Body resonance and art appreciation.

Leder et al. have asked how hand movements reflected two styles of painting having similar content and historic period might interact with muscle movements in the viewer to influence their appreciation of the painting. Their introduction gives a bit of context for the work:

The question of how art creates aesthetic pleasure has puzzled researchers since the early days of psychology... In the visual arts, the common belief is that perceptual features, such as contrast or color, determine aesthetic pleasure; one mechanism underlying this perceptual path has been identified as processing efficiency... By contrast, since the late 19th century, the Empathists’ movement has claimed that a substantial source of aesthetic pleasure is empathy with the artwork... More precisely, Lee..argued that such empathy may result from episodes of sympathetic resonance of the perceiver’s own body with the artwork he or she is viewing. Currie...distinguished different kinds of resonance occurring through structures specifically responsible for motor processing, emotional responses, and even metaphorical word-action relations. Regarding motor simulations, Freedberg and Gallese..speculated that viewing artwork may activate neural movement programs associated with the way the artwork was produced ... Thus, one source of aesthetic empathy and thus aesthetic pleasure may stem from body resonances (of the perceiver’s body) with the movements that the artist made when producing the work.

They started with the view that perceiving a painting style elicits covert simulations of concordant hand movements in the viewer and that these stimulus-triggered simulations might be enhanced or interfered with by simultaneously performing hand movements that either resemble or do not resemble, respectively, the movements the artist made while creating the paintings... Making such movements might increase or decrease aesthetic appreciation, respectively, in the viewer...

Indeed, they found that when subjects were instructed to tap an eraser tip out of their view on the table top at their own pace (the motion used the stippling of pointillism), on viewing a series of pictures they preferred pointillist painting over stroke-style paintings. Instruction to move a pen out of view in strokes of about 20 cm from left to right on the table’s surface produced a preference for stroke-style paintings.

They showed that the movements were essential to the aesthetic episode of perceiving and evaluating the artwork by doing the control of have subjects perform matching or mismatching hand movements before viewing the artwork. This did not influence their art appreciation.

Grin and bear it.

Kraft and Pressman make a nice observation on linking muscle movement to emotion, showing how manipulating the muscles involved in a smile can alter the stress response:

In the study reported here, we investigated whether covertly manipulating positive facial expressions would influence cardiovascular and affective responses to stress. Participants (N = 170) naive to the purpose of the study completed two different stressful tasks while holding chopsticks in their mouths in a manner that produced a Duchenne smile, a standard smile, or a neutral expression. Awareness was manipulated by explicitly asking half of all participants in the smiling groups to smile (and giving the other half no instructions related to smiling). Findings revealed that all smiling participants, regardless of whether they were aware of smiling, had lower heart rates during stress recovery than the neutral group did, with a slight advantage for those with Duchenne smiles. Participants in the smiling groups who were not explicitly asked to smile reported less of a decrease in positive affect during a stressful task than did the neutral group. These findings show that there are both physiological and psychological benefits from maintaining positive facial expressions during stress.

We use body cues, not facial expression, to discriminate intense positive and negative emotions.

Interesting work from Aviezer et al:

The distinction between positive and negative emotions is fundamental in emotion models. Intriguingly, neurobiological work suggests shared mechanisms across positive and negative emotions. We tested whether similar overlap occurs in real-life facial expressions. During peak intensities of emotion, positive and negative situations were successfully discriminated from isolated bodies but not faces. Nevertheless, viewers perceived illusory positivity or negativity in the nondiagnostic faces when seen with bodies. To reveal the underlying mechanisms, we created compounds of intense negative faces combined with positive bodies, and vice versa. Perceived affect and mimicry of the faces shifted systematically as a function of their contextual body emotion. These findings challenge standard models of emotion expression and highlight the role of the body in expressing and perceiving emotions.

