Is your emotional style getting you down?
Research finds the neural basis of your responses to life-and how you can
change them.
That may seem as obvious as stating that everyone has a unique
personality. But personality is not grounded in identifiable neurological
mechanisms; it has not been traced to specific patterns of neural activity in
the brain. This is where the theory of Emotional Style breaks new ground:
through neuroimaging and other methodologies, I have traced Emotional
Style—and, specifically, the six components that make it up—to patterns of
activity throughout the brain.
In making those
discoveries, I have found that, in contrast to the longstanding scientific
orthodoxy, Emotional Style arises partly from activity in regions involved in
cognition, reason, and logic—functions that textbooks tell us are as unrelated
to emotions as apples are to squid. That has come as a shock to defenders of
the view that cognition—which many psychologists and neuroscientists consider
the most exalted human capacity—and emotion (viewed as a lesser, almost
animalistic trait) run on separate, mutually independent brain circuitry: the
former in the “highly evolved” frontal cortex and the latter in the limbic
system, which in humans is not much different from that of other animals. In
showing that cognition and emotion are not so separate after all, these
discoveries have rehabilitated emotion. From a behavior that was, as recently
as the 1970s, studied for the most part only in rats and other lab animals,
human emotion has now assumed as important a place in neuroscience as thinking.
Locating the bases of emotion at least
partly in the brain’s seat of reason has several practical implications. None
is more intriguing than this: it is possible to transform your Emotional Style
through systematic mental practice.
It is hard to
exaggerate what a break this is from the conventional wisdom in psychology and
neuroscience. From the earliest days of brain mapping—determining which regions
are responsible for which functions—neuroscientists traced feelings and
thoughts to structures that were barely within hailing distance of each other.
The limbic system deep in the brain, including the amygdala and hippocampus,
seemed to be the brain’s holy terror of a 2-year-old, the site of anger, fear,
and anxiety, as well as positive emotions. The frontal cortex, just behind the
forehead, was the exalted thinker, where forethought and judgment, reason and
volition, attention and cognition came from. As recently as the 1980s,
neuroscientists focused almost exclusively on cognition and the other functions
of the frontal cortex; emotions were deemed of so little interest that
neuroscience left them to psychology.
The first crack in this wall came in the
1980s. The neurobiology of emotion was still a backwater, but a few scientists
were beginning to pay more attention to feelings, particularly in the context
of depression. Inspired by one of them, I launched experiments using electrodes
to measure brain activity in people whose emotional state we manipulated in the
lab. By showing them upsetting, fearful, or uplifting videos and photos, for
instance, and monitoring their response, we discovered that how well and how
quickly a person is able to bounce back from adversity has nothing to do with
activity in what scientists identify as the brain’s emotion centers. Instead,
the ability to vanquish feelings of grief, anger, or other negative emotions
reflects activity in the prefrontal cortex. In this research, we found that
Resilience—one of the six elements of Emotional Style—is marked by greater left
versus right activation in the prefrontal cortex: a lack of Resilience comes
from higher right prefrontal activation. The amount of activation in the left
prefrontal region of a Resilient person can be 30 times that in someone who is
not Resilient.
Almost immediately, we faced a new
question: what does the prefrontal cortex do when it comes to emotion? After
all, the prefrontal cortex was, and is, known to be the site of the highest of
higher-order cognitive activity, the seat of judgment, planning, and other
executive functions. How could it possibly play a role in a key element of our
emotional lives?
One clue came
from the large bundles of neurons running between certain regions of the
prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in, among other
things, negative emotion and distress, snapping to attention and activity when
we feel anxious, afraid, or threatened. Perhaps the left prefrontal cortex
inhibits the amygdala and, through this mechanism, helps to facilitate rapid
recovery from adversity.
In a major
experiment testing this idea, my colleagues and I fitted volunteers with
electrodes to measure their brain activity and then showed them 51 pictures on
a video monitor. One third of the pictures depicted upsetting images such as a
baby with a tumor growing out of his eye; one third showed something happy,
such as a radiant mother embracing her infant; one third showed a neutral scene
such as a nondescript room. Sometimes during or after a picture, the volunteer
would hear a short burst of noise that made him blink involuntarily. A large
body of research had established that when people are in a negative emotional
state, these blinks are a little stronger than when we are in a neutral
emotional state, and much stronger than in a positive state.
