Appreciating the little things will lead to big ones.

Over the past month I tried a little experiment. Not one of those that I carry out in the laboratory, but a personal one: I have been diligently keeping a gratitude journal to improve my mental wellbeing.

A bit of background.  The last two months of 2017 had been the toughest I have had in a long time.  Tiredness and stress of the PhD together with a thesis setback, saw me slowly falling into a negative spiral of sadness, irritability, hopelessness and anxiety.

It was not fun for me and the people around me!

I went back to what I wrote on happiness in my previous blog posts, in particular the one on physical exercise to increase the “happiness hormones”, and the interview with Mr. Spencer-Matthews, with his advice to intentionally focus on the things in our life that do not work, but that we can fix.

However, I felt like I didn’t have enough energy, neither in my body nor in my head, to put those advices in action.

I would go down to the garage, where my partner and I have a little “gym”, and would give up the training after 10 minutes because of infuriating headaches.

I would try hard not to let my hurt subconscious take control of my thoughts and apply Mr. Spencer-Matthews’s strategy “accept-address-activate” for the inevitable life challenges, but my head was just too distressed to think clearly.

After excluding the possibility of hypothyroidism (whose symptoms are often mistaken for depression) and refusing to take the prescribed antidepressants because I am too scared of the side effects, I had to find another solution.

I thought, what can I – or anyone who is as drained as me now – do to feel better and climb up this negative spiral with the highest efficacy and minimal energy investment?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash.

Some of my research on this topic led me to the crucial role of gratitude in happiness.

It has been shown that gratitude is one of the elements that strongly correlates with life satisfaction (together with love, zest, curiosity and hope) (Park N. et al., 2004).  A study conducted on medical students, because of their high tendency to burnout and depression, reported that gratitude correlates with both subjective and psychological wellbeing representing an ultimate happiness strength (Hausler M. et al., 2017).  Moreover, as part of transcendent strengths, that include hope and spirituality, gratitude can even be a predictor of life satisfaction (Shoshani A. and Slone M. 2013).

Prof. Wood, chair in Psychology at the University of Stirling, Scotland, has conducted extensive research on gratitude and in one of his reviews on the topic he presented some of the mechanisms by which gratitude correlates with wellbeing.  Briefly, there is a coping hypothesis, according to which grateful people have better coping strategies and willingness to seek for help; another hypothesis focuses on positive effects, as gratefulness triggers more positive feelings which result in greater happiness; and finally, the broaden and build hypothesis, which states that people with gratitude tend to broaden their social activities and build resources that can eventually be used in times of adversity (Wood A. M. et al., 2010).

However, the studies presented above are relative to gratitude as a personality trait, and not as an asset acquired through practice. So, the question is: does the gratitude intervention  (for example through meditation and/or journaling) actually increase happiness or is it just a placebo effect?

In a recent study, scientists demonstrated that the heart rate of subjects during the gratitude intervention was lower compared to the resentment intervention group (Kyeong S. et al., 2017).  Considering that a high heart rate is an indication of stress and anxiety, this result suggested that gratitude has a positive effect.  Moreover, and importantly, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), followed by functional connectivity analysis, revealed that the gratitude intervention modulated the emotion and motivation-related brain regions, which might be involved in the reduction of anxiety and enhancement of one’s performance, respectively.

Thus, convinced enough that the gratitude practice helps to improve emotional and mental wellbeing, I needed to try it myself not only to get its benefits but also to be able to write this piece with confidence.

I decided to practice gratitude through journaling.  Every evening before going to bed I would write few things for which I was grateful.  It was easy to start with the more general things, like “I am grateful to have a roof over my head, food in my fridge (and tummy), clean water etc…” or being grateful for a loving family, friends and partner.

As the days went by, I had to find more specific things to write in my journal: a message received from a relative back home, a coffee offered by a colleague, a tiny progress at work…  This was forcing me to see a few good things in a day that I would otherwise label as bad.  The things that I wrote, black on white, were the evidence that some good exists. Moreover, while being grateful, one cannot possibly be unhappy at the same time! As I was also recording my mood at the end of my gratitude practice, I noticed that I was making great progresses straight away.  I went from crying every day for two months to just two times in one month!

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

However, the hardest thing of this practice, apart from creating the habit itself, is to be grateful even for the “negative things”, the life challenges.  It takes faith to see them as an input to grow, a lesson to learn and just accept them among all that happens in life.  Not everything can be good after all, right?

