Thoughts as material objects - impact on evaluations

It's hard to get rid of unwanted thoughts. What about just throwing them in the garbage like unwanted objects? In some conditions might we discard our thoughts as easily as we dispose of objects? If Mr. Descartes was right (straw man, I know), a thought cannot literally be thrown into the garbage, because it does not have a material or physical nature. If a component of our cognition is taken to be a physical object, we should be able to discard it. Briñol et al. make some observations relevant to these points. Their experiments involved subjects writing down positive and negative thoughts about their bodies. First, their abstract:

In Western dualistic culture, it is assumed that thoughts cannot be treated as material objects; however, language is replete with metaphorical analogies suggesting otherwise. In the research reported here, we examined whether objectifying thoughts can influence whether the thoughts are used in subsequent evaluations. In a firstexperiment participants wrote about what they either liked or disliked about their bodies. Then, the paper on which they wrote their thoughts was either ripped up and tossed in the trash or kept and checked for errors. When participants physically discarded a representation of their thoughts, they mentally discarded them as well, using them less in forming judgments than did participants who retained a representation of their thoughts. A second experiment replicated this finding and also showed that people relied on their thoughts more when they physically kept them in a safe place—putting their thoughts in their pockets—than when they discarded them. A final study revealed that these effects were stronger when the action was performed physically rather than merely imagined.

Now, a bit more detail on the first experiment:

The experiment was presented as a study on body image. All participants received written instructions asking them to complete several tasks. As part of the first task, each participant was randomly assigned to generate and write down either positive or negative thoughts about his or her own body during a 3-min period. In the positive-thoughts condition, participants were told to list as many positive thoughts about their bodies as they could; in the negative-thoughts condition, participants were told to list as many negative thoughts about their bodies as they could (e.g., Killeya & Johnson, 1998). Examination of the thoughts listed indicated that all participants followed the instructions.

After listing his or her thoughts, each participant was randomly assigned to either the thought-disposal or the control condition. All participants were asked to look back at the thoughts they wrote. In the thought-disposal condition, participants were asked to contemplate their thoughts and then throw them into the trash can located in the room, because their thoughts did not have to remain with them. In the control condition, participants were asked to contemplate their thoughts and to check for any grammar or spelling errors they could find.

The dependent variable in our analysis was participants’ attitudes toward their bodies. Participants were told that they should record these attitudes because their self-image might have influenced their previous responses. Attitudes were assessed using three 9-point semantic-differential scales (e.g., bad-good, unattractive-attractive, like-dislike). Ratings were highly intercorrelated (α = .88), so we averaged them (after reverse scoring as appropriate) to create a composite attitude index. Higher values on this index indicated more favorable attitudes.

From their discussion:

Consistent with our hypothesis that a thought-disposal treatment can influence judgments by invalidating people’s thoughts, results showed that the attitudes of participants who physically threw their thoughts away showed less impact of the thought-direction induction than did the attitudes of participants who physically retained their thoughts....It is important to note that because the treatment was induced after thoughts were already generated, it could not affect the valence or the number of participants’ thoughts. Rather, the treatment decreased the strength of the influence that participants’ thoughts had on their attitudes.

What we should fear...

Gary Marcus does a review of some answers to the annual question of John Brockman's edge.org, "What *should* we be worried about?" On the question of whether we are psychologically and politically constituted to worry about what we most need to worry about, Marcus suggests:

that there is good reason to think that we are not inclined that way, both because of an inherent cognitive bias that makes us focus on immediate concerns (like getting our dishwasher fixed) to the diminishment of our attention to long-term issues (like getting enough exercise to maintain our cardiovascular fitness) and because of a chronic bias toward optimism known as a “just-world fallacy” (the comforting but unrealistic idea that moral actions will invariably lead to just rewards).

A theme throughout the collection is what Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson calls “metaworry”. His metaworry is that:

...actual threats [to our species] are changing much more rapidly than they have in the ancestral past. Humans have created much of this environment with our mechanisms, computers, and algorithms that induce rapid, “disruptive,” and even global change. Both financial and environmental examples easily spring to mind.… Our worry engines [may] not retune their direction to focus on these rapidly changing threats fast enough to take preventative action.

Brain correlates of developing intuition.

An interesting open access study from Wan et al.:

The superior capability of cognitive experts largely depends on automatic, quick information processing, which is often referred to as intuition. Intuition develops following extensive long-term training. There are many cognitive models on intuition development, but its neural basis is not known. Here we trained novices for 15 weeks to learn a simple board game and measured their brain activities in early and end phases of the training while they quickly generated the best next-move to a given board pattern. We found that the activation in the head of caudate nucleus developed over the course of training, in parallel to the development of the capability to quickly generate the best next-move, and the magnitude of the caudate activity was correlated with the subject's performance. In contrast, cortical activations, which already appeared in the early phase of training, did not further change. Thus, neural activation in the caudate head, but not those in cortical areas, tracked the development of capability to quickly generate the best next-move, indicating that circuitries including the caudate head may automate cognitive computations.

A few pictures showing location of the caudate head (pointed to by to line in right figure):

How procrastination gets things done...

John Tierney writes a delightful piece on not getting some things done. He notes several authors' comments on procrastination:

The key to productivity, John Perry argues in “The Art of Procrastination,” is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about it...At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter.,,“Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes. “With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”

Robert Benchley:

“The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” he wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Piers Steel ("The Procrastination Equation", 2011):

For most of us, procrastination can be beaten down, but not entirely beaten…My best trick is to play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another….We are willing to pursue any vile task as long as it allows us to avoid something worse.

Procrastinators rarely sit around absolutely idle. The author Raymond Chandler forced himself to write detective stories by setting aside 4 hours each day with two rules:

a) You don’t have to write.

b) You can’t do anything else.

Another rule from Perry:

Never do today any task that may disappear by tomorrow.

Hedonic adaptation - where did the warm glow go?

Obtaining something we want follows a very stereotyped course, as noted in Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." Or, consider the scene from the musical "Stop the World, I want to get off." in which the character at the climax of a song are entwined in a happy summation...the music stops...the characters keep holding their position, and keep holding....and keep holding...begin to wobble just a bit...wobble a bit more...and finally fall apart.

Why is the warm glow on attaining some we desire sustained? Why is happily-ever-after so rare? The issue, in terms of relationships, is addressed in Jane Brody recent review of writing and studies on keeping love alive in relationships. The happiness boost that occurs with marriage lasts only about two years, after which people revert to their former levels of happiness - or unhappiness, and infatuation and passion have even shorter life spans. The phenomenon is dubbed "hedonic adaptation" by psychologists - things that thrill us tend to be short-lived. (The reaction of many brain circuits to repeated stimulation is to decrease their reactivity or output, an example being the mesolimbic dopamine system, whose role in the brain reward system is controversial.)

 Lyubomirsky's new book "The Myth of Happiness" deals with this situation and notes techniques, backed by recent research, that help relationships evolve into companionate love, composed more of deep affection, connection and liking (I just downloaded a test sample from Amazon to my iPad to check it out). Barbara L. Fredrickson, author of the forthcoming "Love 2.0" specifies that a flourishing relationship needs three times as many positive emotions as negative ones.

The advice on relationships all seems to boil down to "practice a bit more kindness and gratitude".   I have to say, that when I've been able to budge my curmudgeonly nature enough to actually do this for brief periods of time, it has worked wonders!

How environments talk to genes.

