Science of the SpiritS


Lemon

Negative emotions are found to be key to mental well-being

Tori Rodriguez
Scientific American
Wed, 05 Jun 2013 09:09 UTC
Feeling sad, mad, critical or otherwise awful? Surprise: negative emotions are essential for mental health

mental health negative emotions
© SebastienThibault
A client sits before me, seeking help untangling his relationship problems. As a psychotherapist, I strive to be warm, nonjudgmental and encouraging. I am a bit unsettled, then, when in the midst of describing his painful experiences, he says, "I'm sorry for being so negative."

A crucial goal of therapy is to learn to acknowledge and express a full range of emotions, and here was a client apologizing for doing just that. In my psychotherapy practice, many of my clients struggle with highly distressing emotions, such as extreme anger, or with suicidal thoughts. In recent years I have noticed an increase in the number of people who also feel guilty or ashamed about what they perceive to be negativity. Such reactions undoubtedly stem from our culture's overriding bias toward positive thinking. Although positive emotions are worth cultivating, problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time.

In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment. "Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being," says psychologist Jonathan M. Adler of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

Comment: Éiriú Eolas is a gentle, extremely effective breathing program for accessing and releasing negative emotions. Éiriú Eolas can provide the skills to instantly control stress in high energy situations, detox your body resulting in pain relief, relax and gently work through past emotional and psychological trauma, and regenerate and rejuvenate your body/mind..

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Arrow Up

Blame the Brain: Why psychopaths lack empathy

Tanya Lewis
LiveScience
Tue, 24 Sep 2013 15:00 UTC
Psychopathy
© Dan Scandal/ShutterstockPsychopathy is marked by impulsivity, an absence of guilt over hurting others, and often superficial charm.
Psychopaths are usually described as lacking empathy, and a new study reveals the neurological basis for this dearth of feeling.

When people with psychopathy imagine others experiencing pain, brain regions associated with empathy and concern for others fail to activate or connect with brain areas involved in emotional processing and decision-making, researchers report.

In addition to a lack of remorse, psychopathy is characterized by shallow affect, glibness, manipulation and callousness. The rate of psychopathy is about 23 percent in prisons, compared with about 1 percent in the general population, research shows.

To investigate the neurological roots of the disorder, researchers studied 121 inmates at a medium-security prison in the United States. The inmates were divided into highly psychopathic, moderately psychopathic and weakly psychopathic groups on the basis of a widely used diagnostic tool called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised.

Researchers scanned the brains of the participants while showing them images depicting physical pain, such as a finger getting caught in a door or a toe caught under a heavy object. The participants were told to imagine the accident happening to themselves or to someone else. They were also shown images of neutral ojects, such as a hand on a doorknob.
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Chess

Power robs the brain of empathy

Kathleen Blanchard
Digital Journal
Sat, 10 Aug 2013 16:03 UTC
Image
Researchers have some new insights into how power diminishes a person's capacity for empathy. According to scientists, a sense of power shuts down a part of the brain that helps us connect with others.

For their study that builds on past information about how the brain operates, the researchers found that even the smallest bit of power - for instance from a job promotion or more money - can shut down our ability to empathize with others.

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada and his colleagues Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, conducted an experiment that shows people in charge can lose their ability to be compassionate because power affects the mirror system of the brain.

A look at the mirror system

The mirror system is activated by neurons in the brain when we watch other people.

The study authors write: "For example, with respect to action observation, neural circuits that are related to action execution become active when the person observes someone else making the same action; in other words, the observer's brain resonates with the model's motor behavior."

Comment: No amount of coaching will help certain people in power regain their empathy and compassion. For more information do read:

Moral Endo-skeletons and Exo-skeletons: A Perspective on America's Cultural Divide and Current Crisis
Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes

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People 2

15 beliefs and habits of highly effective and happy people

Tara Laserna
Natural Blaze
Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:22 UTC
mountain
© N/A
Regardless of industry, profession, town, city or nation, highly effective and happy people share many of the same perspectives and beliefs and they act on those beliefs.

1. Time doesn't fill me. I fill time.

The average person who is given two weeks to complete a task will instinctively adjust his or her effort so it actually takes two weeks. Average people allow time to impose its will on them; remarkable people impose their will on their time and allow fluidity. They don't stress about time and because their perception is more fluid, time does not become their focus and tasks become more manageable.

2. I understand balance.

They know that the terms money and success are not interchangeable. They understand that people who are successful on a financial level only, are not successful at all. They have an off switch. They know how to relax, enjoy what they have in their life and to have fun. Their career is not their identity, it's their job. It's not who they are, it's what they do. Unfortunately we live in a society which teaches that money equals success. Like many other things, money is a tool. It's certainly not a bad thing but ultimately, it's just another resource. Unfortunately, too many people worship it.
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People

Racism takes a toll on kids' mental health

Robert Preidt
HealthDay
Sun, 22 Sep 2013 20:16 UTC
Image
Being a victim of racism may trigger poor mental health, depression and anxiety in children and teens, according to a new review.

The report, published in the October issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, looked at 461 cases of links between racism and the health and well-being of youngsters.

