitivity to your own feelings
and bodily sensations, a more consistently positive
outlook, and a greater capacity for Resilience. Do you
feel yourself to be too negative in outlook? Pay
heightened attention to the ways in which you can be more
generous and upbeat, through processes therapists call
“well-being therapy.” Are you very Self-Aware,
so much so that your internal chatter threatens to take
over your day-to-day life? Practice observing your
thoughts, feelings, and sensations nonjudgmentally moment
by moment.
This practice, known as “mindfulness
meditation,” is one of the most effective tools for
changing our Emotional Style. In patients with
depression—whom we call “Slow to Recover”
on the Resilience scale—every disappointment and
setback is shattering. These patients need to increase
activity in the prefrontal cortex (especially on the left
side), to strengthen the neuronal highways between it and
the amygdala, or both. Mindfulness meditation cultivates
greater Resilience and faster recovery from setbacks by
weakening the chain of associations that keep us
obsessing about and even wallowing in a setback. It
strengthens connections between the prefrontal cortex and
the amygdala, promoting an equanimity that will help keep
you from spiraling down. As soon as your thoughts begin
to leap from one catastrophe to the next in this chain of
woe, you have the mental wherewithal to pause, observe
how easily the mind does this, note that it is an
interesting mental process, and resist getting drawn into
the abyss.
If you instead wish to move toward the Slow-to-Recover
end of the Resilience dimension—perhaps you find you
are not taking in the pain of others or yourself
carefully enough—then you need to weaken connections
between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. One
strategy is to focus intently on whatever negative
emotion or pain you are feeling, or the pain of someone
you know. This can help sustain the emotion, at least for
a time, and increase activation of your circuitry that is
involved in pain and distress.
The goal here is not to go from one extreme to the other:
I’m not trying to change you from Slow to Speedy (or
vice versa) on the Resilience scale, or from Cassandra
into Pollyanna in your Outlook. Changing the patterns of
activity and even connectivity that underlie the facets
of Emotional Style is highly personal. It depends on what
works for you.
Adapted by arrangement with Hudson Street Press, a member
of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Emotional Life of
Your Brain by Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., and Sharon
Begley. Copyright 2012 by Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., and
Sharon Begley.
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