all emotions stories

Unfeeling moral choices traced to damaged frontal lobes

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:45:32 -0400

Consider the following scenario: Someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person. Do you pull the trigger?

Most people waver or say they could not, even if they agree that in theory they should. But according to a new study in the journal Nature, subjects with damage to a part of the frontal lobe make a less personal calculation. The logical choice, they say, is to sacrifice one life to save many.

I know just how you feel

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:40:37 -0400

When people talk with psychotherapists, the best results occur if both feel similar emotions, when both “like” each other. But do most therapists really connect with patients this way? No one has ever tried to directly measure the biology of empathy between the two.

To fill this gap, a group of researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital measured involuntary biological reactions by both patients and therapists during a regular psychotherapy session. Attention and inattention, expressions of pleasure and satisfaction, and words of care and understanding also were caught on videotape.

Adjusting to death of a loved one

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:37:38 -0400

"Is my grief normal?" That is one of the most common questions posed by people who have lost a loved one. A new study by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers has helped answer that question by affirming the commonly accepted stages of grief - disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance - and the sequence in which these emotions occur. The findings appear in the Feb. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Doctor fatigue hurting patients

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:46:57 -0400

Too many 24-hour shifts worked by hospital interns cause medical mistakes that harm and may even kill patients, according to a new Harvard Medical School study.

Doctors in training who fall asleep during surgery or while examining patients make four times more errors that cause deaths than their better-rested colleagues, the research reveals.

Young doctors also suffer from their mistakes with emotional problems that can haunt them for years. They admit that their distress includes fear, guilt, anger, humiliation, and decreased compassion. What's more, the distress coupled with reduced empathy can increase the odds of more medical errors and even alcohol and drug abuse.

Feelings are key to negotiation

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:40:51 -0400

In any negotiation, says Roger Fisher, the Samuel Williston Professor Emeritus of Law and the director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, "there are a handful of things you can easily do, and you'd be dumb not to do them." Expressing appreciation for one's interlocutor is one of them.

And appreciation is one of the five "core concerns" that Fisher and his co-author Daniel Shapiro, associate director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, have identified as essential to address whenever parties get together to work out a deal, whether it's the handoff of children by one half of a divorced couple to the other or a labor contract or a peace treaty.

Anyone in a negotiation wants to feel appreciated, Fisher and Shapiro maintain. They also want to feel "affiliated," want to feel some personal connection to others. Negotiators also want to preserve, and preferably expand, their autonomy. They want their status acknowledged: Perhaps this is a function of their rank within an organization, or of their specialized knowledge or institutional memory. And they want to choose and play a fulfilling role within the negotiation.

When either side in a negotiation feels these core concerns are not being addressed, the result is negative emotions, such as anger, fear, and guilt, which trigger competitive action - including old-style "I want mine" kind of bargaining. When those core concerns are addressed, positive emotions, leading to cooperative action, are fostered, and the result is much likelier to be a "win-win" agreement.

Researchers find a gene for fear

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:23:18 -0400

A team of researchers from Harvard, Columbia, and Rutgers universities has found the seat of fear. It's located in a pea-sized area deep in the brain of all mammals, from gerbils, to lions, to humans. And it's involved in both inborn fear and the dread we acquire from dealing with people and things that hurt us. The scientists already knew that fear forms in the amygdala (a- mig-da-la), an almond-shaped mass of gray matter. But a closer look revealed the presence of a gene that produces a protein known as "stathmin," a stimulant of fear and anxiety. The scientists' investigations were done with mice because they involved genetic engineering and surgical slicing of the brain.

"This is the first time it has been shown that the protein stathmin is linked to brain circuits that register both inborn alarm and acquired memories of fear," says Vadim Bolshakov of Harvard Medical School and Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital. "Because it is so essential for survival, memory for fear is easily established, very resistant to extinction, and normally lasts for a lifetime."

The finding provides a deeper understanding of how learning and memory take place. It also could lead to new treatments for a variety of mental disorders including generalized anxiety, panic, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the post- traumatic stress disorder that is being brought back from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Besides Bolshakov and his colleagues at McLean Hospital, the research team involved Eric Kandel and colleagues at Columbia University, and Gleb Shumyatsky and colleagues at Rutgers. Kandel won the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine. They reported their results in the November 2005 issue of the journal Cell.

Discovering how we appreciate a loss

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:36:56 -0400

A committee of psychiatrists, surgeons, ethicists, and others decided that the only course left for five people with otherwise untreatable mental disorders was to cut out a certain area of their brains. The region sits near the middle of the brain tucked between regions that have to do with thinking and emotion. It is known as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). In seldom-used surgery, the ACC is removed to relieve conditions such as major depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, when every other treatment has failed.

Probing inappropriate rage

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:35:34 -0400

As 30 research subjects seethed, scientists measured blood flowing between the thinking and emotional parts of their brains. What would be the difference between people who controlled their anger pretty well, and those who could not handle it in a socially acceptable way? These were the first such brain scans ever done with mental patients while they wrestled with their anger. They were done by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. A look into the brains of normal subjects revealed that anger increases blood flow to a reasoning part of their brains, an area over the left eye just behind the forehead, technically called the orbitofrontal cortex. This flow inhibits thoughts of rage. At the same time, blood flow increased activity in the amygdala, an almond-shaped knot of tissue deep in the brain that deals with emotion and vigilance. But in people dealing with both depression and rage, things go a different way. A decrease in blood flow to these areas of the brain reduces both their ability to control impulsive acts and their feelings about the consequences of those acts.