The January issue of Nature Neuroscience has some fascinating articles on gene-environment interactions. Vassoler et al. report that in rats paternal cocaine use causes a heritable increase in cortical brain-derived neurotrophic factor (Bdnf) gene expression, which then confers a cocaine-resistant phenotype in male, but not female, progeny (The sins of the father are forgiven!):

We delineated a heritable phenotype resulting from the self-administration of cocaine in rats. We observed delayed acquisition and reduced maintenance of cocaine self-administration in male, but not female, offspring of sires that self-administered cocaine. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (Bdnf) mRNA and BDNF protein were increased in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and there was an increased association of acetylated histone H3 with Bdnf promoters in only the male offspring of cocaine-experienced sires. Administration of a BDNF receptor antagonist (the TrkB receptor antagonist ANA-12) reversed the diminished cocaine self-administration in male cocaine-sired rats. In addition, the association of acetylated histone H3 with Bdnf promoters was increased in the sperm of sires that self-administered cocaine. Collectively, these findings indicate that voluntary paternal ingestion of cocaine results in epigenetic reprogramming of the germline, having profound effects on mPFC gene expression and resistance to cocaine reinforcement in male offspring.

And, Klengel et al. find a molecular mechanism in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder: demethylation of a glucocorticoid response element in the stress response regulator FKBP5 that depends on both the risk allele and childhood trauma. Here is the jargon:

Although the fact that genetic predisposition and environmental exposures interact to shape development and function of the human brain and, ultimately, the risk of psychiatric disorders has drawn wide interest, the corresponding molecular mechanisms have not yet been elucidated. We found that a functional polymorphism altering chromatin interaction between the transcription start site and long-range enhancers in the FK506 binding protein 5 (FKBP5) gene, an important regulator of the stress hormone system, increased the risk of developing stress-related psychiatric disorders in adulthood by allele-specific, childhood trauma–dependent DNA demethylation in functional glucocorticoid response elements of FKBP5. This demethylation was linked to increased stress-dependent gene transcription followed by a long-term dysregulation of the stress hormone system and a global effect on the function of immune cells and brain areas associated with stress regulation. This identification of molecular mechanisms of genotype-directed long-term environmental reactivity will be useful for designing more effective treatment strategies for stress-related disorders.

Our brains change operating modes during an eyeblink.

Nakano et al. suggest that an eye blink briefly gives our attentional network a rest, as activity shifts to the default network:

It remains unknown why we generate spontaneous eyeblinks every few seconds, more often than necessary for ocular lubrication. Because eyeblinks tend to occur at implicit breakpoints while viewing videos, we hypothesized that eyeblinks are actively involved in the release of attention. We show that while viewing videos, cortical activity momentarily decreases in the dorsal attention network after blink onset but increases in the default-mode network implicated in internal processing. In contrast, physical blackouts of the video do not elicit such reciprocal changes in brain networks. The results suggest that eyeblinks are actively involved in the process of attentional disengagement during a cognitive behavior by momentarily activating the default-mode network while deactivating the dorsal attention network.

Why mental arithmetic counts.

Price et al. show that brain activation during single digit arithmetic predicts high school math scores:

Do individual differences in the brain mechanisms for arithmetic underlie variability in high school mathematical competence? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we correlated brain responses to single digit calculation with standard scores on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT) math subtest in high school seniors. PSAT math scores, while controlling for PSAT Critical Reading scores, correlated positively with calculation activation in the left supramarginal gyrus and bilateral anterior cingulate cortex, brain regions known to be engaged during arithmetic fact retrieval. At the same time, greater activation in the right intraparietal sulcus during calculation, a region established to be involved in numerical quantity processing, was related to lower PSAT math scores. These data reveal that the relative engagement of brain mechanisms associated with procedural versus memory-based calculation of single-digit arithmetic problems is related to high school level mathematical competence, highlighting the fundamental role that mental arithmetic fluency plays in the acquisition of higher-level mathematical competence.

Lifelong bilingualism enhances cognitive control in aging.

This work by Gold et al. makes me wish I had maintained the proficiency in German that I had in my college years:

Recent behavioral data have shown that lifelong bilingualism can maintain youthful cognitive control abilities in aging. Here, we provide the first direct evidence of a neural basis for the bilingual cognitive control boost in aging. Two experiments were conducted, using a perceptual task-switching paradigm, including a total of 110 participants. In Experiment 1, older adult bilinguals showed better perceptual switching performance than their monolingual peers. In Experiment 2, younger and older adult monolinguals and bilinguals completed the same perceptual task-switching experiment while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed. Typical age-related performance reductions and fMRI activation increases were observed. However, like younger adults, bilingual older adults outperformed their monolingual peers while displaying decreased activation in left lateral frontal cortex and cingulate cortex. Critically, this attenuation of age-related over-recruitment associated with bilingualism was directly correlated with better task-switching performance. In addition, the lower blood oxygenation level-dependent response in frontal regions accounted for 82% of the variance in the bilingual task-switching reaction time advantage. These results suggest that lifelong bilingualism offsets age-related declines in the neural efficiency for cognitive control processes.

A great New Yorker Cover

I can't resist passing on the cover of the most recent issue of The New Yorker:

Mindfulness neuroscience

The journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience has released an issue devoted to studies of brain correlates of different kinds of meditation. One article, on compassion or loving-kindness meditation, is open access. For me, the crucial article is the last one, written by a senior guru of the brain imaging field, Michael Posner, and his colleague Yi-Yuan Tang, outlining theoretical and methodological issues in the field. They note that reviews of the field have:

..summarized four components of how mindfulness meditation may work: (i) attention regulation, (ii) body awareness, (iii) emotion regulation (including reappraisal, exposure, extinction and reconsolidation) and (iv) change in perspective on the self. The authors indicate that mindfulness practice comprises a process of enhanced self-regulation that can be differentiated into distinct but interrelated components. While these components are a start, future empirical work should identify additional components of mindfulness and establish to what extent the components involve distinct mechanisms.

Many studies have difficulties with appropriate control and comparison subjects:

Different control and comparison groups have been used in mindfulness research, such as waiting lists, active control groups and interventions designed to match the non-specific effects of mindfulness practices, such as trainer’s confidence, expectancy effects and group support... Ideally, participants would be randomly assigned to condition, and the conditions would be matched with the many non-specific factors that have been found to produce beneficial change... Random assignment allows the changes observed in mindfulness research to be reasonably attributed to the active ingredient of mindfulness practice per se rather than to pre-existing differences in the experimental and control groups. Therefore, moving the field will require the use of rigorous comparison conditions to which participants are randomly assigned.

In long-term studies, an active control is not possible. In studies of long-term practitioners such as monks with many thousands of hours of practice, it is challenging to find even a matched control group. We don’t know how the monks differed before meditation practice and other factors including the environment and low stress, which differ from any ‘matched’ control group.

Other issues are that the various studies employ different mindfulness techniques, stages of practice, or duration of training. (Motivated readers can request a copy of his article from me.)

The power of concentration

I've been meaning to pass on this review by Konnikova on the salutary effects of mindfulness and concentration. It pulls together a number of observations that I have noted in previous MindBlog posts. Here are a few clips:

...mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way...In 2011, researchers from the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it...

An exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern existence: multitasking...researchers led by a team from the University of Washington examined the effects of meditation training on multitasking in a real-world setting. They asked a group of human resources professionals to engage in the type of simultaneous planning they did habitually... After the multitasking free-for-all, participants were divided into three groups: one was assigned to an eight-week meditation course (two hours of instruction, weekly); another group didn’t take the course at first, but took it later; and the last group took an eight-week course in body relaxation. Everyone was put through a second round of frenzy...The only participants to show improvement were those who had received the mindfulness training.Not only did they report fewer negative emotions at the end of the assignment, but their ability to concentrate improved significantly. They could stay on task longer and they switched between tasks less frequently.

In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction. Mindfulness, in other words, helps our attention networks communicate better and with fewer interruptions than they otherwise would...In 2006, a team of psychologists demonstrated that the neural activation patterns of older adults (specifically, activation in the prefrontal cortex), began to resemble those of much younger subjects after just five one-hour training sessions on a task of attentional control. Their brains became more efficient at coordinating multiple tasks — and the benefit transferred to untrained activities, suggesting that it was symptomatic of general improvement.

