Science of the Spirit

Incidental negative emotions can reduce our capacity to trust others

University of Zurich
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 11:00 UTC

© istock.com/tommaso79
Incidental emotions, caused for instance by a traffic jam, influence the way we interact with others and specifically how much we trust others.

That emotions can influence the way we interact with others is well known - just think of how easily an argument with a loved one can get heated. But what about when these emotions are triggered by events that have nothing to do with the person we are interacting with, for instance the annoyance caused by a traffic jam or a parking fine. Researchers call these types of emotions "incidental", because they were triggered by events that are unrelated to our currently ongoing social interactions. It has been shown that incidental emotions frequently occur in our day-to-day interactions with others, although we might not be fully aware of them.

Negative emotions suppress trust

For the study, UvA neuroeconomist Jan Engelmann teamed up with UZH neuroeconomists Ernst Fehr, Christian Ruff and Friederike Meyer. The team investigated whether incidental aversive affect can influence trust behavior and the brain networks relevant for supporting social cognition. To induce a prolonged state of negative affect, the team used the well-established threat-of-shock method, in which participants are threatened with (but only sometimes given) an unpleasant electrical shock. This threat has been shown to reliably induce anticipatory anxiety. Within this emotional context, participants were then asked to play a trust game, which involved decisions about how much money they wished to invest in a stranger (with the stranger having the possibility to repay in kind, or keep all the invested money to themselves). The researchers found that participants indeed trusted significantly less when they were anxious about receiving a shock, even though the threat had nothing to do with their decision to trust.

Comment: See also:

Mothers are drowning in stress

Alison Escalante M.D.
Psychology Today
Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:01 UTC

It's 2019 and American women have been in the workforce for decades, but a new report shows that their careers still get stuck on impossible ideals of work and home. As a result, they are drowning of stress that no woman can solve on her own.

Sociologist Caitlyn Collins spent five years studying parenthood in four wealthy western countries for Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving, and she's found that U.S. moms have it the worst.

"Across the countries where I conducted interviews, one desire remained constant among mothers. Women wanted to feel that they were able to combine paid employment and child-rearing in a way that seemed equitable and didn't disadvantage them at home or at work." (8)

Comment: Much of the conflict here seems to be coming from those who tell women what they should want. The fact that motherhood has been devalued, while any woman worth her salt should be able to compete with the men in their chosen field, has done a serious amount of damage to the female psyche. Overall, it seems women would be better off if they chose, as individuals, whether it was more important to them to have a stellar career or a family, rather than believing the myth that they can 'have it all', without any consequences.

See also:

The Truth Perspective: The Hidden Role of Psi in Psychotherapy - and Evolution?

Corey Schink and Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC

Dr. Jim Carpenter's First Sight theory not only finds a role for psi in the creation of consciousness; it has a wide range of implications for what it means to be human, the nature of personal development, and potentially the development of life itself. With its focus on the importance of meaning, it has particular relevance to the practice of psychotherapy.

Today on the Truth Perspective we discuss a chapter in Carpenter's book on the subject, as well as a talk he gave in which he expands on the ideas presented there. Carpenter compares his theory with the Control/Mastery theory of psychotherapy, in which conscious and unconscious motivations play a central role. Last week we asked how to bring unconscious and conscious intentions into alignment. Carpenter's discussion of pathogenic beliefs and the role of the therapist in correcting them provides an answer: on an unconscious level, patients wish to have their unconscious pathogenic beliefs disproven. And psi can play a role in helping that process along.

Running Time: 01:23:45

Download: MP3 - 76.7 MB

How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger

Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh
NPR
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 09:01 UTC

© Jean Briggs Collection / American Philosophical Society
Myna Ishulutak (upper right, in blue jacket) lived a seminomadic life as a child. Above: photos of the girl and her family in the hunting camp of Qipisa during the summer of 1974.

Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a landmark discovery about the nature of human anger.