Brain correlates of out of body and depersonalization experiences

The NewScientist points to a workshop by Nick Medford at the recent ASSC meeting in Brighton that dealt with a focus on the anterior cingulate and right anterior insular cortex as central in producing subjective feelings about bodies, their continuity and individuality. Abnormal activity is observed in these areas during depersonalization (feelings of detachment or disconnection from one's own mental processes, emotions and/or body) and derealization (feeling like being outside of your own body observing it). Medford's ideas are summarized in his review article with Critchley.

There is now a wealth of evidence that anterior insular and anterior cingulate cortices have a close functional relationship, such that they may be considered together as input and output regions of a functional system. This system is typically engaged across cognitive, affective, and behavioural contexts, suggesting that it is of fundamental importance for mental life. Here, we review the literature and reinforce the case that these brain regions are crucial, firstly, for the production of subjective feelings and, secondly, for co-ordinating appropriate responses to internal and external events. This model seeks to integrate higher-order cortical functions with sensory representation and autonomic control: it is argued that feeling states emerge from the raw data of sensory (including interoceptive) inputs and are integrated through representations in conscious awareness. Correspondingly, autonomic nervous system reactivity is particularly important amongst the responses that accompany conscious experiences. Potential clinical implications are also discussed.

Embodied metaphors and creative acts

K.-y. Leung et al. do a series of studies that suggest that embodiment of metaphors for creativity promotes creative problem solving. Given that across cultures and languages (e.g., English, Korean, Hebrew, and Chinese), metaphors associate creativity with bilateral physical orientations (thinking about a problem “on one hand” and then “on the other hand”), a first study probed divergent thinking (fluency, flexibility, and originality) by asking participants to imagine multiple uses for a university building complex while gesturing with their right hand towards a wall. During a second trial, control participants generated additional ideas while raising the same hand they had raised during the first trial; participants in the experimental condition, however, switched hands by holding their left hand toward the wall and their right hand behind their back while they generated additional ideas (participants were not aware that they would have to generate answers to the same question on both trials until the second trial began.) The experimental subjects who changed hands generated more ideas, which were also more flexible and original.

A second two part experiment looked at the "think outside of the box" metaphor by seating participants inside or outside of a 5x5 ft. box, who carried out a convergent thinking task (think of a word that is related to three cue words. For example, “measure,” “worm,” and “video” might elicit the fourth word “tape”). Participants who completed such a remote associates test while they were physically outside the box generated more correct answers. In a variation on the box theme, divergent thinking was then probed by noting the effect of having participants physically embody a box by walking in a fixed, rectangular path. Participants who could move freely were more creative in imagining identities of ambiguous objects.

Two further studies dealt with the “putting two and two together” metaphor (by noting the effect of physically moving blocks on convergent thinking), and imagining bodily motions in a virtual world similar to those of physically enacting such metaphors (as in the first and second experiments).

Here is their abstract:

Creativity is a highly sought-after skill. Prescriptive advice for inspiring creativity abounds in the form of metaphors: People are encouraged to “think outside the box,” to consider a problem “on one hand, then on the other hand,” and to “put two and two together” to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances in the understanding of body-mind linkages in the research on embodied cognition, we explored whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem solving. Our findings from five studies revealed that both physical and psychological embodiment of metaphors for creativity promoted convergent thinking and divergent thinking (i.e., fluency, flexibility, or originality) in problem solving. Going beyond prior research, which focused primarily on the kind of embodiment that primes preexisting knowledge, we provide the first evidence that embodiment can also activate cognitive processes that facilitate the generation of new ideas and connections.

We don't project our visceral states onto dissimilar others.