What we found, in a nutshell, is that
people with greater activation on the left side of the prefrontal cortex
recovered much more quickly even from the strongest feelings of disgust, anger,
and fear evoked by the images. From this, we inferred that the left prefrontal
sends inhibitory signals to the amygdala, instructing it to quiet down.
Activity in the left prefrontal cortex actually shortens the period of amygdala
activation, allowing the brain to bounce back from an upsetting experience.
Thanks to
MRI, we now also know that there is a second element at play: the more axons
you have connecting one neuron to another between the prefrontal cortex and the
amygdala, the more resilient you are. The less of this “white matter”—that is,
the fewer the highways leading from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala—the
less resilient you are.
In other words, both prefrontal-cortex
activity and the number of pathways sending calming signals to the amygdala
determine just how easily a person will bounce back from adversity. Through
these two mechanisms, our “thinking brain” is able to calm our “feeling” self,
enabling the brain to plan and act effectively without being distracted by
negative emotion—not a bad working definition of Resilience.
This is the
kind of statement that makes people worry: Oh great, I must not have many
connections between my prefrontal cortex and amygdala, so I’m doomed to melt
into a neurotic puddle every time I experience adversity. And indeed, for
decades, neuroscientists assumed that the adult brain is essentially fixed in
form and function.
We now know
that this picture is wrong. Instead, the brain has a property called
neuroplasticity, the ability to change its structure and function in
significant ways. The brains of virtuoso violinists, for example, show a
measurable increase in the size and activity of areas that control the fingers,
and the brains of London
When it comes
to your Emotional Style, we know that changes to the neural structure of the
brain are possible. We don’t know exactly how much plasticity the brain has,
but we do know that some neurally inspired interventions—forms of mental
training that target patterns of brain activity—can work. Mental activity,
ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, can help you develop a
broader awareness of social signals, a deeper sensitivity to your own feelings
and bodily sensations, a more consistently positive outlook, and a greater
capacity for Resilience. Do you feel yourself to be too negative in outlook?
Pay heightened attention to the ways in which you can be more generous and
upbeat, through processes therapists call “well-being therapy.” Are you very
Self-Aware, so much so that your internal chatter threatens to take over your
day-to-day life? Practice observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations
nonjudgmentally moment by moment.
This practice, known as “mindfulness
meditation,” is one of the most effective tools for changing our Emotional
Style. In patients with depression—whom we call “Slow to Recover” on the Resilience
scale—every disappointment and setback is shattering. These patients need
to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex (especially on the left side), to
strengthen the neuronal highways between it and the amygdala, or both.
Mindfulness meditation cultivates greater Resilience and faster recovery from
setbacks by weakening the chain of associations that keep us obsessing about
and even wallowing in a setback. It strengthens connections between the
prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, promoting an equanimity that will help keep
you from spiraling down. As soon as your thoughts begin to leap from one
catastrophe to the next in this chain of woe, you have the mental wherewithal to
pause, observe how easily the mind does this, note that it is an interesting
mental process, and resist getting drawn into the abyss.
If you
instead wish to move toward the Slow-to-Recover end of the Resilience
dimension—perhaps you find you are not taking in the pain of others or yourself
carefully enough—then you need to weaken connections between the prefrontal
cortex and the amygdala. One strategy is to focus intently on whatever negative
emotion or pain you are feeling, or the pain of someone you know. This can help
sustain the emotion, at least for a time, and increase activation of your
circuitry that is involved in pain and distress.
The goal here
is not to go from one extreme to the other: I’m not trying to change you from
Slow to Speedy (or vice versa) on the Resilience scale, or from Cassandra into
Pollyanna in your Outlook. Changing the patterns of activity and even
connectivity that underlie the facets of Emotional Style is highly personal. It
depends on what works for you.
