Science of the SpiritS


People

New research reveals that oxytocin could make us more accepting of others

Oxytocin - often referred to as the 'love hormone' because of its ability to promote mother-infant attachment and romantic bonding in adults - could also make us more accepting of other people, as found in new research, "Oxytocin Sharpens Self-other Perceptual Boundary," by Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation research grantee Valentina Colonnello Ph.D. published online today in Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Together with Dr. Markus Heinrichs from the Department of Psychology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Dr. Colonnello found that oxytocin can sharpen the brain's self-other differentiation - a function that has been shown to play a crucial role in social bonding, successful social interactions and the tolerance of others. They also found that oxytocin helps to increase our positive evaluation of other people. This further supports the role of the oxytocinergic system in the empathic response and the modulation of social cognition.

"Social bonding, mutual support, mate preference and parental investment," says Dr. Colonnello, "are all mediated by the oxytocinergic system, which is heavily reliant on a person's ability to appreciate that self and others are both different and valuable."

Participants in the study were shown videos of their own face morphing into an unfamiliar face and vice versa, and were instructed to press a button as soon as they felt that they saw more features belonging to the incoming face. Of the 44 participants, those given oxytocin before the task were significantly faster at identifying the new face, regardless of whether it was their own or that of a stranger.

Magic Wand

Can phobias be cured in our sleep?

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© Brian Gordon Green, National Geographic StockA three year old boy sleeping on a couch in Germantown, Maryland.
The brain can be trained to overcome fear during sleep, new research suggests.You may think you're doing nothing at night, but to your brain, sleep means finally having some spare time to take stock of the day's events. Freed from the distractions of recording new experiences, a deeply sleeping brain can organize and strengthen memories, especially emotional ones.

For Katherina Hauner, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who studies fear, that makes sleep a fascinating frontier. Hauner's latest research, just published in Nature Neuroscience, explores the connections between fear, memory, and sleep.

Walk me through your study in layman's terms.

The subjects were all healthy adults. While awake, they looked at pictures of faces with neutral expressions and learned to associate these with a mild electric shock, so that eventually these face pictures elicited a fear response in the brain. This is called fear conditioning.

Sounds fun.

Just to clarify, these were not painful shocks! They were simply startling, like you might get from opening a car door.

Heart

I didn't love my wife when we got married

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I'm a ridiculous, emotional, over-sentimental sap. I guess that's why I told my wife I loved her on our second date.

I had tried really hard up to that point to hold it back, honestly. I wanted to tell her on the first date, but I knew that would probably be weird.

I still remember her reaction. She kind of gave me this half-shy, half-amused smile. Then she nodded and looked off into the sky.

I wasn't heartbroken by the response. I think part of me recognized that she was much smarter and more modest than me.

But as time has gone on, I also realized that she knew something that I didn't.

Like most Hasidic Jews (we both became religious later in life), our dating period lasted a very short time. After two months of dating, we were engaged. Three months after that, we were married.

And that whole time I was swooning. This fire was burning in me, a fire that burned just like that second date: I was in love.

But then we got married, and everything changed.

Info

Circuit that controls overeating found in the brain

Overeating
© Shutterstock
When a particular circuit in the brain is stimulated, it causes mice to voraciously gorge on food even though they are well fed, and deactivating this circuit keeps starving mice from eating, a new study shows.

The findings suggest that a breakdown within this neural network could contribute to unhealthy eating behaviors, the researchers said, although more work is needed to see whether the findings are also true of people.

The circuit lies in a brain area called the "bed nucleus of the stria terminalis" (BNST), and affects eating by inhibiting activity in another region, called the lateral hypothalamus, which is known to control eating, according to the study, published today (Sept. 26) in the journal Science.

"Normally, there's a population of neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that's putting the brakes on eating," said study researcher Garret Stuber, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "But when you shut those cells down by stimulating this pathway, that releases the brake, and the animal starts to eat."

The lateral hypothalamus has been known for more than 50 years to be an important part of the brain for controlling eating. Scientists had learned that putting stimulating electrodes in the lateral hypothalamus of animals would influence their eating behavior, but exactly how it works has been a mystery.

People

Fetching faces and friendly foxes: Selective breeding of foxes reveals why with humans, beauty rules

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© Quarterly Review of Biology 2013Left to right: Figure 2, Friendly Fox and Technician, M. Nurgalieva (Photograph used with the permission of Lyudmila Trut); Figure 3, Bonobo Mutual Gaze (Photograph used with the permission of Frans Lanting/lanting.com); Figure 4, Human Mutual Gaze.
"What is beautiful is good" - but why? A recent article in The Quarterly Review of Biology provides a compelling physiological explanation for the "beauty stereotype": why human beings are wired to favor the beautiful ones.

Studies have shown that humans subconsciously attribute positive social qualities (such as integrity, intelligence, and happiness) to physically attractive individuals. Even across cultures there exists a significant consensus on relative beauty: youthful facial features, including, for women, relatively large eyes, a relatively high craniofacial ratio, and a relatively small jaw. In an article published in the September 2013 issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Dr. I. Elia, an independent scholar at Cambridge University, bridges genetics, physical and social anthropology, and psychology to interpret the findings of the "farm fox experiment" in Russia to reveal "a possible and replicable demonstration of the origin of beauty while inadvertently illuminating its ancient philosophical connection to goodness via a plausible neurohormonal pathway."

Silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes) were selectively bred for "friendly" behavior toward humans. Within 20 years, a tame line of communicative, trusting, and playful foxes was achieved. Researchers also noticed that in addition to desirable behavioral traits, the foxes also experienced more rapid development to maturity and displayed more "attractive" and more juvenile physical features, including rounder skulls and flatter faces, with smaller noses and shorter muzzles. That these neotenic changes resulted from genetically controlled alterations in friendly behavior may suggest that to humans, facial beauty signals an individual's relatively greater level of approachability and sociability.

People

When the going gets tough and there is no spiritual depth, the materialistic go shopping

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© G.L. KohuthA study led by Ayalla Ruvio, Michigan State University assistant professor of marketing, suggests materialistic people are more likely to deal with fear of death with compulsive spending.
Materialistic people experience more stress from traumatic events such as terrorist attacks and are more likely to spend compulsively as a result, according to an international study led by a Michigan State University business professor.

These possession-driven folks tend to have lower self-esteem than others, said Ayalla Ruvio, assistant professor of marketing in MSU's Broad College of Business.

"When the going gets tough, the materialistic go shopping," said Ruvio. "And this compulsive and impulsive spending is likely to produce even greater stress and lower well-being. Essentially, materialism appears to make bad events even worse."

For the first part of the study, Ruvio and colleagues surveyed 139 citizens from a southern Israeli town under extreme rocket attacks from Palestine for about six months in 2007. Ruvio, who is from northern Israel, coordinated the data collection amid the terrorist attacks. Her co-researchers were Eli Somer, professor and clinical psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel, and Aric Rindfleisch, business professor and department head at the University of Illinois.

Toys

Children are suffering a severe play deficit

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© Alex Webb/MagnumIn the country of Le Grandes Meaulnes; children play near the village of Baudrémont, Meuse, France.
When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children's opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the 'golden age' of children's free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace 'pickup' games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents' fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It's not just that we're seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.

Lemon

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

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.

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Arrow Up

Blame the Brain: Why psychopaths lack empathy

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.

Chess

Power robs the brain of empathy

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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