At age 34, Jean Briggs traveled above the Arctic Circle and lived out on the tundra for 17 months. There were no roads, no heating systems, no grocery stores. Winter temperatures could easily dip below minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Briggs persuaded an Inuit family to "adopt" her and "try to keep her alive," as the anthropologist wrote in 1970.

At the time, many Inuit families lived similar to the way their ancestors had for thousands of years. They built igloos in the winter and tents in the summer. "And we ate only what the animals provided, such as fish, seal and caribou," says Myna Ishulutak, a film producer and language teacher who lived a similar lifestyle as a young girl.

Study: Memories of music cannot be lost to Alzheimer's and dementia

Ned Dymoke
Big Think
Sun, 29 Apr 2018 00:01 UTC

The part of your brain responsible for ASMR catalogs music, and appears to be a stronghold against Alzheimer's and dementia.

Some music inspires you to move your feet, some inspires you to get out there and change the world. In any case, and to move hurriedly on to the point of this article, it's fair to say that music moves people in special ways.

If you're especially into a piece of music, your brain does something called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), which feels to you like a tingling in your brain or scalp. It's nature's own little "buzz", a natural reward, that is described by some as a "head orgasm". Some even think that it explains why people go to church, for example, "feeling the Lord move through you", but that's another article for another time.

Comment: See also:

Neurofeedback - keeping you in the zone

Holly Evarts
Columbia Engineering
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 09:37 UTC

Study participants navigated a virtual plane up and down through a course of red boxes while we recorded their electrical brain activity from an electroencephalography (EEG) cap (see top panel). The participants became more and more agitated as the course also became more and more difficult over time which led most participants to miss one of the boxes (i.e. crashed the plane) in the middle of the course (see Control, bottom panel). When we provided a brain-computer interface (BCI) based neurofeedback signal that reflected their level of stress or arousal, participants were able to decrease their arousal level, which in term improved their task performance.

Our state of arousal - being fearful, agitated, or calm - can significantly affect our ability to make optimal decisions, judgments, and actions in real-world dynamic environments. Imagine, for instance, walking across a balance beam. Your performance - speed across the beam and the odds of making it across without falling off - are dramatically better if the beam sits a mere six inches off the ground and you are relaxed rather than terror-stricken on a beam 60 feet higher. To keep you in the zone of maximum performance, your arousal needs to be at moderate levels, not so high that it pushes you over the edge.

Biomedical engineers at Columbia Engineering have shown - for the first time - that they can use online neurofeedback to modify an individual's arousal state to improve performance in a demanding sensory motor task, such as flying a plane or driving in suboptimal conditions. The researchers used a brain computer interface (BCI) to monitor, through electroencephalography (EEG) in real time, the arousal states of the study participants when they were engaged in a virtual reality aerial navigation task. The system generated a neurofeedback signal that helped participants to decrease their arousal in particularly difficult flight situations, which in turn improved participants' performance. The study was published today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Comment: See also:

Oxford researcher believes there are seven moral rules that unite humanity

Jenny Anderson
Quartz
Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC

In 2012, Oliver Scott Curry was an anthropology lecturer at the University of Oxford. One day, he organized a debate among his students about whether morality was innate or acquired. One side argued passionately that morality was the same everywhere; the other, that morals were different everywhere.

"I realized that, obviously, no one really knew, and so decided to find out for myself," Curry says.

Seven years later, Curry, now a senior researcher at Oxford's Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, can offer up an answer to the seemingly ginormous question of what morality is and how it does - or doesn't - vary around the world.

Morality, he says, is meant to promote cooperation. "People everywhere face a similar set of social problems, and use a similar set of moral rules to solve them," he says as lead author of a paper recently published in Current Anthropology. "Everyone everywhere shares a common moral code. All agree that cooperating, promoting the common good, is the right thing to do."