"The review showed there are strong and consistent relationships between racial discrimination and a range of detrimental health outcomes such as low self-esteem, reduced resilience, increased behavior problems and lower levels of well-being," lead researcher Naomi Priest, of the University of Melbourne in Australia, said in a university news release.

Most of the racism experienced by children and teens involved discrimination by other people, rather than institutional or systemic racism, according to the findings.

The review also revealed an increased risk of poorer birth outcomes among children whose mothers experienced racism during pregnancy.
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Red Flag

How our society breeds anxiety, depression and dysfunction

Bruce E. Levine
Alternet
Sat, 21 Sep 2013 20:30 UTC
Image
Our belief in "progress" has increased our expectations that life should be more satisfying, resulting in mass disappointment.

In The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? (New York Review of Books, 2011), Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, discusses over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, pathologizing of normal behaviors, Big Pharma corruption of psychiatry, and the adverse effects of psychiatric medications. While diagnostic expansionism and Big Pharma certainly deserve a large share of the blame for this epidemic, there is another reason.

A June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have "checked out" of them. Life may or may not suck any more than it did a generation ago, but our belief in "progress" has increased expectations that life should be more satisfying, resulting in mass disappointment. For many of us, society has become increasingly alienating, isolating and insane, and earning a buck means more degrees, compliance, ass-kissing, shit-eating, and inauthenticity. So, we want to rebel. However, many of us feel hopeless about the possibility of either our own escape from societal oppression or that political activism can create societal change. So, many of us, especially young Americans, rebel by what is commonly called mental illness.
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Info

Strange new state of consciousness could exist, researcher says

Bahar Gholipour
LiveScience
Thu, 19 Sep 2013 18:01 UTC
Coma
© Shutterstock
With anesthetics properly given, very few patients wake up during surgery. However, new findings point to the possibility of a state of mind in which a patient is neither fully conscious nor unconscious, experts say.

This possible third state of consciousness, may be a state in which patients can respond to a command, but are not disturbed by pain or the surgery, according to Dr. Jaideep Pandit, anesthetist at St John's College in England, who discussed the idea today (Sept. 19) at the at an anesthetists meeting in Dublin.

Pandit dubbed this state dysanaesthesia, and said the evidence that it exists comes partly from a recent study, in which 34 surgical patients were anesthetized, and had their whole body paralyzed except for their forearm, allowing them to move their fingers in response to commands or to signify if they are awake or in pain during surgery.

One-third of patients in the study moved their finger if they were asked to, even though they were under what seemed to be adequate anesthesia, according to the study led by Dr. Ian F. Russell, of Hull Royal Infirmary in England, and published Sept. 12 in the journal Anaesthesia.

"What's more remarkable is that they only move their fingers if they are asked. None of the patients spontaneously responded to the surgery. They are presumably not in pain," said Pandit, who wrote an editorial about the study.
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Attention

Researcher finds the most depressing discovery about the brain ever

Marty Kaplan
AlterNet
Mon, 16 Sep 2013 21:44 UTC
brain research decisions
Say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, or reason can provide the tools that people need in order to make good decisions.

Yale law school professor Dan Kahan's new research paper is called "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government," but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney's piece about it in Grist: "Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math."

Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people's ability to think clearly. His conclusion, in Mooney's words: partisanship "can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills.... [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs."

In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn't the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we're rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.
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Info

How and where imagination occurs in human brains


ScienceDaily
Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:29 UTC
Brain Activity
© Alex SchlegelEleven areas of the brain are showing differential activity levels in a Dartmouth study using functional MRI to measure how humans manipulate mental imagery.
Philosophers and scientists have long puzzled over where human imagination comes from. In other words, what makes humans able to create art, invent tools, think scientifically and perform other incredibly diverse behaviors?

The answer, Dartmouth researchers conclude in a new study, lies in a widespread neural network -- the brain's "mental workspace" -- that consciously manipulates images, symbols, ideas and theories and gives humans the laser-like mental focus needed to solve complex problems and come up with new ideas.

Their findings, titled "Network structure and dynamics of the mental workspace," appear the week of Sept. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Info

From the deepest coma, new brain activity found

Bahar Gholipour
LiveScience
Wed, 18 Sep 2013 16:00 UTC
Brain Waves
© Shutterstock
When a patient's brain falls completely silent, and electrical recordings devices show a flat line, reflecting a lack of brain activity, doctors consider the patient to have reached the deepest stage of a coma. However, new findings suggest there can be a coma stage even deeper than this flat line - and that brain activity can ramp up again from this state.

In the case of one patient in a drug-induced coma, and in subsequent experiments on cats, the researchers found that after deepening the coma by administering a higher dose of drugs, the silent brain started showing minimum but widespread neural activity across the brain, according to the study published today (Sept. 18) in the journal PLOS ONE.

The findings were based on measures of the brain's electrical activity, detected by electroencephalography (EEG), which shows various waveforms. In comatose patients, depending on the stage of their coma, the waveforms are altered. As the coma deepens, the EEG device will eventually show a flat line instead of a wave - this stage is considered to be the turning point between a living brain and a deceased brain.

"Flat line was the deepest known form of coma," said study researcher Florin Amzica, neurophysiologist at Université de Montréal.
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