Similar changes have been observed in the default network (the brain’s resting-state activity). In 2012, researchers from Ohio State University demonstrated that older adults who scored higher on mindfulness scales had increased connectivity in their default networks, specifically in two of the brain’s major information processing hubs. And while we already know that this kind of increased connectivity is a very good thing, there’s more to these particular results. The precise areas that show increased connectivity with mindfulness are also known to be pathophysiological sites of Alzheimer’s disease.

Self affirmation enhances responsiveness to errors.

Legault et al. note brain responses that correlate with augmented attention and emotional receptivity to performance errors caused by enhanced self affirmation. The experiments used the usual group of undergraduate psychology students, who were split into two groups given writing exercises designed to either enhance or undermine self-affirmation. Both groups then performed a simple go, no-go exercise, with errors getting negative feedback. EEG recordings were made during this exercise. Here is their summary extract:

Self-affirmation produces large effects: Even a simple reminder of one’s core values reduces defensiveness against threatening information. But how, exactly, does self-affirmation work? We explored this question by examining the impact of self-affirmation on neurophysiological responses to threatening events. We hypothesized that because self-affirmation increases openness to threat and enhances approachability of unfavorable feedback, it should augment attention and emotional receptivity to performance errors. We further hypothesized that this augmentation could be assessed directly, at the level of the brain. We measured self-affirmed and nonaffirmed participants’ electrophysiological responses to making errors on a task. As we anticipated, self-affirmation elicited greater error responsiveness than did nonaffirmation, as indexed by the error-related negativity, a neural signal of error monitoring. Self-affirmed participants also performed better on the task than did nonaffirmed participants. We offer novel brain evidence that self-affirmation increases openness to threat and discuss the role of error detection in the link between self-affirmation and performance.

Music and movement: shared dynamic structure in universal expressions of emotion

Sievers et al. do a fascinating analysis. They designed an ingenious computer program that used slider bars to adjust a music player or a bouncing ball with varying rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. Participants were instructed to take as much time as needed to set the sliders in the program to express five emotions: “angry,” “happy,” “peaceful,” “sad,” and “scared.” One set of participants was instructed to move sliders to express the emotion with the moving ball, then other set told to move the sliders to use music to express the emotion. U.S. college students were one experimental group, the other was a culturally isolated Kreug ethnic minority in northern Cambodia with music formally dissimilar to Western music: no system of vertical pitch relations equivalent to Western tonal harmony, constructed using different scales and tunings, and performed on morphologically dissimilar instruments. Here is the authors' summary abstract:

Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in an isolated tribal village in Cambodia. These experiments revealed three things: (i) each emotion was represented by a unique combination of features, (ii) each combination expressed the same emotion in both music and movement, and (iii) this common structure between music and movement was evident within and across cultures.

The End of History Illusion.

The Jan 4 issue of Science has an interested article by Quoidbach et al. on our perception of how much we changed in the past decade and how much we expect to change in the next. Here is some context from their introduction:

At every stage of life, people make decisions that profoundly influence the lives of the people they will become—and when they finally become those people, they aren’t always thrilled about it. Young adults pay to remove the tattoos that teenagers paid to get, middle-aged adults rush to divorce the people whom young adults rushed to marry, and older adults visit health spas to lose what middle-aged adults visited restaurants to gain. Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret? One possibility is that people have a fundamental misconception about their future selves. Time is a powerful force that transforms people’s preferences, reshapes their values, and alters their personalities, and we suspect that people generally underestimate the magnitude of those changes. In other words, people may believe that who they are today is pretty much who they will be tomorrow, despite the fact that it isn’t who they were yesterday. In the studies we describe here, we showed that people expect to change little in the future, despite knowing that they have changed a lot in the past, and that this tendency bedevils their decision-making. We call this tendency to underestimate the magnitude of future change the “end of history illusion.”

And here is their summary and discussion:

Across six studies of more than 19,000 participants, we found consistent evidence to indicate that people underestimate how much they will change in the future, and that doing so can lead to suboptimal decisions. Although these data cannot tell us what causes the end of history illusion, two possibilities seem likely. First, most people believe that their personalities are attractive, their values admirable, and their preferences wise (10); and having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change. People also like to believe that they know themselves well (11), and the possibility of future change may threaten that belief. In short, people are motivated to think well of themselves and to feel secure in that understanding, and the end of history illusion may help them accomplish these goals.

Second, there is at least one important difference between the cognitive processes that allow people to look forward and backward in time (12). Prospection is a constructive process, retrospection is a reconstructive process, and constructing new things is typically more difficult than reconstructing old ones (13, 14). The reason this matters is that people often draw inferences from the ease with which they can remember or imagine (15, 16). If people find it difficult to imagine the ways in which their traits, values, or preferences will change in the future, they may assume that such changes are unlikely. In short, people may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself.

Although the magnitude of this end of history illusion in some of our studies was greater for younger people than for older people, it was nonetheless evident at every stage of adult life that we could analyze. Both teenagers and grandparents seem to believe that the pace of personal change has slowed to a crawl and that they have recently become the people they will remain. History, it seems, is always ending today.

Surprise! Satisfied old folks live longer.

Contra a popular assumption that feisty, grumpy old farts are likely to live longer than sweet docile passive ones, Judith Graham reviews recent work by Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University that suggests the opposite - basically that older people become what they think, what their age stereotypes are. Some edited clips:

She looked at a a database of 660 adults age 50 and older in Oxford, Ohio, who were followed for a period of 23 years, from 1975 to 1998, and reported in The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology in 2002 that those with positive age stereotypes lived 7.5 years longer than those with negative stereotypes. She also did a series of laboratory experiments with older people, exposing them subliminally to negative or positive stereotypes by flashing words associated with aging on a computer screen too fast for them to process consciously. Then these seniors were asked to perform a task. Those exposed to negative words such as "decrepit" had poorer handwriting, slower walking speeds, higher levels of cardiovascular stress and a greater willingness to reject hypothetical medical interventions that could prolong their lives. Those primed with positive words such as "wisdom" did much better.

Levy established that people with positive age stereotypes were more likely to eat a balanced diet, exercise, limit their alcohol consumption, stop smoking and get regular physical exams, and that they had a higher level of physical functioning over time. Results were controlled for other factors like illness, gender, race and socioeconomic status…In these papers, Dr. Levy hypothesized that positive age stereotypes are associated with a greater sense of control and that this enhanced seniors' sense of self efficacy -- their ability to remain captains of their own ship, as it were.

Human evolution: endurance running made our brains larger and smarter.

Gretchen Reynolds reviews work suggesting that our advanced cleverness and big brains may have come not from the need to think but becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped. It turns out our larger brain size with respect to body size is also shown to some extent by species like dogs and rats that have a high innate endurance capacity, presumably evolved over millennia. it is also seen in mice and rats systematically bred to be marathon runners. After multiple generations, these animals begin to develop innately higher levels of tissue growth and health promoters, including the protein brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth. Such observations have led Raichlen and Polk to suggest that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter:

The hunting and gathering lifestyle adopted by human ancestors around 2 Ma required a large increase in aerobic activity. High levels of physical activity altered the shape of the human body, enabling access to new food resources (e.g. animal protein) in a changing environment. Recent experimental work provides strong evidence that both acute bouts of exercise and long-term exercise training increase the size of brain components and improve cognitive performance in humans and other taxa. However, to date, researchers have not explored the possibility that the increases in aerobic capacity and physical activity that occurred during human evolution directly influenced the human brain. Here, we hypothesize that proximate mechanisms linking physical activity and neurobiology in living species may help to explain changes in brain size and cognitive function during human evolution. We review evidence that selection acting on endurance increased baseline neurotrophin and growth factor signalling (compounds responsible for both brain growth and for metabolic regulation during exercise) in some mammals, which in turn led to increased overall brain growth and development. This hypothesis suggests that a significant portion of human neurobiology evolved due to selection acting on features unrelated to cognitive performance.

