RJ Mackenzie Neuroscientists have identified a brain signal in mice that kick-starts the process of overwriting fearful memories once danger is passed — a process known as fear extinction. The research is at an early stage, but could aid the development of drugs to treat conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), that are linked to distressing past experiences. In a study published on 28 April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, the researchers focused on two populations of neurons in a part of the brain called the basolateral amygdala (BLA). These two types of neuron have contrasting effects: one stimulates and the other suppresses fear responses, says co-author Michele Pignatelli, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Until now, scientists didn’t know what activated these neurons during fear extinction, although previous research implicated the neurotransmitter dopamine, released by a specific group of neurons in another part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA). To investigate this possibility, the authors used fluorescent tracers injected into the brains of mice to show that the VTA sends dopamine signals to the BLA, and that both pro- and anti-fear neurons in the BLA can respond to these signals. They then studied the effects of these circuits on behaviour, using mice that had been genetically modified so that dopamine activity in their brains produced fluorescent light, which allowed the researchers to record the activity of the VTA–BLA connections using fibre optics. They first placed these mice into chambers that delivered mild but unpleasant electrical shocks to their feet, which made them freeze in fear. The next day, they put the mice back in the chambers but did not give them any shocks. Although initially fearful, the mice began to relax after about 15 minutes, and the researchers saw a dopamine current surge through their ‘anti-fear’ BLA neurons. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29766 - Posted: 04.30.2025

Hannah Thomasy, PhD In recent decades, scientists have demonstrated that prosocial behaviors are not unique to humans, or even to primates. Rats, in particular, have proved surprisingly sensitive to the distress of conspecifics, and will often come to the aid of a fellow rat in trouble. In 2011, researchers showed that when rats were provided with a clear box containing chocolate chips, they usually opened the box and consumed all the chocolate.1 But when one box contained chocolate and another contained a trapped cagemate, the rats were more likely to open both boxes and share the chocolate. But some rats didn’t play as nicely with others. In versions of the test that did not involve chocolate, only a rat and its trapped cagemate, researchers noticed that while some rats consistently freed their compatriots, others did not. In a new Journal of Neuroscience study, neuroscientists Jocelyn Breton at Northeastern University and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal at Tel-Aviv University explored the behaviors and neural characteristics of helpers and non-helpers.2 They found that helper rats displayed greater social interactions with their cagemates, greater activity in prosocial neural networks, and greater expression of oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), providing clues about the mechanisms that govern prosocial behaviour. “We appear to live in an increasingly polarized society where there is a gap in empathy towards others,” said Bartal in a press release. “This work helps us understand prosocial, or helpful, acts better. We see others in distress all the time but tend to help only certain individuals. The similarity between human and rat brains helps us understand the way our brain mediates prosocial decisions.” To undertake these experiments, the researchers first divided the rats into pairs and allowed them to acclimatize to their cagemates for a few weeks. Then they placed the pair in the testing arena, where they allowed one rat to roam free and restrained the other in a clear box that could only be opened from the outside. While they were not trained to open the box, more than half of the rats figured out how to free their trapped companions and did so during multiple days of consecutive testing. © 1986-2025 The Scientist.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29765 - Posted: 04.30.2025

By Matt Richtel So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information. What is ideology? It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules. You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that? Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something. There’s also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient strategy. Also, many people argue — and many ideologies will try to tell you — that adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally. I actually come at it from a different perspective: Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good. Q: In the book, you describe research showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain? Remarkably, we can observe this effect in children. In the 1940s, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and tested their levels of prejudice and authoritarianism, like whether they championed conformity and obedience or play and imagination. When children were told a story about new pupils at a fictional school and asked to recount the story later, there were significant differences in what the most prejudiced children remembered, as opposed to the most liberal children. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29737 - Posted: 04.09.2025