Interesting observations from O’Brien and Ellsworth on limits to the empathy of our embodied cognition:

What people feel shapes their perceptions of others. We have examined the assimilative influence of visceral states on social judgment. Replicating prior research, we found in a first experiment that participants who were outside during winter overestimated the extent to which other people were bothered by cold, and in a second study found that participants who ate salty snacks without water thought other people were overly bothered by thirst. However, in both studies, this effect evaporated when participants believed that the other people under consideration held political views opposing their own. Participants who judged these dissimilar others were unaffected by their own strong visceral-drive states, a finding that highlights the power of dissimilarity in social judgment. Dissimilarity may thus represent a boundary condition for embodied cognition and inhibit an empathic understanding of shared out-group pain. Our findings reveal the need for a better understanding of how people’s internal experiences influence their perceptions of the feelings and experiences of those who may hold values different from their own.

Clothes can invade our body and brain...

Adam and Galinsky offer an interesting variant of studies on embodied cognition, a topic that MindBlog has frequently visited (35 postings, see left column) - showing that clothing can invade our body and brain, putting us into a different psychological state. After citing numerous studies of how clothes we wear have power over others, they do a discrete experiment to demonstrate a power of clothing over ourselves, specifically the power and accuracy of our attention:

We introduce the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer's psychological processes. We offer a potentially unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors—the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them. As a first test of our enclothed cognition perspective, the current research explored the effects of wearing a lab coat. A pretest found that a lab coat is generally associated with attentiveness and carefulness. We therefore predicted that wearing a lab coat would increase performance on attention-related tasks. In Experiment 1, physically wearing a lab coat increased selective attention compared to not wearing a lab coat. In Experiments 2 and 3, wearing a lab coat described as a doctor's coat increased sustained attention compared to wearing a lab coat described as a painter's coat, and compared to simply seeing or even identifying with a lab coat described as a doctor's coat. Thus, the current research suggests a basic principle of enclothed cognition—it depends on both the symbolic meaning and the physical experience of wearing the clothes.

Dirty Liberals!

Helzer and Pazarro make some interesting associations between reminders of physical cleanliness and moral and political attitudes. Their abstract, with a few parenthetic additions:

Many moral codes place a special emphasis on bodily purity, and manipulations that directly target bodily purity have been shown to influence a variety of moral judgments. Across two studies, we demonstrated that reminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes. In the first study, individuals (the usual gaggle of college undergraduates used in studies like this, 60 in this case) in a public setting (entering the hallway of a building) who were given a reminder of physical cleansing (questioned near a wall mounted hand sanitizer) reported being more politically conservative than did individuals who were not given such a reminder (and did not see the sanitizer). In a second study, individuals reminded of physical cleansing in the laboratory (a wall sign about air born contaminants, use of hand wipes) demonstrated harsher moral judgments toward violations of sexual purity and were more likely to report being politically conservative than control participants. Together, these experiments provide further evidence of a deep link between physical purity and moral judgment, and they offer preliminary evidence that manipulations of physical purity can influence general (and putatively stable) political attitudes.

What would improve your cognitive toolkit?

My first MindBlog post in 2006 was a description of answers given to an annual question posed each year to prominent public intellectuals by Edge.org. The question for 2010 is "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"

A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world...James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

I'm going to give brief sketches of a few responses that I found most interesting.   I try to edit  the author's point to a single declarative phrase, the 'single cognitive chunk'  requirement suggested above (I'm surprised that in most cases the authors didn't do this more effectively). I'll list a few in this post, and as I have time to continue reading through the 164 contributions, perhaps do some further posts...

Howard Gardner - Try to disprove your viewpoint.

"If American citizens, or, for that matter, citizens anywhere were motivated to decribe the conditions under which they would relinquish their beliefs, they would begin to think scientifically. And if they admitted that empirical evidence would not change their minds, then at least they'd have indicated that their views have a religious or an ideological, rather than a scientific basis.

Christian Keysers - Avoid the mirror fallacy

...our brain mirrors the states of the people we observe...When the person we see has the exact same body and brain as we do, mirroring would tell us what the other feels. Whenever the other person is different in some relevant way, however, mirroring will mislead us...The world is full of such fallacies: we feel dolphins are happy just because their face resembles ours while we smile or we attribute pain to robots in sci-fi movies.