Why are older people more susceptible to fraud?

From Castle et al: a succinct set of observations. Their data is quite compelling.

Older adults are disproportionately vulnerable to fraud, and federal agencies have speculated that excessive trust explains their greater vulnerability. Two studies, one behavioral and one using neuroimaging methodology, identified age differences in trust and their neural underpinnings. Older and younger adults rated faces high in trust cues similarly, but older adults perceived faces with cues to untrustworthiness to be significantly more trustworthy and approachable than younger adults. This age-related pattern was mirrored in neural activation to cues of trustworthiness. Whereas younger adults showed greater anterior insula activation to untrustworthy versus trustworthy faces, older adults showed muted activation of the anterior insula to untrustworthy faces. The insula has been shown to support interoceptive awareness that forms the basis of “gut feelings,” which represent expected risk and predict risk-avoidant behavior. Thus, a diminished “gut” response to cues of untrustworthiness may partially underlie older adults’ vulnerability to fraud.

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.

Lévi-Strauss - "shattered hologram" of aging.

I've been having a go at Jim Holt's popular book  "Why does the world exist? An existential detective story."  After three chapters of fascinating quotes from famous ancient and modern philosophers and scientists I skipped to the epilogue, and found a striking account given by the author of attending a small party at the Collège de France in celebration of the ninetieth birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss was asked to give a little speech to the group, and begins with:

"Montaigne said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today" - which, he adds, was one of the "most curious surprises of my existence."  He says he feels like a "shattered hologram" that has lost its unity but that still retains an image of the whole self. 

Lévi-Strauss goes on to talk about the "dialogue"  between the eroded self he has become - le moi réel - and the ideal self that coexists with it - le moi métronymique.  The latter, planning ambitious new intellectual projects, says to the former,  "You must continue."  But the former replies, "That's your business - only you can see things whole."  Levi-Strauss then thanks those of us assembled for helping him silence this futile dialogue and allowing his two selves of "coincide" again for a moment - "although," he adds,  "I am well aware that le moi réel will continue to sink toward its ultimate dissolution."

What an incredible description of what we experience as we continually loose our brain cells during aging: a receding shadow of the richness of the world once integrated by their antecedent and larger ensemble.

The final lines of Holt's epilogue, and the book:

Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

-AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary

A usefull trick: Shifting attention to reduce emotional reactivity.

Thiruchselvam et al. do a simple demonstration of how our introspective attention can regulate our emotions after an unpleasant for fearful stimulus. Shifting the focus of that subsequent attention away from the challenging part of the image lessens emotional reactivity.  Here is their abstract, following by the basic experimental protocol:

Selective attention plays a fundamental role in emotion regulation. To date, research has examined individuals’ use of selective attention to regulate emotional responses during stimulus presentation. In the present study, we examined whether selective attention can be used to regulate emotional responses during a poststimulus period when representations are active within working memory (WM). On each trial, participants viewed either a negative or a neutral image. After the offset of the image, they maintained a representation of it in WM and were cued to focus their attention on either neutral or arousing aspects of that representation. Results showed that, relative to focusing on an arousing portion of a negative-image representation within WM, focusing on a neutral portion of the representation reduced both self-reported negative emotion and the late positive potential, a robust neural measure of emotional reactivity. These data suggest that selective attention can alter emotional responses arising from affective representations active within WM.

Figure (click to enlarge): Illustration of the trial structure. After an initial fixation period, an image (either negative or neutral) appeared on-screen for 1,500 ms. Then, two circles were overlaid on the image for 1,500 ms. For negative images (as shown here), one circle highlighted a neutral portion, whereas the other circle highlighted an arousing portion. For neutral images, both circles highlighted neutral portions. The image then disappeared, leaving a black screen for 750 ms, during which participants held the full image in working memory. Then, one of the circles was presented briefly for 250 ms. In the subsequent 3,000-ms interval, participants had to focus their attention on the portion of the image that had previously been contained within the target circle. Participants then rated how pleasant or unpleasant they felt.

Happy Holidays - a personal note - and MindBlog taking a break

My partner Len and I have traveled from our Fort Lauderdale snowbird retreat to Austin Texas to join  my ex-wife Marilyn Young, son Jonathan Bownds, daughter-in-law Shana Merlin, and my first grandchild, their new 9 month old grandson Sebastian.   They are now living in the Bownds family home that now has sheltered four generations of the Bownds family.  Daughter Sarah Bownds from Madison is also here.

Training parts of your brain for perceptual enhancement.

Geraint Rees and collaborators have done some fascinating work showing that training the spontaneous activity of just a part of our visual brain, corresponding to just a part of our visual field, can enhance the visual performance of that part of our vision:

Perception depends on the interplay of ongoing spontaneous activity and stimulus-evoked activity in sensory cortices. This raises the possibility that training ongoing spontaneous activity alone might be sufficient for enhancing perceptual sensitivity. To test this, we trained human participants to control ongoing spontaneous activity in circumscribed regions of retinotopic visual cortex using real-time functional MRI-based neurofeedback. After training, we tested participants using a new and previously untrained visual detection task that was presented at the visual field location corresponding to the trained region of visual cortex. Perceptual sensitivity was significantly enhanced only when participants who had previously learned control over ongoing activity were now exercising control and only for that region of visual cortex. Our new approach allows us to non-invasively and non-pharmacologically manipulate regionally specific brain activity and thus provide “brain training” to deliver particular perceptual enhancements.

For guys who want to attract women?

Perhaps there is a human equivalent of the non-volatile protein pheromone darcin, that Roberts et al. show to stimulate spatial preference and learning in mice. Female mice preferred locations where male urine (or synthesized darcin) had been found, and remembered these spatial locations for 2 weeks post-exposure. (Scent marking is an essential component of communication for most mammals. Individuals remember the location of scent marks and regularly revisit marked sites, presumably to assess the condition and status of the animal doing the marking. It is known that individuals can follow odor or pheromone gradients to locate another individual, but relocating scent marks is a much more difficult task given the small amount of volatile compounds deposited, and their static nature.) Here is the abstract:

Many mammals use scent marking for sexual and competitive advertisement, but little is known about the mechanism by which scents are used to locate mates and competitors. We show that darcin, an involatile protein sex pheromone in male mouse urine, can rapidly condition preference for its remembered location among females and competitor males so that animals prefer to spend time in the site even when scent is absent. Learned spatial preference is conditioned through contact with darcin in a single trial and remembered for approximately 14 days. This pheromone-induced learning allows animals to relocate sites of particular social relevance and provides proof that pheromones such as darcin can be highly potent stimuli for social learning.

Unconscious reading and arithmetic.

Here is a fascinating bit from Sklar et al.:

The modal view in the cognitive and neural sciences holds that consciousness is necessary for abstract, symbolic, and rule-following computations. Hence, semantic processing of multiple-word expressions, and performing of abstract mathematical computations, are widely believed to require consciousness. We report a series of experiments in which we show that multiple-word verbal expressions can be processed outside conscious awareness and that multistep, effortful arithmetic equations can be solved unconsciously. All experiments used Continuous Flash Suppression to render stimuli invisible for relatively long durations (up to 2,000 ms). Where appropriate, unawareness was verified using both objective and subjective measures. The results show that novel word combinations, in the form of expressions that contain semantic violations, become conscious before expressions that do not contain semantic violations, that the more negative a verbal expression is, the more quickly it becomes conscious, and that subliminal arithmetic equations prime their results. These findings call for a significant update of our view of conscious and unconscious processes.

(note:  Continuous Flash Suppression consists of a presentation of a target stimulus to one eye and a simultaneous presentation of rapidly changing masks to the other eye. The rapidly changing masks dominate awareness until the target breaks into consciousness. This suppression may last seconds. To examine arithmetic, another symbolic, rule-following system, the authors moved from a breaking-into-consciousness design to a priming design. They examined the effects of subliminal stimuli on conscious stimuli that follow them, using both subjective and objective measures to verify the subliminality of the primes.)