In conclusion, I can confirm that this gratitude practice did wonders to me and is now something I look forward to do at the end of the day.  It lifted me up and helped me restore the energy that I can now use to exercise and be more in control of my thoughts and emotions.

As always, I am happy to share my experience and what I learnt from my little research and experiment, with the hope that those out there that are going through similar things might benefit from it.

Fore a little bit more on gratitude click here.

Please like and share this post if you found it interesting or useful.

Thank you!

References

Hausler M. at al., Distinguishing Relational Aspects of Character Strengths with Subjective and Psychological Well-being, Frontiers in Psychology, 8:1159. 2017.

Kyeong S. et al., Effects of gratitude meditation on neural network functional connectivity and brain-heart coupling, Scientific Reports, 7: 5058, 2017.

Park N. et al., Strengths of character and well-being, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology: Vol. 23, No. 5, pp. 603-619, 2004.

Shoshani A. and Slone M., Middle School Transition from the Strengths Perspective: Young Adolescents’ Character Strengths, Subjective Well-Being, and School Adjustment. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14:1163–1181, 2013.

Wood A. M. et al., Gratitude and well-being: a review and theoretical integration, Clinical Psychology Review volume 30 issue 7 pages 890-905, 2010.

 

Lesson on happiness from the luckiest person in the world

In this post on happiness we have a special guest: Mr. Lindsay Spencer-Matthews.

Mr. Spencer-Matthews is a psychologist and author of the book “Why clever people do dumb things”.  He is also a mentor and public speaker who aims to inspire people to use their “clever brain”.

I had the pleasure to meet Mr. Spencer-Matthews at the TEDx event at the University of Queensland this year and enjoyed the insightful and provocative concepts that he expressed about “changing the way we think about the way we think”.

In this blog Mr. Spencer-Matthews will give us his insights on how to be happier in our everyday life.

Mr. Spencer-Matthews, why are some people unhappy?

Our brain is pre-programmed to be unhappy.  As soon as our mother gives birth to us we have our first experience of misery and we are not prepared for that.  In addition to our conscious brain, or clever brain, which is rational and gives us a sense of control, we have a subconscious brain that I like to call our autopilot.  It is our subconscious brain that regulates most of what we think, say and do.  Using the conscious brain at all times would be safer, but it requires a lot more energy – and it’s just not practical or even possible.  Thus, we operate mainly on autopilot and let our subconscious “unthinking brain” lead us.  However, this autopilot has a negative bias, which tends to emphasize the negative things and forget the positive ones.

Do happy people use this autopilot?

Everyone has an autopilot, which is not intrinsically bad.  If life is good, the autopilot works fine.  We all had the feeling, while driving, when we do not remember exactly how we arrived at our destination.  This phenomenon is due to the fact that we were driving on autopilot and we were not using our thinking brain.  Luckily, this works – most of the times. However, let’s think about when things don’t always work as well as we would like. Remember, all people suffer from adversity – even happy ones.  In case of adversity, the subconscious/autopilot can become a negative influence and we feel miserable. Unfortunately, misery is not a great motivator for action.  However, “happy people” have the ability to switch from autopilot to conscious brain during the tough times.  This process allows them to recognize the issues for what they are, avoid panic and most importantly find solutions.

Thus, being conscious and having intentions will make people happier?

Yes, breaking the habit of living on autopilot is crucial because if we are not careful our autopilot focuses on the things that DO NOT work in our life.  On the contrary, the conscious brain knows that our life is made up of things that DO work and things that don’t.  Moreover, among the things that do not work, the conscious brain can be trained so that we are able to recognize which are the things that we cannot fix and which are the ones that we can fix and do something about it.  This extremely simple process is only possible when we activate the conscious (or clever) brain.  The subconscious/autopilot cannot make this distinction.  Thus, the clever brain will help us accept the bad things that we cannot change and work on the bad things that we can change. 

 Are you saying that happy people are not necessarily the people that focus on positive things? The positive thinkers?

This is what positive psychology tells us.  However, in my opinion, positive psychology is overrated.  Being happy is not focusing only on the positive things but is rather separating the “don’t work stuff” in two categories: some things we cannot fix and some you can fix, so the attention is now just to the things that can be fixed and can be solved.  This way, we are not letting the automatic pilot to take control.  Positive thinkers live in the pile of stuff that works, but this is very hard for many people.  Moreover, I believe that we should not just live in the pile of stuff that works as it’s not ideal to ignore the things that do not work in our lives.  Intentionality has a powerful impact on our happiness: you need to get into the habit of focusing also on how to fix the things in your life that don’t work (but that you can do something about) and be grateful for the things in your life that do work.  If you do this, you will be happier.