By Felicity Nelson Mice immediately bolt for shelter when they see the looming shadow of a bird, just as humans jump when they see a spider. But these instinctive reactions, which are controlled by the brainstem, can be suppressed if animals learn that a scary stimulus is harmless. In Science today, neuroscientists reveal the precise regions of the brain that suppress fear responses in mice1 — a finding that might help scientists to develop strategies for treating post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety in people. The study showed that two parts of the brain work together to learn to suppress fear. But, surprisingly, only one of these regions is involved in later recalling the learnt behaviour. “This is the first evidence of that mechanism,” says neuroscientist Pascal Carrive at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. In the study, an expanding dark circle was used to imitate a swooping bird, and caused naive mice to run to a shelter. To teach the mice that this looming stimulus was not dangerous, a barrier was added to prevent the animals from hiding. “I like their behavioural model,” says Christina Perry, a behavioural neuroscientist at Macquarie University in Sydney. “It’s very simple,” she adds. The mice “don’t get eaten, so they learn that this fake predator is not, in fact, a threat”. As the mice were learning to be bolder, the researchers switched specific types of neurons on or off using optogenetics — a well-established technique that allows neurons to be controlled with light. When researchers silenced the parts of the cerebral cortex that analyse visual stimuli (called the posterolateral higher visual areas), the mice did not learn to suppress fear and continued to try to escape from the fake bird — suggesting that this area of the brain is necessary for learning to suppress this fear reaction. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29664 - Posted: 02.08.2025

By Matt Richtel Cursing is coursing through society. Words once too blue to publicly utter have become increasingly commonplace. “Language is just part of the whole shift to a more casual lifestyle,” said Timothy Jay, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Mass. Dr. Jay has spent a career studying the use of profanity, from what motivates it to the ways in which it satisfies, signals meaning and offends. Although officially retired, he has continued to edit studies on profanity and he recently offered an expert opinion in an ongoing legal dispute in Michigan over whether the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” (a euphemism used to denigrate former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.) should be reasonably interpreted as “profane.” (It should not, Dr. Jay opined.) Dr. Jay posits that the increasingly casual nature of the spoken word derives in part from the way people communicate on social media. One study, published in 2014 by other researchers in the field, found that curse words on Twitter, now known as X, appeared in 7.7 percent of posts, with profanity representing about 1 in every 10 words on the platform. That compared to a swearing rate of 0.5 to 0.7 percent in spoken language, the study found. If that data troubles you, Dr. Jay has some thoughts on how to dial back the profanity. F*@%-free February, anyone? Tis interview has been condensed and edited for clarity, and scrubbed of some of the vernacular that Dr. Jay conceded he regularly uses on the golf course. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29660 - Posted: 02.08.2025

By Jason Bittel Have you ever felt like there was a pit in your stomach? What about a flutter in your heart? It turns out that the anatomical connections we make with certain emotions and feelings — what researchers call embodied emotions — may be more universal than you’d think. In fact, people have been making very similar statements about their bodies for about 3,000 years. In a new study published in iScience, researchers catalogued words for body parts and emotions used by people who lived in Mesopotamia between 934 and 612 BCE, in what is now a region that includes Egypt, Iraq, and Türkiye. Then, they compared those ancient ideas etched on clay tablets and other artifacts to commonly used modern-day links between emotions and body parts, using bodily maps to visualize the similarities and differences. “We see certain body areas that are still used in similar contexts in modern times,” says Juha Lahnakoski, lead author of the study and a cognitive neuroscientist at Germany’s LVR Clinic Düsseldorf, in an email. “For example, the heart was often mentioned together with positive emotions such as love, pride, and happiness, as we might still say ‘my heart swelled’ with joy or pride.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29599 - Posted: 12.14.2024