George Lakoff - Be aware of the conceptual metaphors you are using.

All concepts are physical brain circuits deriving their meaning via neural cascades that terminate in linkage to the body. That is how embodied cognition arises...Primary metaphors are brain mappings linking disparate brain regions, each tied to the body in a different way. For example, More Is Up (as in "prices rose") links a region coordinating quantity to another coordinating verticality...Complex conceptual metaphors arise via neural bindings, both across metaphors and from a given metaphor to a conceptual frame circuit. Metaphorical reasoning arises when source domain inference structures are used for target domain reasoning via neural mappings... A central consequence is the huge range of concepts that use metaphor cannot be defined relative to the outside world, but are instead embodied via interactions of the body and brain with the world...Every time you think of paying moral debts, or getting bogged down on a project, or losing time, or being at a crossroads in a relationship, you are unconsciously activating a conceptual metaphor circuit in your brain, reasoning using it, and quite possibly making decisions and living your life on the basis of your metaphors. And that's just normal. There's no way around it!..But it can do harm if you are unaware of it.

Listening to your heart

Dunn et al. try to evaluate how sensing feedback from the body influences thought and feeling. Some edited clips of background, and their results:

Some metaphorical expressions that are used daily, such as “brokenhearted” or “gut feelings,” reflect the common belief that feelings and cognitions are partly grounded in bodily responses. This idea is reflected in early philosophical writings about embodiment (e.g., Descartes, 1649/1989) and was introduced to experimental psychology by William James (1884), who asserted that perception of changes in the body “as they occur is the emotion” (pp. 189–190). Since then, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which feelings and cognitions are in fact embodied. Much of this discussion has focused on emotion experience and decision making. Schachter and Singer modified Jamesian theory to argue that emotion experience is a product of the cognitive appraisal of bodily arousal. The somatic marker hypothesis of Damasio proposes that emotional biasing signals emerging from the body influence intuitive decision making. These models remain controversial, and critics argue that bodily responses occur relatively late in the information-processing chain and are therefore best viewed as a consequence, rather than the cause, of cognitive-affective activity.

...A central but untested prediction of many of these proposals is that how well individuals can perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) determines the strength of the relationship between bodily reactions and cognitive-affective processing. In a first study we demonstrated that the more accurately participants could track their heartbeat, the stronger the observed link between their heart rate reactions and their subjective arousal (but not valence) ratings of emotional images. (In other words, the more strongly these autonomic changes are felt, the more they are associated with arousal experience.) These results offer strong support for Jamesian bodily feedback theories.

In a second study, we found that increasing interoception ability either helped or hindered adaptive intuitive decision making, depending on whether the anticipatory bodily signals generated favored advantageous or disadvantageous choices. These findings identify both the generation and the perception of bodily responses as pivotal sources of variability in emotion experience and intuition, and offer strong supporting evidence for bodily feedback theories, suggesting that cognitive-affective processing does in significant part relate to “following the heart.” Our findings agree with those of other studies showing that an absence of emotion following frontal head injury can in some circumstances lead to superior decision making and with claims that elevated interoceptive awareness may maintain conditions such as anxiety.

Out of our brains - extended mind continues

As a followup to my Nov. 3 post on critiques of Andy Clark's extended mind ideas (which drew 20 comments) I wanted to pass on this further Clark commentary and a sequel, pointed out to me by a loyal MindBlog reader, in which Clark tries to clarify his ideas.

This is your brain on metaphors

A loyal mindblog reader has pointed me to an essay by one of my heroes, Robert Sapolsky, written for The Stone, a blog hosted by The New York Times which as a forum for contemporary philosophers. He discusses how the brain has evolved to link the literal and the metaphorical by duct-taping metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit. The insula, for example, registers gustatory disgust.