Are you grateful and happy?

I certainly am.  I believe that I am the luckiest person in the world!  And not because of what I have.  Indeed, I am not rich and I also suffer from cancer.  But I have many things in my life that work and make me think that I am very lucky.  The message I want to give to everyone is: don’t listen to the subconscious, instead, intentionally activate your clever brain and ACCEPT those things that don’t work and that you can’t fix; ADDRESS those things that don’t work that you can fix; and ACTIVATE those things that work for you – if you do that then you will learn how to be the luckiest person in the world.

 

 

How exercise makes your brain healthier and happier :)

It’s common knowledge that exercise is good for you by making your body stronger and better looking.  However, several recent studies have reported that exercise is also good for the brain, for multiple reasons!

“The brains at the gym” Ramesh Narayanan, PhD

Unlike other tissues such as the skin, which can easily regenerate itself after an injury, the adult brain has a relatively little number of proliferating precursor (stem) cells, meaning that once is damaged there is not much hope for repair of brain cells (neurons and glia).  In the adult brain, those few stem cells, which provide generation of new neurons, are located in restricted areas and mainly in the hippocampus, involved in many cognitive functions (see image).  So, it would be crucial to know what can activate these areas to support adult neurogenesis in case of brain damage.

Interestingly, one of the way to increase the number of new born neurons in the adult brain of mice is voluntary exercise.  The study showed that mice which had been running on a wheel presented improvement in cognition tasks and also suggested that exercise might prevent age-related decrease in precursor stem cells (van Praag et al., 2005; Blackmore et al., 2009).  Currently, Prof. Perry Bartlett, funding director of the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia, is leading the world largest clinical trial in humans to discover the optimal amount and the type of exercise that can improve the cognitive activity in the older population and assess whether it can also delay the onset of dementia.  Looking forward to its results.

On a molecular level, exercise has been shown to trigger an increase in the production of neurotransmitters (some of the molecules that transmit messages between neurons) in humans, which could have a beneficial impact in psychiatric disorders, aging and cognition (Maddock et al., 2016).

Another important brain neurotransmitter that is more abundant in the “fit” brains is serotonin, also known as the “happy hormone”.  Serotonin is mainly present in the gastrointestinal tract, where it regulates the intestinal movements, and in the central nervous system, where it regulates mood, appetite and sleep.  A study demonstrated that running mice had and slower turnover of serotonin, which in turn led to an improvement of depression derived from sleep deprivation (Medeiros da Costa Daniele et al., 2017).  Another study conducted on human patients reported a lower level of depression in fit people compared to the unfit ones.  Thus, research shows that the increased levels of the serotonin in the brain during and after aerobic exercise is related to an improvement in the mood both in the short and long term.

Importantly exercise also increases the level of 3 more hormones that function as neurotransmitter and make us happy: endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin.

• Very long sessions of running, also lead to the increase of endorphins, other type of neurotransmitters that block the pain signals and make us feel good.  This chemical event explains the notion of “Runner’s high”, which defines the state of euphoria of a runner after a prolonged aerobic activity.  However, running is not the only type of exercise that can make our brain happier.  Some studies proved that also heavy weight lifting can lead to release of endorphins, thereby improving the mood.
• Goal-directed training makes us release dopamine, a pleasure hormone that gives us focus and motivation.  Therefore, if you exercise with a clear target achievement you will have a rise in dopamine together with the serotonin and you will feel good!
• Finally, oxytocin is a “love” hormone that is released when physical contact occurs.  If you take up a type of physical exercise such as partner dancing, most of your happiness will come from the oxytocin release (some ideas are kizomba, bachata, salsa, tango, valz, forro’…).

Take home message is to stay active!  Varying the type and intensity of physical training benefits the body, the brain and gives happiness!

If you liked this post, put a like on it and share it with your friends! Grazie!

Here is what I do (besides running, cycling and weightlifting) and it’s a lot of fun!