By Sara Manning Peskin Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human Guy Leschziner William Collins (2024) There is no food in sight in Alex’s house. Even the rubbish bin is fastened closed. The kitchen is like a bank vault, hidden behind a locked door from which staff members bring out portioned meals for Alex and her six housemates, all of whom have a genetic disorder called Prader–Willi syndrome. Although Alex was born underweight, by early adulthood she could eat three servings in a sitting, had gorged on cat food and carried 110 kilograms on her small frame. Her ‘gluttony’, writes neurologist Guy Leschziner in Seven Deadly Sins, is the result of a condition that instils such a voracious appetite that some people have eaten to the point of bursting their stomachs. Whereas marketers of diet programmes have conventionally coupled obesity to a lack of willpower, Leschziner uses Alex’s case to argue that body size is driven less by moralistic factors and more by genetics, hormones and gut microorganisms. Similar themes run throughout the book, as the author examines lust, envy and other supposed infractions, gathering examples of people who exhibit these traits because of neurological disorders. Like his earlier books about sleep and the senses, Seven Deadly Sins educates as much as it entertains, turning complex neuroscientific topics into fodder for cocktail-party conversations. The biology of behaviour Exploring wrath, Leschziner introduces two men with epilepsy. One lurches into rages in the wake of his seizures and finds himself surrounded by shards of broken dishes afterwards. Another, a “gentle giant”, has anger outbursts because of a medication prescribed to control his disease. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29564 - Posted: 11.20.2024

By Angie Voyles Askham Keeping track of social hierarchies is crucial for any animal. Primates in particular must adapt their behaviors based on the status of those around them, or risk losing their own rank. “True, smart social behavior in humans and in monkeys is dependent on a full adjustment to the context,” says Katalin Gothard, professor of physiology and neuroscience at the University of Arizona. Multiple brain areas keep track of social information. Among them, the amygdala—known for processing emotions—responds to faces, facial expressions and social status, and activates as people learn social hierarchies. But the brain adapts this information for different social settings, a new study reveals: Neurons in the macaque amygdala encode knowledge about social status in a context-specific way, Gothard and her colleagues discovered. Just like people, macaques can infer social standing from videos, and the activity of amygdala cells captures information about both the identity of the individual they are watching and how that animal relates to others in the scene. These findings help explain how primates process information about social position, says Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work. And because the monkeys could successfully learn this information from videos, the results open up a new avenue for studying how the primate brain encodes these relationships in a complex and dynamic way, he adds. “That’s a big step forward.” Like people, macaques have no physical traits that directly convey dominance, Gothard says. “The status of these individuals is inferred.” So she and her colleagues tested two macaques’ ability to understand a hierarchy that the team invented among four unfamiliar monkeys in a series of videos. Each clip simulated status-appropriate interactions between two of the four monkeys on a split screen to convey those two animals’ relative positions: a scene of a higher-ranked animal acting aggressive juxtaposed with one of a lower-ranked monkey smacking its lips in appeasement, for example. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29544 - Posted: 11.06.2024

Ian Sample Science editor Where does our personal politics come from? Does it trace back to our childhood, the views that surround us, the circumstances we are raised in? Is it all about nurture – or does nature have a say through the subtle levers of DNA? And where, in all of this, is the brain? Scientists have delved seriously into the roots of political belief for the past 50 years, prompted by the rise of sociobiology, the study of the biological basis of behaviour, and enabled by modern tools such as brain scanners and genome sequencers. The field is making headway, but teasing out the biology of behaviour is never straightforward. Take a study published last week. Researchers in Greece and the Netherlands examined MRI scans from nearly 1,000 Dutch people who had answered questionnaires on their personal politics. The work was a replication study, designed to see whether the results from a small 2011 study, bizarrely commissioned by the actor Colin Firth, stood up. Firth’s study, conducted at UCL, reported structural differences between conservative and liberal brains. Conservatives, on average, had a larger amygdala, a region linked to threat perception. Liberals, on average, had a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in decision-making. In the latest study of Dutch people, the researchers found no sign of a larger anterior cingulate cortex in liberals. They did, however, find evidence for a very slightly larger amygdala in conservatives. The MailOnline declared evidence that conservatives were more “compassionate”, but later changed their headline noting that the study said nothing about compassion. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29493 - Posted: 09.25.2024

