We use language every day to express our emotions, but can this language actually affect what and how we feel? Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the ways in which the interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being.

Putting Feelings into Words Can Help Us Cope with Scary Situations

Katharina Kircanski and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles investigated whether verbalizing a current emotional experience, even when that experience is negative, might be an effective method for treating for people with spider phobias. In an exposure therapy study, participants were split into different experimental groups and they were instructed to approach a spider over several consecutive days. One group was told to put their feelings into words by describing their negative emotions about approaching the spider. Another group was asked to 'reappraise' the situation by describing the spider using emotionally neutral words. A third group was told to talk about an unrelated topic (things in their home) and a fourth group received no intervention. Participants who put their negative feelings into words were most effective at lowering their levels of physiological arousal. They were also slightly more willing to approach the spider. The findings suggest that talking about your feelings - even if they're negative - may help you to cope with a scary situation.

Loss of muscle functioning in the body. Difficulty transferring message from the brain to muscles. These are just a few traits of paralysis that scientists examined in terms of its relationship to speech. A recent study by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, researchers revealed a code in the brain that helps pronounce vowels.

According to the researchers, human speech sounds are based on coordinated movement of structures near the vocal tract. The researchers were able to break down the code in brain cells that helps individuals in speech and pronunciation. They believe that this discovery could help scientists restore speech for those who suffer paralysis due to injury or disease.

"We know that brain cells fire in a predictable way before we move our bodies," noted Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, in a prepared statement. "We hypothesized that neurons would also react differently when we pronounce specific sounds. If so, we may one day be able to decode these unique patterns of activity in the brain and translate them into speech."

In the project, the investigators followed 11 UCLA epilepsy patients that had electrodes implanted in their brains to record the origin of their seizures. The researchers were able to track the neuron activity when the patients spoke one of five vowels or any syllables that contained vowels. With the help of Technion, the UCLA team examined the process the neurons underwent to encode vowel articulation at the single-cell and collective level.

According to some theories on how self-awareness arises in the brain, Patient R, a man who suffered a severe brain injury about 30 years ago, should not possess this aspect of consciousness.

In 1980, a bout of encephalitis caused by the common herpes simplex virus damaged his brain, leaving Patient R, now 57, with amnesia and unable to live on his own.

Even so, Patient R functions quite normally, said Justin Feinstein, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Iowa who has worked with him. "To a layperson, to meet him for the first time, you would have no idea anything is wrong with him," Feinstein said.

Feinstein and colleagues set out to test Patient R's level of self-awareness using a battery of tools that included a mirror, photos, tickling, a lemon, an onion, a personality assessment and an interview that asked profound questions like "What do you think happens after you die?"

Their conclusion - that Patient R's self-awareness is largely intact in spite of his brain injury - indicates certain regions of the brain thought crucial for self-awareness are not.

Brain anatomy

Self-awareness is a complex concept, and neuroscientists are debating from where it arises in the brain. Some have argued that certain regions in the brain play critical roles in generating self-awareness.

The regions neuroscientists have advocated include the insular cortex, thought to play a fundamental role in all aspects of self-awareness; the anterior cingulate cortex, implicated in body and emotional awareness, as well as the ability to recognize one's own face and process one's conscious experience; and the medial prefrontal cortex, linked with processing information about oneself.

Patient R's illness destroyed nearly all of these regions of his brain. Using brain-imaging techniques, Feinstein and colleagues determined that the small patches of tissue remaining appeared defective and disconnected from the rest of the brain.

Damage to the brain's frontal lobe is known to impair one's ability to think and make choices. And now scientists say they've pinpointed the different parts of this brain region that preside over reasoning, self-control and decision-making.

Researchers say the data could help doctors determine what specific cognitive obstacles their patients might face after a brain injury.

For the study, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) examined 30 years worth of data from the University of Iowa's brain lesion patient registry and mapped brain activity in almost 350 people with lesions in their frontal lobes.

They linked these maps with data on how each patient performed in certain cognitive tasks.

With this information, the researchers could see exactly which parts of the frontal lobe were critical for different tasks like behavioral control (refraining from ordering a chocolate sundae) and reward-based decision making (trying to win money at a casino), a statement from Caltech explained.

You're under pressure. Deadlines are looming. Everyone is making demands on your time. Your anxiety level is rising. Your stomach is in knots. So you do what you've been well-trained to do. You make sure you get in your gym time.

But if neuroscientist Steven W. Porges is right, there's an even better way to counter stress. Exercise has its uses, but as a stress fighter it works primarily at a visceral level - and the operative word is fight. You're basically combating excess levels of cortisol, the hormone that spreads news of danger through your body and readies it to fight or flee.

You're better off working through higher - and more direct - channels, like the brain. The most efficient stress-reducer might just be a smile. Engaging socially with others triggers neural circuits that calm the heart, relax the gut, and switch off fear, Porges says.

Ethnic and political violence in the Middle East can increase violence in families, schools, and communities, which can in turn boost children's aggressiveness, especially among 8-year-olds. Those are the findings of a new study that examined children and their parents in the Middle East.