References

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16177036

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=blackmore+2009+exercise

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Acute+Modulation+of+Cortical+Glutamate+and+GABA+Content+by+Physical+Activity

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Effects+of+exercise+on+depressive+behavior+and+striatal+levels+of+norepinephrine%2C+serotonin+and+their+metabolite

 

Take your life with a bit of philosophy: 4 steps for a happier life

Life is challenging and everyone carries his own crosses.  Despite the glorious photos that we share on social medias, our lives are not perfect or always happy.

Moreover, if our struggles are aggravated by a depressive state, the Aristotelic notion that “happiness depends upon ourselves” might actually affect the wellbeing, thereby leading to frustration for not being able to be happy and creating a loop of negativity for feeling frustrated because we should have happiness inside and we currently don’t.

What I want to pass with this post are 4 simple rules taken from some of the best philosophers out there.  These rules are to be applied especially in those tough life situations so that you can give yourself the support needed for a basal level of happiness that is enough to ultimately get you through the difficulties.

1)  Accept your neediness.  Martha Nussbaum (born in USA, 1947)

“Human beings […] frequently learn to reject their own vulnerability and to suppress awareness of the attachments that entail it […] they are the only animals for whom neediness is a source of shame.”  The contemporary philosopher Nussbaum says that neediness is a key element in our development, like frustration is essential for satisfaction. Neediness is not weakness, but essential to build our sense of control.

2)  Be wise.  Socrates (born in Greece, 470 BC)

According to the famous Greek philosopher Socrates, happiness is not based on contingency nor satisfaction of desires, but on virtue and wisdom.  Having good money, great career, awesome partner and amazing family are things that give joy but don’t necessarily make people happy.  Happiness is not influenced by external circumstances, but by the way we interpret – and make use of – those circumstances in order to achieve a Physic harmony.

3)  Meditate. Buddha (born in India, ~ 500 BC)

Similar to the Socratic Physic harmony, is the Mental equanimity (peace of mind) that is the key of happiness according to the ascetic Buddha.  This can be achieved by mindful meditation that detaches us from passions, cravings, resentments from the past and worries about the future.  By being in the moment one can be truly happy.  This theory has appeared in the ideas of many other philosophers and the power of meditation has been validated by an increasing number of scientific studies that report decreased anxiety, depression, eating disorders and addiction.  These positive effects might be linked to the fact that mindfulness meditation leads to an increase in the grey matter (the major component in the nervous system) as MRI study has revealed (Holzel et al., 2011).

4)  Cultivate Friendship. Epicurus (born in Greece, 321 BC)

Epicurus believed that happiness is the absence of negative emotions.  By removing fear and pain from life, one can reach a state of tranquillity in which there will not even be the need to chase pleasure anymore. One practical way to achieve this is to be surrounded by friends!  “Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship”.  Relationships in general are very important for long-lasting happiness.  Results from the longest study on happiness (nearly 80 years) have shown that a secure romantic relationship late in life has great impact on cognitive and emotional wellbeing!

I am sure this will help you as much as it helped me in this final few months before my PhD thesis submission!!

 

Resources

Mindfulness

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21071182

Relationships

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26413428

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkKuTCFvzI&t=23s

 

 

 

 

 

Negative emotions or just gut feeling? Implication of the gut flora in depression and anxiety

Every second Friday, at the Queensland Brain Institute, where I am conducting my doctoral research, there is a Student and Postdoc Association Meeting for people to gather with a drink while assisting an informal short seminar.  One of these talks was about parasites taking control over animal’s brain and influencing their behavior.  Creepy!  Parasites are organisms that live together (symbiotic) with other organisms (hosts) from which they get nutrients for survival and reproduction.  Interestingly, for their own interest, parasites can manipulate the host’s brain and their decision making.  For example, some worms (the horsehair worms) infect a cricket to obtain food during their larval development.  At some point, the parasites take control of the cricket’s brain that con no longer be responsible for his decisions and is forced to commit suicide in the water, as water is needed for the adult parasite’s survival and reproduction.  See video below, it’s not too scary!

Not all symbiotic organisms are parasites and some symbiotic species have actually a mutualistic relationship with their host, which means that they do not take advantage from their host, but rather establish a cooperative relationship with them.  One common example of this is the gut microbiome (gut flora) composed by millions of microorganisms (bacterial strains).  The bacteria benefit from the food received by the human host and, in turn, they provide help for our digestion.  Human flora varies enormously among individuals because its composition depends on several factors including vaginal or cesarean birth, nutrition, physical activity, possession of a pet or animals, cultural habits such as intimacy and food sharing, stress levels and antibiotic treatments received.