By R. Douglas Fields It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps appear on your arms, sweat on your palms. Your stomach knots and your muscles coil, ready to sprint or fight. Now imagine the same scene, but without any of the body’s innate responses to an external threat. Would you still feel afraid? Experiences like this reveal the tight integration between brain and body in the creation of mind — the collage of thoughts, perceptions, feelings and personality unique to each of us. The capabilities of the brain alone are astonishing. The supreme organ gives most people a vivid sensory perception of the world. It can preserve memories, enable us to learn and speak, generate emotions and consciousness. But those who might attempt to preserve their mind by uploading its data into a computer miss a critical point: The body is essential to the mind. How is this crucial brain-body connection orchestrated? The answer involves the very unusual vagus nerve. The longest nerve in the body, it wends its way from the brain throughout the head and trunk, issuing commands to our organs and receiving sensations from them. Much of the bewildering range of functions it regulates, such as mood, learning, sexual arousal and fear, are automatic and operate without conscious control. These complex responses engage a constellation of cerebral circuits that link brain and body. The vagus nerve is, in one way of thinking, the conduit of the mind. Nerves are typically named for the specific functions they perform. Optic nerves carry signals from the eyes to the brain for vision. Auditory nerves conduct acoustic information for hearing. The best that early anatomists could do with this nerve, however, was to call it the “vagus,” from the Latin for “wandering.” The wandering nerve was apparent to the first anatomists, notably Galen, the Greek polymath who lived until around the year 216. But centuries of study were required to grasp its complex anatomy and function. This effort is ongoing: Research on the vagus nerve is at the forefront of neuroscience today. © 2024.Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 29454 - Posted: 08.28.2024

Joe Hernandez If a human or another animal close to them dies, does a cat grieve the loss? That was the question a team of researchers from Oakland University in Michigan set out to answer when they surveyed hundreds of cat owners about their cat’s behavior after another cat or dog in the household passed away. The data showed that cats exhibited behaviors associated with grief — such as eating and playing less — more often after the death of a fellow pet, suggesting they may in fact have been in mourning. “It made me a little more optimistic that they are forming attachments with each other,” said Jennifer Vonk, a professor of psychology at Oakland University, who co-authored the study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. “It’s not that I want the cats to be sad,” Vonk went on, “[but] there is a part of us, I think, as humans that wants to think that if something happens to us our pets would miss us.” Though animals from elephants to horses to dogs have been shown to express signs of grief, less is known about the emotional life of the domesticated house cat. Vonk said she knew of only one other study on grief in domestic cats. For their research, Vonk and her coauthor, Brittany Greene, surveyed 412 cat caregivers about how their feline companion acted after another pet in the house died. They found that, after the death of a fellow pet, cats on average sought more attention from their owners, spent more time alone, appeared to look for the deceased animal, ate less and slept more. © 2024 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29426 - Posted: 08.11.2024

By Freda Kreier Dogs’ ability to feel your pain could be innate. It is the result of centuries of co-evolution with humans, suggests a community-science study that compared the responses of dogs and pet pigs to the sound of humans crying and humming. The results were published on 2 July in Animal Behaviour1. Humans pay attention to how the animals in their lives are feeling, and it seems that this attentiveness is reciprocal. Researchers have found that horses will stop and listen longer to human growls than to laughter2. Pigs respond more strongly to sounds made by people than wild boars do3. But studies testing whether the animals are just reacting to weird human sounds, or are capable of true emotional contagion — the ability to interpret and reflect people’s emotional states — are thin on the ground. Most animals can accurately echo the feelings of only other members of their species. But studies have shown that dogs (Canis familiaris) can mirror the emotions of the people around them4,5. One question is whether this emotional contagion is rooted in ‘universal vocal signals of emotion ’ that can be understood by all domesticated animals, or is specific to companion animals such as dogs. To test this, researchers compared the stress response of dogs and pet pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) to human sounds. Pet sounds Like dogs, pet pigs are social animals that are from a young age raised around people. But unlike dogs, pigs have been kept as livestock for most of their history with humans. So, if emotional contagion can be learnt through just proximity to people, pet pigs should respond in similar ways to dogs. The team recruited dog or pig owners around the world to film themselves in a room with their pets while playing recorded sounds of crying or humming. Researchers then tallied the number of stress behaviours — such as whining and yawning for dogs, and rapid ear flicks for pigs — exhibited during the experiment. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29394 - Posted: 07.18.2024