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.

Brain plasticity induced by musical training.

As a lifelong pianist, I have always regarded with awe pianists like Horowitz and Rubenstein who have continued to perform into into their advanced old age. I have done some 4 hands recitals here in my winter nest of Fort Lauderdale with an 87-year old retired music professor and performer who still gives solo concerts. Musical performance makes very complex demands on visual, auditory, and motor processing. Numerous studies have shown that subcortical and cortical brain regions can change with musical training. Hernholz and Zatorre offer a massive review of musical training as a framework for brain plasticity in a recent issue of Neuron. I can't even begin to summarize the abundant material presented and offer only the abstract and one sample figure here (motivated readers can request a PDF of the article from me.)

Musical training has emerged as a useful framework for the investigation of training-related plasticity in the human brain. Learning to play an instrument is a highly complex task that involves the interaction of several modalities and higher-order cognitive functions and that results in behavioral, structural, and functional changes on time scales ranging from days to years. While early work focused on comparison of musical experts and novices, more recently an increasing number of controlled training studies provide clear experimental evidence for training effects. Here, we review research investigating brain plasticity induced by musical training, highlight common patterns and possible underlying mechanisms of such plasticity, and integrate these studies with findings and models for mechanisms of plasticity in other domains.

Figure 2 (click to enlarge). Interindividual Differences in Auditory Cortical Structure and Function(A) Variability in auditory cortex gray matter concentration and cortical thickness predicted performance on a melodic transposition task (adapted from Foster and Zatorre, 2010).(B) Different rates of behavioral improvement during pitch memory training were accompanied by differential training-related functional changes in secondary auditory areas (adapted from Gaab et al., 2006).(C) BOLD signal covariation to increasing pitch size in microtonal melodies prior to training in both left and right auditory cortices was predictive of the speed with which learning occurred, such that those individuals who subsequently learned more quickly had an initially steeper response function (adapted from Zatorre et al., in press).

The herding hormone

Yet another addition, from Stallen et al., to the long list of studies on oxytocin and our social behaviors (enter oxytocin in the search box in the left column to pull up the numerous mindblog posts on oxytocin effects on our behaviors):

People often conform to others with whom they associate. Surprisingly, however, little is known about the possible hormonal mechanisms that may underlie in-group conformity. Here, we examined whether conformity toward one’s in-group is altered by oxytocin, a neuropeptide often implicated in social behavior. After administration of either oxytocin or a placebo, participants were asked to provide attractiveness ratings of unfamiliar visual stimuli. While viewing each stimulus, participants were shown ratings of that stimulus provided by both in-group and out-group members. Results demonstrated that on trials in which the ratings of the in-group and out-group were incongruent, the ratings of participants given oxytocin conformed to the ratings of their in-group but not of their out-group. Participants given a placebo did not show this in-group bias. These findings indicate that administration of oxytocin can influence subjective preferences, and they support the view that oxytocin’s effects on social behavior are context dependent.

Brain imaging of the positive bias we place on social feedback.

Continuing the social brain thread started by yesterday's post, I pass on this piece by Korn et al. showing brain correlates of the rose colored glasses we put on interpreting social feedback from others. Participants in the study rated how much 40 positive and 40 negative trait adjectives applied to themselves and to one other person before and after receiving feedback ratings of themselves. The critical test for positively biased updating was finding that the changes toward desirable feedback were larger than the changes toward undesirable feedback. Here is their abstract:

Receiving social feedback such as praise or blame for one's character traits is a key component of everyday human interactions. It has been proposed that humans are positively biased when integrating social feedback into their self-concept. However, a mechanistic description of how humans process self-relevant feedback is lacking. Here, participants received feedback from peers after a real-life interaction. Participants processed feedback in a positively biased way, i.e., they changed their self-evaluations more toward desirable than toward undesirable feedback. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging we investigated two feedback components. First, the reward-related component correlated with activity in ventral striatum and in anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/MPFC). Second, the comparison-related component correlated with activity in the mentalizing network, including the MPFC, the temporoparietal junction, the superior temporal sulcus, the temporal pole, and the inferior frontal gyrus. This comparison-related activity within the mentalizing system has a parsimonious interpretation, i.e., activity correlated with the differences between participants' own evaluation and feedback. Importantly, activity within the MPFC that integrated reward-related and comparison-related components predicted the self-related positive updating bias across participants offering a mechanistic account of positively biased feedback processing. Thus, theories on both reward and mentalizing are important for a better understanding of how social information is integrated into the human self-concept.

Enhancing social ability with brain stimulation.

Social information is thought to be processed by a specific set of neural circuits often referred to as the ‘social brain’ The figure shows localization in human brains of the relevant temporo-parietal junction orbitofrontal cortex in lateral (top) and medial (bottom) views.  Santiesteban et al. now show that low levels of direct current stimulation of the temporoparietal junction region improves control of self-other representations. (The electrical stimulation is two saline-soaked surface sponge electrodes driven by a battery driven constant low current stimulator). Here is their summary, followed by the abstract:

-OFC neurons respond to social visual stimul
-OFC neurons differentiate between socially defined classes of images
-OFC neurons signal the value of social information for making decisions
-More OFC neurons convey social information than fluid reward magnitude.

Primate evolution produced an increased capacity to respond flexibly to varying social contexts as well as expansion of the prefrontal cortex [1,2]. Despite this association, how prefrontal neurons respond to social information remains virtually unknown. People with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) struggle to recognize facial expressions [3,4], make poor social judgments [5,6], and frequently make social faux pas [7,8]. Here we test explicitly whether neurons in primate OFC signal social information and, if so, how such signals compare with responses to primary fluid rewards. We find that OFC neurons distinguish images that belong to socially defined categories, such as female perinea and faces, as well as the social dominance of those faces. These modulations signaled both how much monkeys valued these pictures and their interest in continuing to view them. Far more neurons signaled social category than signaled fluid value, despite the stronger impact of fluid reward on monkeys’ choices. These findings indicate that OFC represents both the motivational value and attentional priority of other individuals, thus contributing to both the acquisition of information about others and subsequent social decisions. Our results betray a fundamental disconnect between preferences expressed through overt choice, which were primarily driven by the desire for more fluid, and preferential neuronal processing, which favored social computations.

Thanks for not sharing, and tuning out...

I almost did a post last week on Roger Cohen's NYTimes 'thank you for not sharing' piece , and now he has done a followup on tuning out, so I can't resist passing on a few choice clips. From the first piece:

LET us ponder oversharing and status anxiety, the two great scourges of the modern world.

What is this compulsion to share? Sometimes, of course, it is just a mistake, the wrong button hit, or mishandling of privacy settings on Facebook. But there is a new urge to behave as if life were some global high-school reunion at which everyone has taken some horrific tell-all drug.

My theory is this. Humanity has always been hardwired to fear. That is how we survived. But the fear used to be of wild beasts prowling, the encroaching Visigoths, plague, world war. Now, in the pampered present, all that anxiety has to find a new focus. So, having searched long and hard, and helped by technology, we have come up with being anxious that our status might be falling or — the horror, the horror! — disintegrating.

Number of Twitter followers shrinking or not growing as fast as your friends’? Status anxiety attack begins. No e-mails or texts received in the past 78 minutes? Status anxiety attack accelerates. Got unfriended or discover by chance on LinkedIn that your 29-year-old college roommate is now running an agribusiness fund out of St. Louis that has assets of $47 billion and owns half of Madagascar? Status meltdown kicks in.

The only antidote, the only means to push that status up again, it seems, is to keep sharing more and more. Here I am — the posts and tweets and pix say — a being not anonymous but alive. I overshare therefore I am.