Interestingly, also the non-parasitic gut microorganisms have been shown to affect the brain and the hereditary aspect of the gut microbiome (most of it comes from maternal placenta) makes it a good candidate for the transmissibility of mental health disorders.

A study conducted in mice shows that the microbiota composition is altered in mice that are chronically stressed and display depressive symptoms.  In particular, the level of Lactobacilli, a bacterial strain of the gut flora, is reduced compared to the control mice and restoration of Lactobacilli levels improves the despair behavior of the depressed mice.  Recent research conducted in the last decade shows that there is a strong communication between the gut and the brain can influence mental health.  Treatment of rodents with probiotics, microorganism that can be consumed to supplement the gut flora, reduces the level of stress hormones.  Other studies show that probiotics consumption leads to increased levels of serotonin, the “happiness hormone”.  Thus, probiotics appear to have a role in regulating molecules implicated in depression.  Importantly, these molecular changes have also a direct consequence on animal’s behavior resulting in improved memory and reduced anxiety- or depression- like behaviors.  Remarkably, a growing number of studies conducted in humans also show positive effect of probiotic treatment on depression, anxiety and stress, and on cognition (less self-blame and better problem solving), despite some variability across studies.

To conclude, I found super interesting that our gut microbiota composition can have such a big impact on our brain, mental health and behavior.  This can be one of the biological explanations for what ancient Greeks and Latins already knew about the necessity of having a healthy body for a healthy mind, which was based on their empiric knowledge (practical experience).  Taking care of our body with good nutrition and exercise (I will talk about this later on) is a favor that we owe to our brain, who works so much for us.

If you feel depressed or anxious, it may be not too concerning…it may be just a gut feeling?!

YouTube video of cricket’s suicide for horsehair worm infection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7r1S6-op8E

 

References

Caroline J. K. Wallace and Roumen Milev.  The effects of probiotics on depressive

symptoms in humans: a systematic review.  Ann Gen Psychiatry 16:14 (2017).

Ioana A. Marin, et al., Microbiota alteration is associated with the development of stress-induced despair behaviour.  Scientific Reports 7:43859 (2017).

 

 

 

Overcoming fears through a re-learning process

I was at a neuroscience conference in Hobart few months ago and I loved the talk from Dr. Jee Hyun Kim, from Melbourne University, about the neurobiology of fear.  She studies fear during development and anxiety disorders at young age, if curious you can see her Tedx talk titled Living without fear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_t9O5MgisM.

Fear is a common emotion across the animal kingdom with the fundamental role of initiating a defense behavior, fight/flight (active) or freezing (passive).  Fear is necessary for survival as it protects from dangers, such as predation, and it is triggered by an acute sensory input due to a fearful situation: innate fear.  However, fear can also be conditioned (learned) and we start to be fearful of an apparently innocuous stimulus or action if associated with a threat.  Moreover, defensive behaviors can be triggered by the prediction of potential threats and dangerous circumstances, in a process called anxiety.  For some scientists, anxiety is just a more sophisticated form of fear because of its predicting aspect.  In this post, I will just use the word fear for simplicity and eventually will discuss anxiety in more detail.

As for the other emotions (joy, sadness, anger, disgust), amygdala, a structure of the limbic system in the brain (see post on the origin of emotions), plays a crucial role in fear.  Importantly, over the last decades of research, the use of animal models and the advancement in imaging technology allowed to better understand the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry of emotions.

Rodents are largely used animal models for these studies and their fear can be assessed by monitoring their freezing response.  The paradigm called fear conditioning consists in making the animal learn to associate an innocuous stimulus (light or tone) with an aversive one (foot shock) until the innocuous stimulus presented on its own is able to evoke fear (freezing), because the animal is expecting to receive the shock.  This procedure has allowed to map the areas of the brain involved in fear as well as the neuronal circuits and some of the molecular mechanisms activated upon a fear response.

When the animals are repeatedly presented only with the innocuous stimulus, not followed by the aversive one, they will learn to dissociate the former from the latter so that they will no longer be afraid of the innocuous stimulus in a process called fear extinction.  In other words, overcoming a fear does not mean to forget about it, but it is instead a new learning: we need to re-learn that something that we perceive as fearful it is actually not dangerous.  This process require practice and psychological therapies can definitely help especially for people that have experienced trauma like sexual abuse, war, accidents and so on.