"The study has important implications for understanding how political struggles can spill over into the everyday lives of families and children, and suggests that intervention might be necessary in a number of different social areas to protect children from the adverse impacts of exposure to ethnic-political violence," according to Paul Boxer, associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University and adjunct research scientist at the University of Michigan, who led the study.

The study, published in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, Bowling Green State University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research, and the New School for Social Research.

A mysterious region deep in the human brain could be where we sort through the onslaught of stimuli from the outside world and focus on the information most important to our behavior and survival, Princeton Univ. researchers have found.

The researchers report in the journal Science that an area of our brain called the pulvinar regulates communication between clusters of brain cells as our brain focuses on the people and objects that need our attention. Like a switchboard operator, the pulvinar makes sure that separate areas of the visual cortex - which processes visual information - are communicating about the same external information, explains lead author Yuri Saalmann, an associate research scholar in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). Without guidance from the pulvinar, an important observation such as an oncoming bus as one is crossing the street could get lost in a jumble of other stimuli.

Saalmann says these findings on how the brain transmits information could lead to new ways of understanding and treating attention-related disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and schizophrenia. Saalmann worked with senior researcher Sabine Kastner, a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute; and PNI researchers Xin Li, a research assistant; Mark Pinsk, a professional specialist; and Liang Wang, a postdoctoral research associate.

It's one of the most common plot twists in Hollywood - caught red-handed, the murderer claims to suffer from multiple personality disorder, says he has no memory of the crime, and points the finger at an alternate personality.

A new study, however, suggests such a scenario belongs strictly to the realm of fiction.

The study - conducted by Harvard's Richard J. McNally, Rafaele Huntjens of the University of Groningen, and Bruno Verschuere of the University of Amsterdam - casts doubt on the "amnesia barrier" that has long been a hallmark of what is now called dissociative identity disorder (DID) by demonstrating that patients do have knowledge of their other identities. Huntjens was lead author of the study, which was reported in a paper published in PLoS ONE on July 17.

"Ultimately, this disorder is a way of expressing distress," said McNally, a professor in the Department of Psychology. "What we have shown is that a fundamental idea behind the concept of DID - that there is amnesia between identities - there's no convincing evidence for that."

About a century ago, Morton Prince, a Harvard-educated neurologist working in the Boston area, coined the phrase "multiple personality disorder" to describe the case of Sally Beauchamp, an Arlington woman who appeared to have two personalities.

Reports of DID, which is sometimes confused with schizophrenia, were rare in the 20th century, with only a few dozen cases appearing in the literature. With the publication of Sybil (1973), however, the condition entered the mainstream. The story of Sybil Dorsett, a woman who claimed to have as many as a dozen personalities, became an international sensation. There were two film adaptations.

Have you ever wondered why you can remember things from long ago as if they happened yesterday, yet sometimes can't recall what you ate for dinner last night? According to a new study led by psychologists at the University of Toronto, it's because how much something means to you actually influences how you see it as well as how vividly you can recall it later.

"We've discovered that we see things that are emotionally arousing with greater clarity than those that are more mundane," says Rebecca Todd, a postdoctoral fellow in U of T's Department of Psychology and lead author of the study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience. "Whether they're positive - for example, a first kiss, the birth of a child, winning an award - or negative, such as traumatic events, breakups, or a painful and humiliating childhood moment that we all carry with us, the effect is the same."

"What's more, we found that how vividly we perceive something in the first place predicts how vividly we will remember it later on," says Todd. "We call this 'emotionally enhanced vividness' and it is like the flash of a flashbub that illuminates an event as it's captured for memory."

By studying brain activity, Todd, psychology professor Adam Anderson and other colleagues at U of T, along with researchers at the University of Manchester and the University of California, San Diego found that the part of the brain responsible for tagging the emotional or motivational importance of things according to one's own past experience - the amygdala - is more active when looking at images that are rated as vivid. This increased activation in turn influences activity in both the visual cortex, enhancing activity linked to seeing objects, and in the posterior insula, a region that integrates sensations from the body.

"The experience of more vivid perception of emotionally important images seems to come from a combination of enhanced seeing and gut feeling driven by amygdala calculations of how emotionally arousing an event is," says Todd.

Children as young as 3 apparently can tell the difference between whining and when someone has good reason to be upset, and they will respond with sympathy usually only when it is truly deserved, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"The study provides the first evidence that 3-year-olds can evaluate just how reasonable another person's distressed reaction is to a particular incident or situation, and this influences whether they are concerned enough to try to do something to help," said the study's lead author, Robert Hepach, MRes, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The study was published online in the APA journal Developmental Psychology.

The experiment involved 48 children, split evenly between girls and boys, from 36 to 39 months old. Researchers recorded reactions of each child as he or she witnessed an adult acting upset in one of three contexts: when the distress was justified, when it was unjustified and when the cause of the distress was unknown, the study said.

For the experiment, two adults met with each child and engaged in various situations in which one of the adults would display distress by frowning, whimpering or pouting. Their distress was in response to specific incidents of apparent physical harm, material loss or unfairness. In each case, the child witnessed the adult either experiencing something that should cause distress or reacting to something that occurred in a similar context but was much less serious. Children who witnessed the adult being upset due to a real harm or injustice showed concern for him, intervened on his behalf and checked on him when he later expressed distress out of their view.