And from the second:

...we are not the first humans to believe the world has sped up and hyperconnected to a point where distance has been eliminated. Too often we confuse activity and movement with accomplishment and fulfillment. More may be gained through a pause...We tend to overstate what has changed. The fundamental instincts and urges of our natures remain constant. Social media did not invent the need to be loved or the fear of being unloved. They just revealed them in new ways...It is the culture of oversharing and status anxiety that disturbs me. And that is inseparable from the grip of social media.

...like Facebook, Twitter can be addictive in ways that may provide brief solace but militate against respect of our deeper natures. There is too much noise, too little silence. To share, that once beautiful verb, has become an awful emotional splurge...The friend-follower conceits are brilliant marketing tools designed to play on insecurities. Who does not want more friends and more followers? Who does not feel the sleight of being unfriended or unfollowed, a settling of scores more impersonal than a duel and perhaps crueler for that?

...here’s to doses of disconnection in 2013. Get out of the cross hairs of your devices from time to time. Drink experience unfiltered by hyperconnection. Gaze with patience. Listen through silences. Let your longings breathe...Somewhere deep inside everyone is the thing that makes them tick. The thing is it is often well hidden. The psyche builds layers of protection around people’s most vulnerable traits, which may be closely linked to their precious essence. Social media build layers of distraction from that essence.

Living without irony?

I've been wanting to pass on this marvelous essay by Christy Wampole, which bemoans the ironic sensibility that pervades our culture, and wonders whether there is any escape. Some clips:

For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s - members of Generation Y, or Millennials - particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt. One need only dwell in public space, virtual or concrete, to see how pervasive this phenomenon has become…Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself.

How did this happen? It stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst. This kind of defensive living works as a pre-emptive surrender and takes the form of reaction rather than action…While we have gained some skill sets (multitasking, technological savvy), other skills have suffered: the art of conversation, the art of looking at people, the art of being seen, the art of being present. Our conduct is no longer governed by subtlety, finesse, grace and attention, all qualities more esteemed in earlier decades. Inwardness and narcissism now hold sway.

I, too, exhibit ironic tendencies. For example, I find it difficult to give sincere gifts. Instead, I often give what in the past would have been accepted only at a White Elephant gift exchange. Good for a chuckle in the moment, but worth little in the long term. Something about the responsibility of choosing a personal, meaningful gift for a friend feels too intimate, too momentous. I somehow cannot bear the thought of a friend disliking a gift I'd chosen with sincerity. The simple act of noticing my self-defensive behavior has made me think deeply about how potentially toxic ironic posturing could be.

Fundamentalists are never ironists; dictators are never ironists; people who move things in the political landscape, regardless of the sides they choose, are never ironists….Where can we find other examples of nonironic living? What does it look like? Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: "Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony."

The ironic life is certainly a provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history and too many choices, but it is my firm conviction that this mode of living is not viable and conceals within it many social and political risks. For such a large segment of the population to forfeit its civic voice through the pattern of negation I've described is to siphon energy from the cultural reserves of the community at large. People may choose to continue hiding behind the ironic mantle, but this choice equals a surrender to commercial and political entities more than happy to act as parents for a self-infantilizing citizenry. So rather than scoffing at the hipster - a favorite hobby, especially of hipsters - determine whether the ashes of irony have settled on you as well. It takes little effort to dust them away.

Hindsight bias.

Regarding the recent presidential election, do you feel that you knew the outcome in your gut all along? Not only felt it coming, but are sure you predicted it beforehand? I did. (But, when I honestly look back, I was totally prepared for a Romney win, and ready to say I had predicted that all along...). In this recent article, Roese and Vohs do a nice dissection of this phenomenon:

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they “knew it all along,” that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. Hindsight bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events’ objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one’s own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one’s judgments. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias.

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.

MindBlog is trying a new brain fitness app

It has been a few years since I have reviewed brain fitness exercises of the sort claimed to enhance working memory and general intelligence (g). A new generation of Apps has appeared, and one - CogniFit Brain Fitness for the iPhone and iPad - gets a brief review in the iPhone App Review. The price is right (It's free), and here is a brief clip from the review:

...fun mind games in the form of visual puzzles are presented for free to each user; such games include jigsaw puzzles, mahjong, “words birds,” and “whack a mole.” Specific skills are tested during each game. For example, the jigsaw challenges are designed to hone users’ updating, focusing, and visual scanning skills while “whack a mole” is built to improve cognitive skills such as divided attention, working memory, planning, and spatial perception. While each game in this app focuses on providing different challenges, all of the games are similar in the way that they increase in difficulty as a player advances through the various levels.

I've put the App on my iPhone and iPad, and will be curious to see whether I get hooked on it. I certainly faded fast on my brief flirtation with N-back game Apps several years ago. I would welcome comments from readers who have tried the CogniFit product.

New Love, a short shelf life...

Lyubomirsky previews her forthcoming book “The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does.” A few clips:

American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who got married and stayed married over the course of 15 years. The findings from this and other similar studies have been clear: newlyweds enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts, on average, for just two years…then they are back where they started…new love seems nearly as vulnerable to hedonic adaptation as a new job, a new home, a new coat and other novel sources of pleasure and well-being. (Though the thrill of a new material acquisition generally fades faster.)

Sexual passion and arousal are particularly prone to hedonic adaptation…both men and women are less aroused after they have repeatedly viewed the same erotic pictures or engaged in similar sexual fantasies. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt; but research suggests that it breeds indifference … There are evolutionary, physiological and practical reasons passionate love is unlikely to endure for long. If we obsessed, endlessly, about our partners and had sex with them multiple times a day — every day — we would not be very productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends or our health…Indeed, the condition of being in love has a lot in common with the state of addiction and narcissism; if unabated, it will eventually exact a toll.

WHY, then, is the natural shift from passionate to companionate love often such a letdown? Because, although we may not realize it, we are biologically hard-wired to crave variety. Variety and novelty affect the brain in much the same way that drugs do — that is, they trigger activity that involves the neurotransmitter dopamine, as do pharmacological highs...Evolutionary biologists believe that sexual variety is adaptive, and that it evolved to prevent incest and inbreeding in ancestral environments. The idea is that when our spouse becomes as familiar to us as a sibling — when we’ve become family — we cease to be sexually attracted to each other.

Honesty requires time (and lack of justifications)

Here is a nice little piece from Eldar and Bereby-Meyer:

Recent research suggests that refraining from cheating in tempting situations requires self-control, which indicates that serving self-interest is an automatic tendency. However, evidence also suggests that people cheat to the extent that they can justify their unethical behavior to themselves. To merge these different lines of research, we adopted a dual-system approach that distinguished between the intuitive and deliberative cognitive systems. We suggest that for people to restrict their dishonest behavior, they need to have enough time and no justifications for self-serving unethical behavior. We employed an anonymous die-under-cup task in which participants privately rolled a die and reported the outcome to determine their pay. We manipulated the time available for participants to report their outcome (short vs. ample). The results of two experiments support our prediction, revealing that the dark side of people’s automatic self-serving tendency may be overcome when time to decide is ample and private justifications for dishonesty are not available.

Brain regions that predict and regulate risk-taking.

Two recent pieces of work raise the prospect of being able to predict and even regulate a person's risk-taking behavior, by first observing activity of the anterior cingulate cortex and then dialing it up or down.