By Laura Sanders Everyone knows that the brain influences the heart. Stressful thoughts can set the heart pounding, sometimes with such deep force that we worry people can hear it. Anxiety can trigger the irregular skittering of atrial fibrillation. In more extreme and rarer cases, emotional turmoil from a shock — the death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, an intense argument — can trigger a syndrome that mimics a heart attack. But not everyone knows that the heart talks back. Subscribe to Science News Powerful signals travel from the heart to the brain, affecting our perceptions, decisions and mental health. And the heart is not alone in talking back. Other organs also send mysterious signals to the brain in ways that scientists are just beginning to tease apart. A bodywide perspective that seeks to understand our biology and behavior is relatively new, leaving lots of big, basic questions. The complexities of brain-body interactions are “only matched by our ignorance of their organization,” says Peter Strick, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Exploring the relationships between the heart, other organs and the brain isn’t just fascinating anatomy. A deeper understanding of how we sense and use signals from inside our bodies — a growing field called interoception — may point to new treatments for disorders such as anxiety. “We have forgotten that interactions with the internal world are probably as important as interactions with the external world,” says cognitive neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry of École Normale Supérieure in Paris. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 29313 - Posted: 05.18.2024

By Gillian Dohrn “Puppy-dog eyes didn’t just evolve for us, in domestic dogs,” says comparative anatomist Heather Smith. Her team’s work has thrown a 2019 finding1 that the muscles in dogs’ eyebrows evolved to communicate with humans in the doghouse by showing that African wild dogs also have the muscles to make the infamous pleading expression. The study was published on 10 April in The Anatomical Record2. Now, one of the researchers who described the evolution of puppy-dog eyebrow muscles is considering what the African dog discovery means for canine evolution. “It opens a door to thinking about where dogs come from, and what they are,” says Anne Burrows, a biological anthropologist at the Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and author of the earlier paper. The 2019 study garnered headlines around the world when it found that the two muscles responsible for creating the sad–sweet puppy-dog stare are pronounced in several domestic breeds (Canis familiaris), but almost absent in wolves (Canis lupus). If the social dynamic between humans and dogs drove eyebrow evolution, Smith wondered whether the highly social African wild dog might also have expressive brows. African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) are native to sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1997 and 2012, their numbers dropped by half in some areas. With only 8,000 or so remaining in the wild, studying them is difficult but crucial for conservation efforts. Smith, who is based at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, and her colleagues dissected a recently deceased African wild dog from Phoenix Zoo. They found that both the levator anguli oculi medalis (LAOM) and the retractor anguli oculi lateralis (RAOL) muscles, credited with creating the puppy-dog expression, were similar in size to those of domestic dog breeds.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 29295 - Posted: 05.07.2024

