Can Too Much Happiness be Dangerous?

Greater Good online magazine has an intriguing piece that investigates the downside of being "too happy." Reviewing recent research, the author determines that our nonstop drive to find the holy grail of happiness comes at a cost.  From the piece:

Happiness, it turns out, has a cost when experienced too intensely.

For instance, we often are told that happiness can open up our minds to foster more creative thinking and help us tackle problems or puzzles. This is the case when we experience moderate levels of happiness. But according to Mark Alan Davis’s 2008 meta-analysis of the relationship between mood and creativity, when people experience intense and perhaps overwhelming amounts of happiness, they no longer experience the same creativity boost. And in extreme cases like mania, people lose the ability to tap into and channel their inner creative resources. What’s more, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found that too much positive emotion—and too little negative emotion—makes people inflexible in the face of new challenges.

Not only does excessive happiness sometimes wipe out its benefits for us—it may actually lead to psychological harm. Why? The answer may lie in the purpose and function of happiness. When we experience happiness, our attention turns toward exciting and positive things in our lives to help sustain the good feeling. When feeling happy, we also tend to feel less inhibited and more likely to explore new possibilities and take risks.

Read the entire piece at Greater Good. 

New Smartphone App Tracks Your Nervous Response

New Scientist reports on a fascinating new app called Shimmer that will measure your nervous response to stimuli and serve up more stimuli (in, say, a horror movie) that will amplify your response. From the article:

Getting really sweaty is not normally a good thing. But imagine if doing so could make the film you're watching more exciting - or even change what happens next. Technology firm Sensum is launching a smartphone app that will use your sweat to make life far more entertaining.

Sensum pairs a wrist-mounted galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor, made by Dublin companyShimmer Research, via Bluetooth to a smartphone with the Sensum app installed. The sensor measures how much you sweat while watching different videos, and sends the data to the smartphone which then uploads the data to the Sensum website. Then you can play back the video overlaid with a graph that shows just what made you jump.

Read the entire article at New Scientist. 

Please give my advertisers a click, they keep this site running! Thanks! 

Why We Need to be Cautious about Brain Scans

Mind Hack's writer Vaughan Bell has an excellent piece in The Observer Online about the many issues that remain to be solved for brain imaging (fMRI). Even though we constantly hear trumped up claims in the popular press about what brain imaging can tell us ("Brain Area for Niceness Found!"), Bell warns that brain imaging is merely 20 years old and still in its technological infancy. From the article:

This misplaced enthusiasm often stems from a misunderstanding about what brain scans tell us. The interpretation seems straightforward according to the popular press – the coloured blobs represent a "pleasure centre", an "art centre" or perhaps a "love centre" – but none of this is true.

All of our experiences and abilities rely on a distributed brain network and nothing relies on a single "centre". More than anything, the conclusions depend on the tasks volunteers undertake in the scanner and what each study tells us is limited. This small print has been repeated many times over by scientists. They bemoan how people misunderstand the subtleties and draw unwarranted conclusions. But now neuroscientists have had to come to terms with the fact that many of the methods on which brain scan studies are based have been flawed.

Read the entire article at The Observer. 

Please give my advertisers a click, they keep this site running! Thanks! 

What Makes Some People So Shy?

Researchers at Vanderbilt University think they may have discovered why some people imbibe the social scene like smooth vodka, while others would rather drink rubbing alcohol than meet someone new.

The difference may come down to two areas of the brain that underlie our response to new stimuli: the amygdala and hippocampus.  The amygdala plays a crucial role in the brain's response to new stimuli, in part to figure out if we should be mobilizing for a threat. The hippocampus is vital to memory formation, particularly in the movement and consolidation of information from short to long term memory.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine adults who were either social mavens ("uninhibited temperament," to use the study vernacular) or extremely shy (inhibited temperament). Study participants were shown pictures of unfamiliar faces multiple times. Individuals with an uninhibited temperament demonstrated habituation--the normal tendency to get used to stimuli--in both the amygdala and hippocampus. In other words, their response in those regions of the brain increased when the faces were new but declined as they became familiar.

In contrast, individuals with an inhibited temperament failed to habituate no matter how many times they saw the faces--meaning familiar faces triggered the same brain response as the unfamiliar.

“This failure to habituate provides a novel neural mechanism for understanding the shy and cautious behavior that is characteristic of inhibited individuals,” said Jennifer Urbano Blackford, Ph.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry and Psychology and lead author of the study.

“Individuals who familiarize more slowly may find encounters with new people overwhelming and thus avoid new social experiences, whereas those who adjust more quickly may be more likely to seek novel social experiences.”

Blackford and colleagues think that this failure to habituate may be a key cause of social anxiety disorder, the persistent, chronic fear of a specific social situation. Social anxiety disorder is the second most common anxiety disorder and affects approximately one in 10 adults in the United States.

So does this mean that we may one day see a medication to remedy shyness? More than likely. On the other hand, perhaps studies like this could also lead to meds to treat the chronically uninhibited. In a brave new world, there's a little soma in it for all of us.

The study was published in the February 2012 issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Please give my advertisers a click, they keep this site running! Thanks! 

Is there Really Such a Thing as a Political "Independent"?

At his blog, We're Only Human, science writer Wray Herbert has an interesting piece about new research suggesting that the term "independent" may be something of a misnomer -- those using the term want to appear objective, but they may be just as partisan as those self-identifying as Republican or Democrat. From the post:

The results were intriguing—and politically significant. As Hawkins reported this week at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, in Chicago, self-proclaimed Independents are not as independent-minded as they claim they are. In fact, Independents vary greatly in their unconscious partisanship, and they make partisan political judgments in line with their implicit political identities. Among the self-proclaimed Independents, those who unconsciously identified with Democrats preferred the liberal welfare plan, while the implicit Republicans had a clear preference for the conservative welfare plan. In other words, they acted like liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans even if they refused to accept any political labels.

Read the entire post at We're Only Human. 

Please give my advertisers a click, they keep this site running! Thanks!