Not only does the insula “do” sensory disgust; it does moral disgust as well. Because the two are so viscerally similar. When we evolved the capacity to be disgusted by moral failures, we didn’t evolve a new brain region to handle it. Instead, the insula expanded its portfolio.

...there’s a fancier, more recently evolved brain region in the frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate that’s involved in the subjective, evaluative response to pain...When humans evolved the ability to be wrenched with feeling the pain of others, where was it going to process it? It got crammed into the anterior cingulate. And thus it “does” both physical and psychic pain.

Sapolsky reviews a range of other studies showing how the brain links the literal and metaphorical, several of which have been the subjects of previous posts on this blog (cleanliness influencing moral judgements, holding a hot versus cold liquid influencing personality judgements, the weight of a resume influencing the judged gravity of a job applicant, etc.).

The viscera that can influence moral decision making and the brain’s confusion about the literalness of symbols can have enormous consequences. Part of the emotional contagion of the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda arose from the fact that when militant Hutu propagandists called for the eradication of the Tutsi, they iconically referred to them as “cockroaches.” Get someone to the point where his insula activates at the mention of an entire people, and he’s primed to join the bloodletting.

And, an example of the sort in my recent post on resolving conflict:

But if the brain confusing reality and literalness with metaphor and symbol can have adverse consequences, the opposite can occur as well. At one juncture just before the birth of a free South Africa, Nelson Mandela entered secret negotiations with an Afrikaans general with death squad blood all over his hands, a man critical to the peace process because he led a large, well-armed Afrikaans resistance group. They met in Mandela’s house, the general anticipating tense negotiations across a conference table. Instead, Mandela led him to the warm, homey living room, sat beside him on a comfy couch, and spoke to him in Afrikaans. And the resistance melted away.

...Nelson Mandela was wrong when he advised, “Don’t talk to their minds; talk to their hearts.” He meant talk to their insulas and cingulate cortices and all those other confused brain regions, because that confusion could help make for a better world.

Our minds extend beyond our heads.

I've always liked the idea, lucidly presented by Andy Clark over many years, that our minds are impossible to distinguish from our environment, because they really can't exist in the absence of a cognitive coupling between the two. I am relaying below the entire text of an instructive and interesting book review by Erik Myin of a book of commentaries on an influential 1998 paper by Andy Clark and David Chalmers titled "The extended mind." (very much worth reading, PDF here).

Where is the mind? "In the head" or "in the brain," most people might respond. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave a different answer:

The statement "the mind is in its own place," as theorists might construe it, is not true, for the mind is not even a metaphorical "place." On the contrary, the chessboard, the platform, the scholar's desk, the judge's bench, the lorry, the driver's seat, the studio and the football field are among its places. (1)

Recently, this idea of the mind not being confined to the head has been reinvigorated by philosophers and cognitive scientists, who see the mind as "spreading out" or "extending" into the world. "How do you know the way to San José?" philosopher John Haugeland has famously asked (2). Chances are you don't have some inner analog of a printed map. Rather, you know where you should enter the highway, and then you get there by following the road signs. Your knowledge seems to be partially "implemented" in the environment. There is now a blooming field of research into "situation cognition," which explores how cognitive or mental phenomena such as problem solving or remembering can be strongly dependent on interactions between subjects and their environments.

The possible far-reaching implications of a situated view of cognition were brought into sharp focus by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their 1998 paper "The extended mind" (3). There they defend the idea that the mind "extends" into the environment in cases in which a human organism and the environment become cognitively coupled systems. Their by now iconic illustration of cognitive coupling involves "Otto," a "slightly amnesic" person, who uses a notebook to write down important facts that he is otherwise likely to forget. Unlike a person who remembers the address of the Museum of Modern Art by relying on natural memory, Otto recalls it by accessing his notebook. If one supposes that the notebook is constantly available to Otto and that what is written in it is endorsed by Otto, it becomes plausible—so Clark and Chalmers argue—that Otto's memory extends to include the notebook. After all, they notice, Otto's notes seem to play exactly the same role as memory traces in other people. Wouldn't it be chauvinistic to restrict the mind's extent to what's natural and inner?