By Sabrina Malhi The phrase “anger kills” might have a more literal meaning: New research suggests a possible reason frequent anger has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, emphasizes the potential health risks associated with intense anger and illuminates the influence of negative emotions on our overall well-being. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the study involved 280 healthy adults who were randomly assigned to a different eight-minute task, each designed to elicit feelings of anger, anxiety, sadness or neutrality. Before and after these emotional tasks, researchers assessed the participants’ endothelial health. Endothelial cells, which line the insides of blood vessels, are essential for maintaining vessel integrity and are vital for proper circulation and cardiovascular health. The findings revealed that anger had a significant negative impact on endothelial function, limiting the blood vessels’ ability to dilate. The response was not as pronounced with anxiety or sadness. According to Daichi Shimbo, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the lead study author, this research marks a step toward understanding how different negative emotions particularly affect physical health. “It's fascinating that anxiety and sadness did not have the same effect as anger, suggesting that the ways in which negative emotions contribute to heart disease differ,” Shimbo said.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29282 - Posted: 05.02.2024

By Helen Bradshaw With its hairless silicone skin and blue complexion, Emo the robot looks more like a mechanical re-creation of the Blue Man Group than a regular human. Until it smiles. In a study published March 27 in Science Robotics, researchers detail how they trained Emo to smile in sync with humans. Emo can predict a human smile 839 milliseconds before it happens and smile back. Right now, in most humanoid robots, there’s a noticeable delay before they can smile back at a person, often because the robots are imitating a person’s face in real time. “I think a lot of people actually interacting with a social robot for the first time are disappointed by how limited it is,” says Chaona Chen, a human-robot interaction researcher at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. “Improving robots’ expression in real time is important.” Through synced facial expressions, future iterations of robots could be sources of connection in our loneliness epidemic, says Yuhang Hu, a roboticist at Columbia University who, along with colleagues, created Emo (SN: 11/7/23). Cameras in the robot’s eyes let it detect subtleties in human expressions that it then emulates using 26 actuators underneath its soft, blue face. To train Emo, the researchers first put it in front of a camera for a few hours. Like looking in a mirror would do for humans and their muscles, looking at itself in the camera while researchers ran random motor commands on the actuators helped Emo learn the relationships between activating actuators in its face and the expressions it created. “Then the robot knows, OK, if I want to make a smiley face, I should actuate these ‘muscles,’” Hu says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29258 - Posted: 04.16.2024

By Christina Caron Anxious ahead of a big job interview? Worried about giving a speech? First date nerves? The solution, some digital start-ups suggest, is a beta blocker, a type of medication that can slow heart rate and lower blood pressure — masking some of the physical symptoms of anxiety. Typically a trip to the doctor’s office would be necessary to get a prescription, but a number of companies are now connecting patients with doctors for quick virtual visits and shipping the medication to people’s homes. “No more ‘Shaky and Sweaty,’” one online ad promised. “Easy fast 15 minute intake.” That worries Dr. Yvette I. Sheline, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. “The first question is: What is going on with this person?” Dr. Sheline said. Are they depressed in addition to anxious? Do they have chronic anxiety or is it just a temporary case of stage fright? “You don’t want to end up prescribing the wrong thing,” she added. In addition, although beta blockers are generally considered safe, experts say they can carry unpleasant side effects and should be used with caution. What are beta blockers? Beta blockers such as propranolol hydrochloride have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for chest pain, migraine prevention, involuntary tremors, abnormal heart rhythms and other uses. Some are still prescribed for hypertension, although they’re no longer considered the preferred treatment, mainly because other medications are more effective in preventing stroke and death. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29247 - Posted: 04.06.2024