First, Rudorf et al. show that behavioral risk preferences are reflected in the passive evaluation of risky situations:

"Individual risk preferences have a large influence on decisions, such as financial investments, career and health choices, or gambling. Decision making under risk has been studied both behaviorally and on a neural level. It remains unclear, however, how risk attitudes are encoded and integrated with choice. Here, we investigate how risk preferences are reflected in neural regions known to process risk. We collected functional magnetic resonance images of 56 human subjects during a gambling task (Preuschoff et al., 2006). Subjects were grouped into risk averters and risk seekers according to the risk preferences they revealed in a separate lottery task. We found that during the anticipation of high-risk gambles, risk averters show stronger responses in ventral striatum and anterior insula compared to risk seekers. In addition, risk prediction error signals in anterior insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and anterior cingulate indicate that risk averters do not dissociate properly between gambles that are more or less risky than expected. We suggest this may result in a general overestimation of prospective risk and lead to risk avoidance behavior. This is the first study to show that behavioral risk preferences are reflected in the passive evaluation of risky situations. The results have implications on public policies in the financial and health domain."

Figure: Anticipation risk coding. Neural activation in bilateral ventral striatum (vStr; top) and anterior insula (aIns; bottom) during anticipation of the second card that correlates with anticipation risk, i.e., expected outcome variance.

Second, Ishii et al. show (in mice) that inactivating anterior insular cortex suppresses risk-taking behavior:

"We often have to make risky decisions between alternatives with outcomes that can be better or worse than the outcomes of safer alternatives. Although previous studies have implicated various brain regions in risky decision making, it remains unknown which regions are crucial for balancing whether to take a risk or play it safe. Here, we focused on the anterior insular cortex (AIC), the causal involvement of which in risky decision making is still unclear, although human imaging studies have reported AIC activation in various gambling tasks. We investigated the effects of temporarily inactivating the AIC on rats' risk preference in two types of gambling tasks, one in which risk arose in reward amount and one in which it arose in reward delay. As a control within the same subjects, we inactivated the adjacent orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which is well known to affect risk preference. In both gambling tasks, AIC inactivation decreased risk preference whereas OFC inactivation increased it. In risk-free control situations, AIC and OFC inactivations did not affect decision making. These results suggest that the AIC is causally involved in risky decision making and promotes risk taking. The AIC and OFC may be crucial for the opposing motives of whether to take a risk or avoid it."

Where our brains predict romantic attraction at a glance.

From Cooper et al:

Humans frequently make real-world decisions based on rapid evaluations of minimal information; for example, should we talk to an attractive stranger at a party? Little is known, however, about how the brain makes rapid evaluations with real and immediate social consequences. To address this question, we scanned participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed photos of individuals that they subsequently met at real-life “speed-dating” events. Neural activity in two areas of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), paracingulate cortex, and rostromedial prefrontal cortex (RMPFC) was predictive of whether each individual would be ultimately pursued for a romantic relationship or rejected. Activity in these areas was attributable to two distinct components of romantic evaluation: either consensus judgments about physical beauty (paracingulate cortex) or individualized preferences based on a partner's perceived personality (RMPFC). These data identify novel computational roles for these regions of the DMPFC in even very rapid social evaluations. Even a first glance, then, can accurately predict romantic desire, but that glance involves a mix of physical and psychological judgments that depend on specific regions of DMPFC.

Neural predictors of subsequent decision compared with areas mediating judgments of physical attractiveness. A, Brain regions showing greater responses at the time of first viewing for faces of individuals that are subsequently (after speed dating) selected as a potential romantic partner (“pursued”), compared with those who were not (“rejected”). Paracingulate cortex (circled) is the only activated region that significantly independently correlates with subsequent decision in a multiple regression including all activated regions. B, Brain regions positively correlating with subjective ratings of physical attractiveness for each partner (Att). C, Overlap between brain regions related to decision and those related to attractiveness, showing substantial overlap between these variables in the paracingulate cortex. Color bars indicate t statistic. Coordinates in ICBM/MNI space.

Cognitive and Emotional plasticity increased by Mindfulness training

Here is a fascinating study from Allen et al:

Mindfulness meditation is a set of attention-based, regulatory, and self-inquiry training regimes. Although the impact of mindfulness training (MT) on self-regulation is well established, the neural mechanisms supporting such plasticity are poorly understood. MT is thought to act through interoceptive salience and attentional control mechanisms, but until now conflicting evidence from behavioral and neural measures renders difficult distinguishing their respective roles. To resolve this question we conducted a fully randomized 6 week longitudinal trial of MT, explicitly controlling for cognitive and treatment effects with an active-control group. We measured behavioral metacognition and whole-brain blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals using functional MRI during an affective Stroop task before and after intervention in healthy human subjects. Although both groups improved significantly on a response-inhibition task, only the MT group showed reduced affective Stroop conflict. Moreover, the MT group displayed greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex responses during executive processing, consistent with increased recruitment of top-down mechanisms to resolve conflict. In contrast, we did not observe overall group-by-time interactions on negative affect-related reaction times or BOLD responses. However, only participants with the greatest amount of MT practice showed improvements in response inhibition and increased recruitment of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and right anterior insula during negative valence processing. Our findings highlight the importance of active control in MT research, indicate unique neural mechanisms for progressive stages of mindfulness training, and suggest that optimal application of MT may differ depending on context, contrary to a one-size-fits-all approach.

Face to face dialog is different.

Jiang et al do a neat bit of work showing how modern hi-tech dialog devices fail to engage the evolved brain and body synchronization that accompanies face-to-face dialog.

Although the human brain may have evolutionarily adapted to face-to-face communication, other modes of communication, e.g., telephone and e-mail, increasingly dominate our modern daily life. This study examined the neural difference between face-to-face communication and other types of communication by simultaneously measuring two brains using a hyperscanning approach. The results showed a significant increase in the neural synchronization in the left inferior frontal cortex during a face-to-face dialog between partners but none during a back-to-back dialog, a face-to-face monologue, or a back-to-back monologue. Moreover, the neural synchronization between partners during the face-to-face dialog resulted primarily from the direct interactions between the partners, including multimodal sensory information integration and turn-taking behavior. The communicating behavior during the face-to-face dialog could be predicted accurately based on the neural synchronization level. These results suggest that face-to-face communication, particularly dialog, has special neural features that other types of communication do not have and that the neural synchronization between partners may underlie successful face-to-face communication.

Body-Mind dualism - effects on health.

Forstmann et al do an interesting bit of work whose results make a lot of sense:

Beliefs in mind-body dualism—that is, perceiving one’s mind and body as two distinct entities—are evident in virtually all human cultures. Despite their prevalence, surprisingly little is known about the psychological implications of holding such beliefs. In the research reported here, we investigated the relationship between dualistic beliefs and health behaviors. We theorized that holding dualistic beliefs leads people to perceive their body as a mere “shell” and, thus, to neglect it. Supporting this hypothesis, our results showed that participants who were primed with dualism reported less engagement in healthy behaviors and less positive attitudes toward such behaviors than did participants primed with physicalism. Additionally, we investigated the bidirectionality of this link. Activating health-related concepts affected participants’ subsequently reported metaphysical beliefs in mind-body dualism. A final set of studies demonstrated that participants primed with dualism make real-life decisions that may ultimately compromise their physical health (e.g., consuming unhealthy food). These findings have potential implications for health interventions.

Oxytocin nudges men to monogamy?

Scheele et al. show that oxytocin nasal spray causes married, but not single, men to keep a greater distance from attractive woman during a first encounter. They totally should do this experiment with gay married males!

In humans, interpersonal romantic attraction and the subsequent development of monogamous pair-bonds is substantially predicted by influential impressions formed during first encounters. The prosocial neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) has been identified as a key facilitator of both interpersonal attraction and the formation of parental attachment. However, whether OXT contributes to the maintenance of monogamous bonds after they have been formed is unclear. In this randomized placebo-controlled trial, we provide the first behavioral evidence that the intranasal administration of OXT stimulates men in a monogamous relationship, but not single ones, to keep a much greater distance (∼10–15 cm) between themselves and an attractive woman during a first encounter. This avoidance of close personal proximity occurred in the physical presence of female but not male experimenters and was independent of gaze direction and whether the female experimenter or the subject was moving. We further confirmed this unexpected finding using a photograph-based approach/avoidance task that showed again that OXT only stimulated men in a monogamous relationship to approach pictures of attractive women more slowly. Importantly, these changes cannot be attributed to OXT altering the attitude of monogamous men toward attractive women or their judgments of and arousal by pictures of them. Together, our results suggest that where OXT release is stimulated during a monogamous relationship, it may additionally promote its maintenance by making men avoid signaling romantic interest to other women through close-approach behavior during social encounters. In this way, OXT may help to promote fidelity within monogamous human relationships.