Another important aspect that is being studied is how to stop the creation of a fear conditioning in the first place.  This can be achieved by blocking the neurochemical inputs that activate the fear response, straight after the trauma (pre-emptive treatment).  So, timing is really crucial in this process.

Take home message, overcoming fears is possible and this requires a new learning process.  We never stop learning after all.  Hoping for success and may the force be with you.

 

References

Tovote P. et al., “Neuronal circuits for fear and anxiety”.  Nature reviews, 2015.

Steimer T., “The biology of fear- and anxiety-related behaviors”.  Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 2002.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdulAtk9ES0

 

 

 

Merry SADless Christmas: on holiday sadness and depression.

The other day I found myself in tears.  Maybe I am only missing my big family back in Italy. Surely this has something to do with the famous song from the old Italian singer Mario Merola called “Neapolitan’s tears”, which I was listening to (the YouTube link is below if you are curious!).  The song is about a homesick man emigrated to US that wish he was spending Christmas with his family in Napoli, the city where I am from.  So, I felt particularly touched as I will be spending Christmas here in Australia, which is very far away from my family too.

Christmas means time for gifts shopping, family lunches, gatherings with friends and colleagues and holidays as well. Time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ for the religious people or just reflect on the year that has passed, with projection to the New Year and formulation of often almost unreliable good purposes.  However for many people, Christmas is that time of the year when some form of melancholy comes to fill up the body and the mind.  People feel under pressure for practical reasons including spending (too much) money in buying presents and maybe cooking for (too many) guests.  One can be victim of stressful interactions in case of dysfunctional families and sadness in case they have to spend the festivities in a foreign country away from the beloved ones.

The Christmas melancholy is like a form of depression that is called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).  In the Northern hemisphere SAD is usually linked to the mild depression that occurs during the winter time, when cold and absence of light have a huge impact on people’s mood leading to depressive feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness and loss of interest in activities and withdrawn from social interactions.  SAD can also happen in a certain time of the year that reminds of a traumatic experience. Someone who has experienced the loss of a beloved one, let’s say in June, then every June could experience a mild depression.  Usually people that go through SAD feel better after the specific time has passed.  They struggle for a while but come at the other end.

However, other people might not be able to cope with it and the persisting symptoms may lead to a major depression.  Depression is considered one of the main causes of disability worldwide and it is associated with increasing mortality.  The causes of depression are really variable. Studies conducted in twins and adopted children demonstrate that the influence of genetic factors is about 30-40%. The remaining 60-70% of risk factors are non-genetic and often environment related and individual-specific, therefore explaining the high heterogeneity of this disease.  Trauma or abuse in childhood and prolonged stress are highly correlated with depressive states.

Depression has some form of gender specificity as well.  While the manifestations of depression are the same between males and females (altered sleep, appetite, sex drive and pleasure in general) they vary in their response upon stressors.  A man is more likely to experience depression after divorce or loss of the job, while women are more susceptible to rejection in social relationships, illness and death.  Overall, women are more likely to experience depression due to the lower levels of testosterone.  It is also known that women might fall into depression in two specific life events: after giving birth or around the menopause.

Stress hormones like cortisol play a big role as well.  Studies conducted in post mortem brains show that there is an increased number of neurons secreting cortisol in limbic brain regions in depression (limbic system is the core region for emotions, see post number 2).

Imbalance in the amount of other chemicals that function as neurotransmitters (molecules released from the upstream neurons in order to communicate with the downstream one) is implicated in depression too and these molecules include serotonin (the neurotransmitter of pleasure), noradrenaline (the neurotransmitter of mind and body action) and dopamine (the neurotransmitter of reward-motivated behaviour).  Some of the antidepressants on the market work in re-establishing a balance of the neurotransmitters in the brain.

Depression can be cured with drug therapies but can also be tackled, if not prevented, with talking strategies.  If you want to know more, visit the blog and website from the psychologist Giovanni Felice Pace:

http://www.giovannifelicepace.com/

http://www.giovannifelicepace.com/blog/.

Material:

Stanford lecture on depression:

“Neapolitan’s tears” song with english lyrics:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–uYLkyVTcs

Review from Gregor Hasler, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Bern:  Pathophysiology of depression: do we have any solid evidence of interest to clinicians? World Psychiatry 2010;9:155-161.

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Do emotions differ in the two planets?