Clark and Chalmers's paper has triggered a vigorous and continuing debate. Nonbelievers concede that numerous tight causal couplings between minds and environments exist, but they deny that it therefore makes sense to speak of an extended mind instead of a mind in a person that closely interacts with an environment. All things considered, they argue, thoughts remain in persons—never in objects like notebooks, however closely dependent a person could become on them.

Enthusiasts for the extended mind thesis insist that a close causal coupling between persons and environments can license the conclusion that the mind spreads into the environment. Some follow the argument in Clark and Chalmers that infers extendedness from the fact that external elements can play a role that would be considered as cognitive if played by something internal to a person.

Other supporters of the idea are suspicious of this argument from parity. They note that the most interesting cases of causal coupling are those in which the environment does not simply function as some ersatz internal milieu—when the involvement of external means makes possible forms of cognition that were not possible without them. For example, when pen and paper, symbolic systems, or computers make possible calculations, computations, and, ultimately, scientific theories. Those taking this position hold that it is when the environment becomes a necessary factor in enabling novel cognitive processes that the mind extends.

In The Extended Mind, philosopher Richard Menary (University of Wollongong) brings together the Clark and Chalmers paper and several responses to it. The collection, lucidly introduced by Menary, will neither definitively prove nor deal the deathblow to the idea that "the place of the mind" is the world—nor even establish that there really is such a question about "the place of the mind" that needs to be answered. Rather, the volume provides carefully drawn arguments for and against different interpretations of the extended mind thesis, often with extensive reference to empirical material. Several of the papers in the collection are excellent.

To take one fascinating idea, consider Susan Hurley on "variable neural correlates." We are comfortable with the correlation between types of experience and types of brain states, and undoubtedly such variation is one important source for the idea that the mind is in the head. Hurley notes, however, that there is also a dependence of experience on type of interaction with the environment, one not aligned to strictly neural properties. For example, when blind people haptically read Braille text, activity in the visual cortex seems to correlate with tactile experience. In people who are not blind, tactile experience correlates with activity in the tactile cortex. What explains the common enabling of tactile experience by the different kinds of cortex seems to be tactile causal coupling with the environment, rather than strictly neural type. According to Hurley, and others, the same kind of correlation-tracking reasoning that convinces us, in standard cases, that the mind is in the brain should here lead to the conclusion that the mind is not in the head.

References

* 1. G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Hutchinson, London, 1949).
* 2. J. Haugeland, Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998).
* 3. A. Clark, D. J. Chalmers, Analysis 58, 7 (1998).

How to make yourself more powerful...

Carney et al suggest that just a few minutes of moving your body muscles into a more open expansive posture can change your behavior and body chemistry, increasing testosterone and decreasing the stress hormone cortisol:

Humans and other animals express power through open, expansive postures, and they express powerlessness through closed, contractive postures. But can these postures actually cause power? The results of this study confirmed our prediction that posing in high-power nonverbal displays (as opposed to low-power nonverbal displays) would cause neuroendocrine and behavioral changes for both male and female participants: High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk; low-power posers exhibited the opposite pattern. In short, posing in displays of power caused advantaged and adaptive psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes, and these findings suggest that embodiment extends beyond mere thinking and feeling, to physiology and subsequent behavioral choices. That a person can, by assuming two simple 1-min poses, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

Here are some clips from the context and data the authors provide:

In research on embodied cognition, evidence suggests that bodily movements, such as facial displays, can affect emotional states. For example, unobtrusive contraction of the “smile muscle” (i.e., the zygomaticus major) increases enjoyment, the head tilting upward induces pride, and hunched postures (as opposed to upright postures) elicit more depressed feelings. Approach-oriented behaviors, such as touching, pulling, or nodding “yes,” increase preference for objects, people, and persuasive messages…no research has tested whether expansive power poses, in comparison with contractive power poses, cause mental, physiological, and behavioral change in a manner consistent with the effects of power.