Scientists pursue happiness

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:34:38 -0400

"When we try to predict what will make us happy we're often wrong," says Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. "Researchers all over the world find the same predictable errors, whether the pursuit involves romance, a new car, or a sumptuous meal." Gilbert uses the results of his study of election outcomes as an example. Many Democrats insist that the re-election of George W. Bush would make them unbearably unhappy. Many Republicans maintain that the election of Howard Dean would send them and the whole country into a deep ditch of discontent for a long time to come. Gilbert compares such forecasts to a 1992 campaign when Bush squared off against Ann Richards for the governorship of Texas. Only one month after Bush won, his supporters weren't as happy as they thought they would be, and those who opposed him weren't as sad. "People are wonderful rationalizers," Gilbert points out. "They will rearrange their view of the world so it doesn't hurt as much." Anti-Bushers he interviewed said things like: "The governor of Texas really doesn't have much power" and "He wants to be president, so he's not going to do anything too dumb or crazy."

Emotions change with direction

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:30:52 -0400

If someone looks directly at you with an angry expression, you usually assume that person is mad at you. If she or he looks away, you become unsure. The person may be angry with someone or something else. In the latter case, the emotional part of your brain shows more activity. With fear, it's the opposite. When someone with a scared expression looks away, you assume that person is gazing at whatever is scary. Your brain doesn't become as active as when the person looks directly at you. He or she might fear you, or not. You don't have any information about the source of the fear and your brain has a stronger reaction. In a first-of-its-kind-study, Reginald Adams, a Harvard psychologist, and his colleagues demonstrated this by scanning the brains of 11 people while they viewed images of fearful and angry faces. The result raises the question of why the brain gets more excited when people look afraid of you than when they look angry with you. Why would an averted gaze of anger produce more activity in the fear region of you brain than a direct expression of rage?

Faking happiness for fun and profit

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:26:57 -0400

Laura Morgan Roberts of Harvard Business School and Stéphane Côté of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada, studied 103 working college students. "We found that presenting yourself to be happier than you really are has positive benefits not just for those around you but for yourself," says Roberts. "Suppressing negative feelings has the opposite effect." Côté and Roberts reached their conclusions by quizzing the students before and after they worked four weeks at part-time jobs. They were employed mostly as wait staff, salesclerks, teacher's aides, and in other service jobs in Ann Arbor, Mich. Seventy-eight males and 33 females, including whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and multiracials, took part.

Starship memories

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:25:36 -0400

Psychologists are at odds over the idea that people can forget traumatic events then "recover" intact memories of the trauma years later. On one side are clinicians, who observe that painful memories can be repressed, banished from a trauma survivor's consciousness until they're "recovered" with the help of certain psychotherapeutic techniques in adulthood. Memory researchers, on the other hand, say that people don't repress traumatic events. When people report recovered memories of traumatic events, assert these cognitive psychologists, they are most likely creating false memories. Intrigued by this debate, and its enormous political, legal, and social implications, Susan Clancy's research led her into the world of people who believe they were abducted by aliens.

Pain and pleasure activate same brain structures

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:16:53 -0400

David Borsook is a Harvard Medical School associate professor of radiology, who both treats patients and conducts research. "Over 15 years of seeing patients with pain it became obvious that we do not have good methods of assessing chronic pain," Borsook says. "And we do not have good methods for treating it." So Borsook and his colleagues decided to conduct an experiment to see which areas of the brain are activated by pain, and which by pleasure. To their surprise, the reseachers found that pleasure and pain are recorded in the same brain structures. Even more surprising was their discovery that some of the mental circuits associated with pleasure appear to react more quickly to hurtful stimuli than do the sensory areas of the brain traditionally associated with pain.

The fruit fly fight club

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:17:08 -0400

Fruit flies fight. The males will go after each other, fighting to establish dominance. Edward Kravitz, the George Packer Berry professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, is using the fighting fruit fly model system to explore the neurobiology of aggression. Previously Kravitz has used fighting lobsters to study changes in the brain that occur after fights. While it may sound fanciful, Kravitz's work is serious. "Aggression is a serious problem in society, but even after studies of lots of animal models for many years, we don't know a lot about the biological basis of aggression," Kravitz said.

Research suggests optimistic attitude can reduce risk of heart disease in older men

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:16:48 -0400

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, working with colleagues from the Department of Veterans Affairs, studied some 1,306 Boston area men who were part of the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study. In 1986, the volunteers completed a questionnaire that judged whether they were optimistic or pessimistic. They all were healthy individuals with no known chronic medical conditions when the study began. The men were followed for an average of 10 years after filling out the questionnaire. Study participants with the highest levels of optimism accounted for less than half the number of cases of angina, nonfatal and fatal heart attacks during the course of the study when compared to pessimistic men. “Most of the evidence for the notion that ‘thinking positively' is good for your health has been anecdotal - this study provides some of the first hard medical evidence for this idea in the arena of heart disease,” said Laura Kubzansky, assistant professor of health and social behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health. The study was supported in part by grants from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and from the National Institute for Aging.