To the gentlemen – how many times have you tried to understand your sister(s), partner, female colleague or  friend being upset about something you can’t quite understand?  Wondering what’s going on in their mind and why you ended up in that situation in the first place?  To ladies – how many times, when complaining to your female friends about something that your brother (s), partner, male colleague or friend did/said you have heard back “Don’t get upset darling.  Men’s brain works differently!”.

Is that true?  Some people believe so.  In a great talk about male and female brains Mark Gungor explains that the male brain is highly compartmentalized.  It is made of boxes, like the “work” box, the “friends” box, the “family” box, the “partner” box. And these boxes do not touch each other.  At all.  Lol.  On the other hand, areas of the female brain are all well connected.  So while they are at work they think about the partner and while with the partner they concern about having to spend more time with friends and while with friends they worry about work.  No ways to stop the cycle.  At least females can multi-task though.  However, recent studies have shown that there is not such a thing of male brain and female brain.  Magnetic resonance imaging of several individuals showed that the brain is actually a mosaic of features that are common in females and features that are common in males.

What about emotions then?  Despite my personal experience in a family where my dad is the emotional one and my mum is as hard as a rock, it is often a stereotype that women are more emotional than men.  It was really controversial when the Nobel laureate Tim Hunt said to an audience full of scientists and science journalist that one of the problems of “girls” working in science is that they cry.  Not surprisingly that comment caused a sexist issue and a reaction from female scientists.

Now I don’t want to get into this debate (admitting that I am the one that cries on the workplace, or everywhere else I feel like crying for that matter), but I want rather address the following questions.  As emotions arise in the brain (see my previous post), and the brains are fundamentally similar in males and females, is it fair to say that men and women are from two different emotional planets?  Are really females more emotional than males?

Some research has shown that women are better than men in talking about emotions as they have a larger area of the brain devoted to speech and language.  Moreover, men have a different public display of emotions that comes from social “rules”.  Indeed, boys are often told to toughen up and not to cry to not show weakness, while girls are usually allowed to cry and express their feelings.  Finally, it appears that males are worse at recognizing someone else’s emotion.  If presented with sensory cues (visual or auditory), females perform better than males at recognizing what emotion is linked to that stimulus.  Of course these are all large group studies with a big space for individual variation.

But if you were wondering whether male and female emotions are different at a biological level, if males and females are from two completely different emotional planets as the stereotypes wants us to think, once again the answer to this potential gender difference is no.  Interestingly, research shows that there is no significant difference between males and females in their responses to emotionally evocative stimuli when looking both at the level brain activity and at the autonomic nervous system (by measuring skin conductance and heart rate).

In conclusions, emotions are fundamentally the same in Mars and Venus. Whether you want to recognize them, show them and talk about them or not is another story!!

 

More material:

Mark Gungor’s talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ9L9YBJkk8

Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic; Joel et al., 2015.

Dr LaFrance’s talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxSR9U_LbSw

Gender differences in identifying emotions from auditory and visual stimuli; Waaramaa 2016.

 

The origin of emotions

Where do emotions come from? I was attending a meditation workshop with a very talented instructor who was talking about controlling anxiety with breathing. At some point he said that, as we all know, emotions are from the heart. This is like when someone says about a love situation “Don’t be too rational. Your heart knows the truth”.

The heart, which is really good at pumping blood through the body, doesn’t actually know much. Nor it has emotions in it. The identification of the heart as the house of emotions has a very ancient origin and it’s purely metaphoric nowadays.

If you have ever watched the animated movie “inside out” from Pixar, you will remember the touching story of Riley and her emotions. In the movie each emotion is a character that operates in the head of the girl. In the picture, from the left, are: anger, disgust, joy, fear and sadness. The main message of the movie is that not only joy but also all the other emotions are crucial for the growth of the girl, pointing out the value of sadness too (if you have not seen the movie, I strongly suggest to do so, with napkins next to you maybe!).

The reason why I mention this movie is because it is a great representation to introduce the fact that emotions are in the brain, and in no other organ like heart, stomach or throat. What we feel in those organs is only the physiological manifestation of an emotion.

The brain is communicating to the body so it can react appropriately. In an evolutionary perspective, fear due to a specific stimulus or a perceived risk promotes avoidance behaviours that are necessary for survival, such as escaping from a predator. So the brain, the most complex and less understood organ of the human body, is the house of emotions and years of research have tried to understand how emotions are regulated and how they regulate our behaviour in both healthy and pathological subjects.

