Staying sane
Do More of Those in Misery Suffer from Poverty, Unemployment or Mental Illness?
Sarah Flèche & Richard Layard
Kyklos, February 2017, Pages 27–41
Abstract:
Studies of deprivation usually ignore mental illness. This paper uses household panel data from the USA, Australia, Britain and Germany to broaden the analysis. We ask first how many of those in the lowest levels of life-satisfaction suffer from unemployment, poverty, physical ill health, and mental illness. The largest proportion suffers from mental illness. Multiple regression shows that mental illness is not highly correlated with poverty or unemployment, and that it contributes more to explaining the presence of misery than is explained by either poverty or unemployment. This holds both with and without fixed effects.
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Arbitrary Rituals Mute the Neural Response to Performance Failure
Nicholas Hobson, Devin Bonk & Michael Inzlicht
University of Toronto Working Paper, September 2016
Abstract:
Rituals are found in all types of performance domains, from high-stakes athletics and military to the daily morning preparations of the working family. And yet despite their ubiquity and widespread importance for humans, we know very little of ritual’s causal mechanisms and how (if at all) they facilitate goal-directed performance. Correlational and anecdotal evidence suggests that rituals might assist in goal-regulation by dealing with potential performance setbacks, either by: (i) bolstering self-efficacy that then promotes controlled performance in the face of errors or (ii) buffering the sting of performance errors. Here, in a fully pre-registered pre/post experimental design, we test these two competing mechanisms by examining changes in the error-related negativity (ERN), a measure of neural performance-monitoring involved in regulatory control. Participants completed an arbitrary ritual – novel actions repeated at home over one week – followed by an executive function task in the lab during electroencephalographic (EEG) recording. Results revealed that relative to pre rounds, participants showed a reduced ERN in the post rounds, after completing the ritual in the lab. The findings offer support for the palliative explanation: rituals dampen the neuroaffective signal in response to task errors. Corroborating the long-established view that rituals protect against uncertainty and anxiety, our results provide preliminary evidence that even arbitrary rituals can mute the brain’s response to distressing performance failures.
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A Linguistic Signature of Psychological Distancing in Emotion Regulation
Erik Nook, Jessica Schleider & Leah Somerville
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Effective emotion regulation is critical for mental health and well-being, rendering insight into underlying mechanisms that facilitate this crucial skill invaluable. We combined principles of cognitive linguistics and basic affective science to test whether shifting components of one’s language might foster effective emotion regulation. In particular, we explored bidirectional relations between emotion regulation and linguistic signatures of psychological distancing. In Study 1, we assessed whether people spontaneously distance their language (i.e., shift their word use to be less socially and temporally proximate) when regulating emotions. Participants transcribed their thoughts while either passively viewing or actively regulating their emotional responses to negative images. Regulation increased linguistic markers of social and temporal distance, and participants who showed greater linguistic distancing were more successful regulators. Study 2 reversed this relation and investigated whether distancing one’s language spontaneously regulated one’s emotions. Participants wrote about negative images either using psychologically “close” or “distant” language in physical, social, and temporal domains. All 3 domains of linguistic distancing spontaneously reduced negative affect. Distancing language also “bled” across domains (e.g., temporal distancing spontaneously produced social distancing). This suggests that distancing one’s language in 1 domain (e.g., reducing use of present-tense verbs) produces shifts in deep representations of psychological distance that are measurable across domains (e.g., reduced use of the word “I”). Results extend understanding of language-emotion interactions and reveal novel strategies for reducing negative affect.
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What You Like Is What You Try to Get: Attitudes Toward Emotions and Situation Selection
Noam Markovitch, Liat Netzer & Maya Tamir
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do people expose themselves to certain emotional stimuli and avoid others? We propose that what people want to feel is linked to attitudes toward emotions. In 3 studies, we show that individuals with more (vs. less) negative attitudes toward an emotion were more (vs. less) likely to avoid stimuli that induce that emotion. People who evaluated disgust (or joy) less favorably than others were less likely to expose themselves to disgusting (or joyful) pictures (Study 1). These links were emotion-specific and could not be explained by differences in state or trait emotion (Study 2) or in emotional reactivity (Study 3). We were further able to show that the choice of emotion-inducing stimuli affected emotional experience in a congruent manner. People with more (vs. less) negative attitudes toward disgust (or sadness) were more likely to avoid disgusting (or sad) stimuli, resulting in more intense experiences of disgust (or sadness; Study 2). Finally, people with more negative attitudes toward disgust chose to avoid more disgusting stimuli, whether attitudes were assessed explicitly or implicitly (Study 3). These findings suggest that people avoid stimuli that induce emotions that they evaluate less favorably, even when such evaluations are not consciously accessible.
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Ahmed Tawakol et al.
Lancet, forthcoming
Background: Emotional stress is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease. We imaged the amygdala, a brain region involved in stress, to determine whether its resting metabolic activity predicts risk of subsequent cardiovascular events.
Methods: Individuals aged 30 years or older without known cardiovascular disease or active cancer disorders, who underwent 18F-fluorodexoyglucose PET/CT at Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, MA, USA) between Jan 1, 2005, and Dec 31, 2008, were studied longitudinally. Amygdalar activity, bone-marrow activity, and arterial inflammation were assessed with validated methods. In a separate cross-sectional study we analysed the relation between perceived stress, amygdalar activity, arterial inflammation, and C-reactive protein. Image analyses and cardiovascular disease event adjudication were done by mutually blinded researchers. Relations between amygdalar activity and cardiovascular disease events were assessed with Cox models, log-rank tests, and mediation (path) analyses.
Findings: 293 patients (median age 55 years [IQR 45•0–65•5]) were included in the longitudinal study, 22 of whom had a cardiovascular disease event during median follow-up of 3•7 years (IQR 2•7–4•8). Amygdalar activity was associated with increased bone-marrow activity (r=0•47; p<0•0001), arterial inflammation (r=0•49; p<0•0001), and risk of cardiovascular disease events (standardised hazard ratio 1•59, 95% CI 1•27–1•98; p<0•0001), a finding that remained significant after multivariate adjustments. The association between amygdalar activity and cardiovascular disease events seemed to be mediated by increased bone-marrow activity and arterial inflammation in series. In the separate cross-sectional study of patients who underwent psychometric analysis (n=13), amygdalar activity was significantly associated with arterial inflammation (r=0•70; p=0•0083). Perceived stress was associated with amygdalar activity (r=0•56; p=0•0485), arterial inflammation (r=0•59; p=0•0345), and C-reactive protein (r=0•83; p=0•0210).
Interpretation: In this first study to link regional brain activity to subsequent cardiovascular disease, amygdalar activity independently and robustly predicted cardiovascular disease events. Amygdalar activity is involved partly via a path that includes increased bone-marrow activity and arterial inflammation. These findings provide novel insights into the mechanism through which emotional stressors can lead to cardiovascular disease in human beings.