In humans and other animals, testosterone levels both reflect and reinforce dispositional and situational status and dominance; internal and external cues cause testosterone to rise, increasing dominant behaviors, and these behaviors can elevate testosterone even further…testosterone levels, by reflecting and reinforcing dominance, are closely linked to adaptive responses to challenges.

Power holders show lower basal cortisol levels and lower cortisol reactivity to stressors than powerless people do, and cortisol drops as power is achieved. Although short-term and acute cortisol elevation is part of an adaptive response to challenges large (e.g., a predator) and small (e.g., waking up), the chronically elevated cortisol levels seen in low-power individuals are associated with negative health consequences, such as impaired immune functioning, hypertension, and memory loss.

 Here are the basic results:

Salivary cortisol and testosterone levels were within a normal range of ~ 0.16 μg/dl and ~60 pg/ml both before and after participants held either two high-power or two low-power poses for 1 min each. The figure shows the changes caused by the two postures (click to enlarge). The experiment is missing what would seem to be one obvious control: measurements on subjects who were given an instruction to assume an arbitrary posture unrelated to power.

A smooth botox face inhibits emotion processing

Richie Davidson and collaborators at Wisconsin come up with this interesting gem, on the consequences of a face made more smooth and beautiful by Botulinum toxin injections:

How does language reliably evoke emotion, as it does when people read a favorite novel or listen to a skilled orator? Recent evidence suggests that comprehension involves a mental simulation of sentence content that calls on the same neural systems used in literal action, perception, and emotion. In this study, we demonstrated that involuntary facial expression plays a causal role in the processing of emotional language. Subcutaneous injections of botulinum toxin-A (BTX) were used to temporarily paralyze the facial muscle used in frowning. We found that BTX selectively slowed the reading of sentences that described situations that normally require the paralyzed muscle for expressing the emotions evoked by the sentences. This finding demonstrates that peripheral feedback plays a role in language processing, supports facial-feedback theories of emotional cognition, and raises questions about the effects of BTX on cognition and emotional reactivity. We account for the role of facial feedback in language processing by considering neurophysiological mechanisms and reinforcement-learning theory.

Embodyment: a two-minute powerful pose raises your testosterone levels

I pass on this fascinating item from a mindblog reader who has pointed out a number of other interesting articles to me. The article by Carnay, Cuddy, and Yap is titled "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance."

Hey, I tried it, puffing up my chest and letting my shoulders rest back for two minutes left me feeling way more strong and assertive (now....where can I find a cheap saliva testosterone  home test kit...).

Here is the abstract:

Humans and other animals express power through open, expansive postures, and powerlessness through closed, constrictive postures. But can these postures actually cause power? As predicted, results revealed that posing in high-power (vs. low-power) nonverbal displays caused neuroendocrine and behavioral changes for both male and female participants: High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk; low-power posers exhibited the opposite pattern. In short, posing in powerful displays caused advantaged and adaptive psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes — findings that suggest that embodiment extends beyond mere thinking and feeling, to physiology and subsequent behavioral choices. That a person can, via a simple two-minute pose, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

Click here for PDF of article to appear in Psychological Science

Abstract thoughts move muscles.

Movements of our muscles influence our thoughts and emotions. People given neutral bland instructions to contract the specific face muscles that make a smile find it harder to generate a feeling of anger when requested to do so, and instruction to move the muscles that make an angry frown make it harder to follow a subsequent instruction to feel friendly or happy. Havas has found that blocking a frown can actually prevent a bad mood.  Natalie Angier summarizes several studies that show the opposite: how thoughts influence our muscle movements in subtle ways.  Miles et al., for example, show that when we thing of events in the future, our bodies move slightly forward, while thinking of past events causes them to move slightly backwards. Their observations are consistent with theories of "embodied cognition," in this case mental time travel may be represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. The metaphorical “arrow of time” may be grounded in a processing architecture that integrates temporal and spatial information in a directional manner (i.e., past = back, future = forward).