The study of emotions can be tracked back to Aristotle (384 BC- 322 BC), who I mentioned in the previous post for his great definition of an emotion.  However he thought that emotions and intelligence were in the heart.  Only many years later, Galen (130 AD- 200 AD), who gave a big contribution to the knowledge in neuroanatomy, developed a “cerebral ventricle theory of emotions”.  In this theory, the brain processes the information resulting from the five senses and is the centre for both reason and emotions. Together with Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519), a famous painter who gave a tremendous contribution to development of neuroscience, another renowned painter called Michelangelo (1475 – 1564), played a key role too.   Michelangelo studied science, attended brain dissections and published his drawing. I was very surprised when I learned that!

In the 19^th century, with new anaesthetic techniques, invention of microscope and histological staining, neuroscience saw important discoveries occurring. But it was only a century later that the limbic system was identified as the part of the brain that generates emotions.

The limbic system includes five very internal structures in the brain: the thalamus (it receives sensory signals and send them to other areas in the brain), amygdala (which in Latin means almond, for its shape, is involved in emotional memory), hippocampus (it operates with long term memories), hypothalamus (it has an homeostatic role regulating food-water uptake, sleep-wake cycle) and olfactory bulb (that processes olfactory stimuli).  Image from http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/brain/limbic-system.html

So emotions can arise from a stimulus and evoke a behavioural response. Importantly though, they can be learnt with experience and the emotional value of a stimulus can change over time. For example, a baby might be afraid of dogs at first, but would extinguish the fear after several positive experiences that make him understand that the dog is not harmful. The learning process linked to emotions is important for us to know what to do in those situations when the same emotion arises again.

I really enjoyed the reading that I have done to put this post together and I am happy to share this with you. More to come soon as there are so many interesting things to talk about! I am quite passionate about neuroscience and I am almost completing the doctoral research in neurobiology at the Queensland Brain Institute. However, what I am studying is very different from what I am discussing in this blog, so please feel free to leave a comment if you have anything to add to this post with a more competent perspective or if you want to know more about something that I just briefly discussed here. Thanks for reading.

Some sources

Roxo et al., 2011 “The Limbic System Conception and Its Historical Evolution”.

Youtube lecture from Prof. Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University.

 

 

Definition of an emotion

Hello I am Alessandra, welcome to my blog about emotions!

This is my first post and I would really like to start with a definition of the topic before going deeper, how exciting!!!

During my high school time I have studied ancient Latin and Greek so maybe you can get my passion about the etymology of words.   My name Alessandra, for example, has a Greek root and means “defensor (alexo) of men (andros)”, which is pretty cool, if it only was true lol. The word emotion has a Latin origin from the word emovere, which means “to move (movere) out (e/ex)”.   Indeed, emotions are manifestations of something that is inside us.  

According to the American psychologist Robert Plutchik, there are eight main emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, joy, anticipation, trust and surprise.   As you can notice already, some of them are negative (the first four) and some positive.  Moreover, each of them has a stronger and weaker related emotion.  For example, terror is stronger than fear and apprehension is weaker.  Similarly, ecstasy is more than joy while serenity is weaker.  

In the Rhetoric, the Greek philosopher and physician Aristotele gives a beautiful definition of emotions, which often calls pathe (plural of pathos = feeling) and he says that are “all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure”.  I found this definition so complete because it links the emotions (feelings) to the thoughts (judgments) and to the physiological and behavioural manifestation that emotions trigger (pain or pleasure).   Aristotele particularly likes to pair an emotion with its opposite (for example anger vs calmness and shame vs shamelessness) and he provides detailed description of emotions and the contexts in which they arise.  He acknowledges that emotions are part of our life and that they have an effect on our thoughts and behaviours.   I am totally with Aristotele in this sense.  

On the other side, stoic philosophers including Cicero and Seneca, give a negative interpretation to emotions in general.   They believe that emotions perturb the tranquility that is of the wise man.  A good life is to be lived without pathos and indeed they value the apatheia (absence of pathos).  I know few people that would rather leave emotions (of all sorts) out of their lives.   They believe that emotions disturb the perception of reality and lead them out of control.   Those people appear extremely sensible and rational and rarely let themselves go with spontaneity.   Most likely they are not comfortable able with their emotions, just not knowing how to deal with them and are not keen to show them as that could mean weakness.  

But this takes me to a whole entire topic about emotions, vulnerability and Brene’ Brown, which I will address another time.  

Thanks for reading, hope you will enjoy this blog!