Comment: See Jonathan Haidt's take on morality and the science of values: The New Science of Morality

Why Darwinism Is Wrong, Dead Wrong - Part 1: Intelligent Design and Information

Luke Baier
Sott.net
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 14:06 UTC

Charles Darwin: God-savior of materialism

Despite its name, Darwin's theory of evolution - and its post-genetics variation, neo-Darwinism - is almost universally accepted as hard fact. It's 'scientifically proven' we're told, which in practice simply denotes something about which you are not allowed to ask questions. But Darwinism is wrong, dead wrong. It is wrong philosophically, scientifically and morally.

It is philosophically wrong, because even some non-sloppy thinking combined with common sense is all you need to dismiss it.
It is scientifically wrong, because the more science progresses (the more we discover about molecular biology, for example), the more Darwinism loses the little plausibility it had left.
It is morally wrong, because the kind of materialism and (false) postulations about nature Darwinism promotes imply an abhorrent world view that acts like poison on human morality; as such, it paved the way for Nazism, Stalinism, postmodernism and today's nihilist, almost psychopathic outlook on life in general.

In the first part of this series, we'll look at Darwin's theory from the philosophical angle. Philosophy promotes rigorous thinking, the detection of gross errors in reasoning and the ability to hold different and conflicting ideas in mind without freaking out. Let's see how Darwinism fares.

Trying to forget uses more brain power than remembering

UT News
Mon, 11 Mar 2019 02:45 UTC

Choosing to forget something might take more mental effort than trying to remember it, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin discovered through neuroimaging.

These findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that in order to forget an unwanted experience, more attention should be focused on it. This surprising result extends prior research on intentional forgetting, which focused on reducing attention to the unwanted information through redirecting attention away from unwanted experiences or suppressing the memory's retrieval.

"We may want to discard memories that trigger maladaptive responses, such as traumatic memories, so that we can respond to new experiences in more adaptive ways," said Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of psychology at UT Austin. "Decades of research has shown that we have the ability to voluntarily forget something, but how our brains do that is still being questioned. Once we can figure out how memories are weakened and devise ways to control this, we can design treatment to help people rid themselves of unwanted memories."

Comment: Perhaps in some situations 'forgetting' could be useful but as a therapy it might not always be the best solution. Simply forgetting that something happened still doesn't remove the trauma that is stored in the body or the behaviours that can be produced by it. Forgetting that it happened could take away what could the only thing that will give us access to the root of the problem.

Memories are not static. They are dynamic constructions of the brain that regularly get updated, modified and reorganized through experience. The brain is constantly remembering and forgetting information - and much of this happens automatically during sleep.

Didn't read the article before commenting? Science says it really shows

Carly Cassella
Science Alert
Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:01 UTC

A little bit of knowledge can go straight to your head, and not in a good way. New research has found that those who only read snippets of their Facebook newsfeed often think they know more than they actually do.

By glancing through article previews, instead of reading the full piece, many users overestimate their understanding of an issue, and this is especially true for those whose knowledge is guided by strong emotions - and, therefore, strong opinions.

"Because most social media users only have a passing engagement with posted news, exposure to political information on social media may simply create the illusion of political learning," write the researchers at the York College of Pennsylvania.

Comment: The point of the article is likely accurate, but there is one glaring flaw in the study that isn't mentioned. Taking a polarizing subject like GM foods, people are likely already holding knowledge and opinions on the subject, regardless of what was written in the sample articles and previews. What if the subjects knew what was written in the article but had prior information which they weighted more than what was written. It brings up the old (by now) adage - who decides what's true? Perhaps it would be a better study design to choose a more neutral subject, or one not as divisive, to actually test what information was retained.

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Science of the Spirit

Incidental negative emotions can reduce our capacity to trust others

Mothers are drowning in stress

The Truth Perspective: The Hidden Role of Psi in Psychotherapy - and Evolution?

How Inuit parents teach kids to control their anger

Study: Memories of music cannot be lost to Alzheimer's and dementia

Neurofeedback - keeping you in the zone

Oxford researcher believes there are seven moral rules that unite humanity

Why Darwinism Is Wrong, Dead Wrong - Part 1: Intelligent Design and Information

Trying to forget uses more brain power than remembering

Didn't read the article before commenting? Science says it really shows

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