Musical protolanguage hypothesis - support from congenital amusia.

Fascinating work from Thompson et al. (open access), suggesting that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from our capacity to process music, supporting the idea of an evolutionary link between musical and language domains in the brain.:

A number of evolutionary theories assume that music and language have a common origin as an emotional protolanguage that remains evident in overlapping functions and shared neural circuitry. The most basic prediction of this hypothesis is that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from the capacity to process music. We examined sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody in a sample of individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in processing acoustic and structural attributes of music. Twelve individuals with congenital amusia and 12 matched control participants judged the emotional expressions of 96 spoken phrases. Phrases were semantically neutral but prosodic cues (tone of voice) communicated each of six emotional states: happy, tender, afraid, irritated, sad, and no emotion. Congenitally amusic individuals were significantly worse than matched controls at decoding emotional prosody, with decoding rates for some emotions up to 20% lower than that of matched controls. They also reported difficulty understanding emotional prosody in their daily lives, suggesting some awareness of this deficit. The findings support speculations that music and language share mechanisms that trigger emotional responses to acoustic attributes, as predicted by theories that propose a common evolutionary link between these domains.

Inspired by distraction.

Baird et al. do a simple experiment demonstrating how mind wandering can facilitate creative incubation, that the basement stuff that is dinking around in the absence focused effort more easily makes novel associations:

Although anecdotes that creative thoughts often arise when one is engaged in an unrelated train of thought date back thousands of years, empirical research has not yet investigated this potentially critical source of inspiration. We used an incubation paradigm to assess whether performance on validated creativity problems (the Unusual Uses Task, or UUT) can be facilitated by engaging in either a demanding task or an undemanding task that maximizes mind wandering. Compared with engaging in a demanding task, rest, or no break, engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial improvements in performance on previously encountered problems. Critically, the context that improved performance after the incubation period was associated with higher levels of mind wandering but not with a greater number of explicitly directed thoughts about the UUT. These data suggest that engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.

Unpredictable love.

There's a nice pieces in the "Gray Matter" series in the New York Times by Richard Friedman that argues that it is our evolved motivational machinery (that drives us to seek unpredictable rewards - i.e., transient reinforcement) more strenuously than predictable ones, that underlies the fickleness of love.

Shakespeare warned women that “men were deceivers ever; one foot in sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never.”

...how commonly people complain that they love someone who always disappoints them...This kind of amorous attachment is like gambling — except that the currency is affection and sex. The key is that the reward is unanticipated, which makes it particularly powerful and alluring to our brains.

Many experiments have shown, in both animals and humans, that intermittent rewards cause more activation and dopamine release in the brain's reward circuits than predictable rewards.

The brain’s reward circuit has evolved over millions of years to enable us to recognize and extract various rewards from our environment that are critical to our survival, like food and a suitable sexual mate. Unlike predictable stimuli, unanticipated stimuli can tell us things about the world that we don’t yet know. And because they serve as a signal that a big reward might be close by, it is advantageous that novel stimuli command our attention.

The article centers on the work of psychiatrist Gregory Berns:

One of the curious things that Professor Berns found was that most of his subjects couldn’t tell the difference between the predictable or unpredictable condition in which the reward was given...Since unpredictable rewards cause more dopamine release than predictable ones and more dopamine means more pleasure, one implication of this study is that people experience more pleasure with unpredictable rewards than with predictable ones — but they may not be consciously aware of this fact...Not just that, but there was essentially no relationship between the subjects’ stated preferences and the observed activity in their reward circuit. This suggests that our reward pathways may not only be activated without our recognition, but perhaps even in ways that are contrary to what we think we prefer...These data might explain, in part, the paradox of people who complain constantly about their unreliable lovers, but keep coming back to them, time and again.

The force of affective norms - the stranger effect

Szczurek et al. make a more distanced and structured description of an experience we all have had - being put on guard in a chat with another person if their facial expressions and body language do not appropriately mirror or complement our own:

What happens when affective displays deviate from normative expectations? In this study, participants evaluated target individuals displaying flat, incongruent, or congruent expressions seemingly in response to pictures eliciting positive, neutral, or negative affect. Relative to targets who displayed normative reactions, those who violated affective norms (affective deviants) were rated more negatively on various dimensions of social judgment. Participants also preferred greater social distance from affective deviants, reported more moral outrage in response to them, and inferred that these targets did not share their moral values. Incongruent affect resulted in more negative social judgment than did flat affect, and this relationship was moderated by stimulus valence. Finally, the relationship between targets’ affective expressions and participants’ avoidant intentions was mediated by the extent to which participants thought the targets shared their moral values. These findings demonstrate the interpersonal costs of affective deviance, revealing the pervasiveness and force of affective norms.

How a simple innate bias might guide visual learning

For years computer programmers have been trying to design algorithms that even remotely approach the ability of young infants in their first few months of life to rapidly learn to recognize complex objects and events in the their visual input, particularly events like hand movements and gaze direction. Even the most powerful probabilistic learning models, as well as connectionist and dynamical models, do not result by themselves in automatically learning about hands, detecting them, paying attention to what they are doing, and using them to make inferences and predictions. Ullman et al. develop a model that incorporates a plausible innate or early acquired bias, based on cognitive and perceptual findings, to detect “mover” events. It leads to the automatic acquisition of increasingly complex concepts and capabilities, which do not emerge without domain-specific biases. After exposure to video sequences containing people performing everyday actions, and without supervision, the model develops the capacity to locate hands in complex configurations by their appearance and by surrounding context and to detect direction of gaze. Here is their abstract:

Early in development, infants learn to solve visual problems that are highly challenging for current computational methods. We present a model that deals with two fundamental problems in which the gap between computational difficulty and infant learning is particularly striking: learning to recognize hands and learning to recognize gaze direction. The model is shown a stream of natural videos and learns without any supervision to detect human hands by appearance and by context, as well as direction of gaze, in complex natural scenes. The algorithm is guided by an empirically motivated innate mechanism—the detection of “mover” events in dynamic images, which are the events of a moving image region causing a stationary region to move or change after contact. Mover events provide an internal teaching signal, which is shown to be more effective than alternative cues and sufficient for the efficient acquisition of hand and gaze representations. The implications go beyond the specific tasks, by showing how domain-specific “proto concepts” can guide the system to acquire meaningful concepts, which are significant to the observer but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input.

Carbs and self control.

From Molden et al. suggest the increase in self control that some studies have correlated with carbohydrate consumption is caused not by a metabolic energy boost, but rather by an increase in motivation:

Self-control is critical for achievement and well-being. However, people’s capacity for self-control is limited and becomes depleted through use. One prominent explanation for this depletion posits that self-control consumes energy through carbohydrate metabolization, which further suggests that ingesting carbohydrates improves self-control. Some evidence has supported this energy model, but because of its broad implications for efforts to improve self-control, we reevaluated the role of carbohydrates in self-control processes. In four experiments, we found that (a) exerting self-control did not increase carbohydrate metabolization, as assessed with highly precise measurements of blood glucose levels under carefully standardized conditions; (b) rinsing one’s mouth with, but not ingesting, carbohydrate solutions immediately bolstered self-control; and (c) carbohydrate rinsing did not increase blood glucose. These findings challenge metabolic explanations for the role of carbohydrates in self-control depletion; we therefore propose an alternative motivational model for these and other previously observed effects of carbohydrates on self-control.