James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which is situated like a bun at the back of the brain. This is no small oversight: The cerebellum contains three-quarters of all the brain’s neurons, which are organized in an almost crystalline arrangement, in contrast to the tangled thicket of neurons found elsewhere. Encyclopedia articles and textbooks underscore the fact that the cerebellum’s function is to control body movement. There is no question that the cerebellum has this function. But scientists now suspect that this long-standing view is myopic. Or so I learned in November in Washington, D.C., while attending the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the largest meeting of neuroscientists in the world. There, a pair of neuroscientists organized a symposium on newly discovered functions of the cerebellum unrelated to motor control. New experimental techniques are showing that in addition to controlling movement, the cerebellum regulates complex behaviors, social interactions, aggression, working memory, learning, emotion and more. The connection between the cerebellum and movement has been known since the 19th century. Patients suffering trauma to the brain region had obvious difficulties with balance and movement, leaving no doubt that it was critical for coordinating motion. Over the decades, neuroscientists developed a detailed understanding of how the cerebellum’s unique neural circuitry controls motor function. The explanation of how the cerebellum worked seemed watertight. Then, in 1998, in the journal Brain, neurologists reported on wide-ranging emotional and cognitive disabilities in patients with damage to the cerebellum. For example, in 1991, a 22-year-old female college student had fallen while ice skating; a CT scan revealed a tumor in her cerebellum. After it was removed surgically, she was a completely different person. The bright college student had lost her ability to write with proficiency, do mental arithmetic, name common objects or copy a simple diagram. Her mood flattened. She hid under covers and behaved inappropriately, undressing in the corridors and speaking in baby talk. Her social interactions, including recognizing familiar faces, were also impaired.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 29118 - Posted: 01.27.2024

By Amber Dance 01.08.2024 We all want to be happy — and for decades, psychologists have tried to figure out how we might achieve that blissful state. The field’s many surveys and experiments have pointed to a variety of approaches, from giving stuff away to quitting Facebook to forcing one’s face into a toothy grin. But psychology has undergone serious upheaval over the last decade, as researchers realized that many studies were unreliable and unrepeatable. That has led to a closer scrutiny of psychological research methods, with the study of happiness no exception. So — what really makes us happy? Under today’s more careful microscope, some routes to happiness seem to hold up, while others appear not to, or have yet to re-prove themselves. Here’s what we know so far, and what remains to be reassessed, according to a new analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology. One long-standing hypothesis is that smiling makes you feel happier. In a classic 1988 study, researchers asked 92 Illinois undergraduates to hold a felt tip pen in their mouth either with their teeth, forcing an unnatural grin, or with their lips, making them pout. The students then looked at four examples of The Far Side comics. On average, those with the forced smiles found the one-panel comics slightly funnier than those with the forced pouts. But when 17 different research labs got together to retest the pen-clench smile’s effects on 1,894 new participants, the finding failed to hold up, the researchers reported in 2016. The repetition study was part of a broader effort to counter psychology’s reproducibility crisis, which in part has been attributed to the variety of ways in which researchers could examine and reanalyze their data until they arrived at publishable results. “It’s kind of like shooting a bunch of arrows at the wall and drawing the bullseye on after,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and coauthor of the new Annual Review of Psychology paper.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29086 - Posted: 01.09.2024

Saga Briggs Trauma is not merely a phenomenon of the mind but also a condition physically embedded in the body, often eluding our conscious awareness and affecting our overall health. That was the main argument in psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, which quickly became a modern classic among trauma researchers, clinicians, and survivors. The book shifted how many in the West view psychiatric illness, which was often viewed solely through a psychological or neurochemical lens, and it sparked new interest in more holistic treatments for trauma that had long been considered alternative: yoga, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), the performing arts, and psychedelics, to name a few. But what does it really mean for the body to “keep the score”? Is it biologically possible for the viscera to actually store and release trauma? In his book, van der Kolk writes: “The body keeps the score. If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.” Can the body “keep score”? Recently, neuroscientists have expressed skepticism over the notion that the body can “keep score” of anything. In a 2023 Big Think video, Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that everything, including trauma, is in our heads, and that “the brain keeps the score and the body is the scorecard.” In her view, everything we experience is constructed by the brain, which learns to predict how we will feel based on past experiences, issues, and sensations that seem to come from our body but actually come from our brain. “When you feel your heart beating, you are not feeling it in your chest, you are feeling it in your brain,” she said. “Your body is always sending sensory signals to the brain, of course, but emotions are made in the brain, not in the body. They are experienced in the brain, like everything else you experience, not in the body. If you experience a trauma, you experience it in your brain.”

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29031 - Posted: 12.06.2023