Angier also notes other work on embodied cognition that I have mentioned - Students who held a hot cup of coffee in their hand were more likely to evaluate a target person as being warm and friendly than those holding a cold cup of coffee.  She notes work (this post) showing that a warm versus cold stare causes subject to evaluate the temperature of a room as warmer.  Finally she points to work (this post) showing our bodies conflate weight with greater importance or value.  (...almost makes you think that  both Angier and Bownds scan the contents of the journal "Psychological Science.")

Mindblog backlog...

Another compilation of items that are potentially interesting to some MindBlog readers:

Two Blogs of interest: Body in Mind (self explanatory) and Phenomics (on more intelligent description of personality dysfunction based on underlying genetic heterogeneity, and how the the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders actually impedes research and understanding.)

The robot that breaks and reassembles itself.

Why we need God. From Robert Wright, author of “The Moral Animal,” “Nonzero” and, most recently, “The Evolution of God.”

Eyes Wide Shut - perceived emotionality of music, eye closure, and the amygdala.

Brain pathology in athletes appears at an unusually young age.

Numbers in the Blind's “Eye.” Both blind and sighted people represent numbers through a spatial code, but with different electrophysiological correlates corresponding to cognitive versus sensory processing.

Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online. These famous lectures can show you that there really is joy in physics. I was overwhelmed when I first saw some of them in my college days.

Knowledge rewards. It turns out that the size of coming rewards is signalled by the same dopamine neurons that signal primitive rewards like sex and food. Two monkeys were trained to glance at one of two targets on a computer screen in order to receive a drink reward, which was randomly large or small. When one target included information about reward size the monkeys preferred to go for that target, rather than be surprised by a randomly sized reward. Neurons in the brain's 'reward' circuitry fired when the monkeys learned information about the future, suggesting that the act of prediction may be intrinsically rewarding.

Yet another theory on why we sleep ...suggestion that sleep evolved to optimize animals’ use of time, keeping them safe and hidden when the hunting, fishing or scavenging was scarce and perhaps risky. In that view, differences in sleep quality, up to and including periods of insomnia, need not be seen as problems but as adaptations to the demands of the environment.

Acting against our real self interest to preserve our self image

Here is a fascinating bit of game playing from Yamagishi et al. :

In a series of experiments, we demonstrate that certain players of an economic game reject unfair offers even when this behavior increases rather than decreases inequity. A substantial proportion (30–40%, compared with 60–70% in the standard ultimatum game) of those who responded rejected unfair offers even when rejection reduced only their own earnings to 0, while not affecting the earnings of the person who proposed the unfair split (in an impunity game). Furthermore, even when the responders were not able to communicate their anger to the proposers by rejecting unfair offers in a private impunity game, a similar rate of rejection was observed. The rejection of unfair offers that increases inequity cannot be explained by the social preference for inequity aversion or reciprocity; however, it does provide support for the model of emotion as a commitment device. In this view, emotions such as anger or moral disgust lead people to disregard the immediate consequences of their behavior, committing them to behave consistently to preserve integrity and maintain a reputation over time as someone who is reliably committed to this behavior.

A common brain substrate for evaluating physical and social space.

From Yamakawa et al, work that is consonant with models of embodied cognition (cf. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) :

Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. “close friends” “high lord”). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a common brain substrate in the parietal cortex. The present study shows the possibility of an analytic brain mechanism to process and represent complex networks of social relationships. Given parietal cortex's known role in constructing egocentric maps of physical space, our present findings may help to explain the linguistic, psychological and behavioural links between social and physical space.