Category: Anxiety

Fearful ‘Memories’ Passed Between Generations Through Genetic Code

New study on mice suggests parents’ fears can be passed on to their grandchildren.

New study on mice suggests parents’ fears can be passed on to their grandchildren.

A frankly mind-blowing new study suggests traumatic events that happen to a parent could be passed down through their genes onto their children.

The research, published in Nature Neuroscience, was carried out on mice, which were conditioned to become afraid of a particular smell: in fact a smell not unlike cherry blossom (Dias & Ressler, 2013).

Soon the mice began to shudder in its presence.

When their offspring were born and tested, they were also shown to be afraid of the cherry blossom smell, despite never having been exposed to it before.

Even the grandchildren showed the fearful response. So the fearful response towards this smell was passed down two generations.

Epigenetics

The reason this study is so potentially exciting is that evolution is thought to occur mostly through random genetic mutations across many generations.

However, if behaviour could be inherited in this way, it might suggest another route by which creatures could have changed and adapted.

The mechanism for the transmission of this response across generations appears to be through the mice’s sperm.

Although the mice’s DNA sequence remained unchanged, a process is thought to have occurred that changes the way these genes are expressed (DNA methylation).

This is a highly controversial idea and many scientists are skeptical about whether these results can really be true.

But, if they did hold in humans, it could help explain how conditions like phobias, alcoholism or anxiety could affect later generations.

A geneticist at UCL, Professor Marcus Pembrey, commented:

“It is high time public health researchers took human transgenerational responses seriously. I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multigenerational approach.”

→ Continue reading: Memory and Recall: 10 Amazing Facts You Should Know

Image credit: DeeAshley

10 Smart Studies that Help Unlock the Mysteries of Intelligence

Reveals the links between intelligence and sleep, mental illness, politics, atheism, happiness and more…

Reveals the links between intelligence and sleep, mental illness, politics, atheism, happiness and more…

The benefits of being smart are hardly a mystery.

Clever people have all kinds of advantages in life: they have better educations, better jobs, earn more and even live longer.

Naturally, then, if you could set your child’s intelligence, you’d probably opt for smart (although maybe not too smart).

Still, being smart is more of a mixed blessing than many imagine.

Here are ten studies that provide vital insights into the psychology of intelligence.

1. The myth of a single intelligence

Some have argued that the idea of intelligence as a single thing is a myth.

According to a recent study of over 100,000 participants, IQ is actually made up of three components (Hampshire et al., 2012).

Analysing the results, they found that IQ split up into short-term memory, reasoning and a verbal component.

In other words: some people could have strong short-term memories but be poor reasoners. Or: some people could be good with language but have poor short-term memory.

Your overall intelligence is a result of how these three subsystems work–and they might not all be at the same level.

2. Intelligence linked to mental illness

Being intelligent isn’t all gravy.

Studies now suggest a link between intelligence and mental illness that may go back into our evolutionary past.

The increased intelligence of Homo sapiens was originally a result of gene mutations. The cost of these gene mutations, however, may have been an increase in mental illness (Nithianantharajah et al., 2012).

The human brain may be the most advanced and complicated object in the universe, but some people pay a heavy price for this gift.

3. Smarts can transcend poor start in life

It’s well-known that being smart helps you get ahead, but what about if you’re smart and disadvantaged? Will your background keep you from achieving?

A study of 12,868 Americans found that while a better background helped people start off with a better job, it was smarts that helped them progress from there (Ganzach, 2011).

Yoav Ganzach explained:

“Your family can help you launch your career and you do get an advantage, but it doesn’t help you progress. And once you start working, you can go wherever your abilities take you.”

4. Clever but worried

They say that ignorance is bliss, and ‘they’ may well be on to something.

That’s because people of high intelligence are more prone to anxiety than those of moderate intelligence.

Indeed, anxiety may have co-evolved with intelligence–worrying may have given early humans a survival benefit in the ancient past (Coplan et al., 2012).

It’s just a pity that it’s left intelligent people with higher levels of anxiety disorders.

5. New ideas

Set against the higher levels of mental illness and anxiety, is the fact that more intelligent people are more likely to come up with new ideas.

Historically, that might mean rejecting superstition and finding new ways of organising society.

One study argues that this explains why more intelligent people are more likely to be atheists and more likely to be politically liberal (Kanazawa et al., 2010).

This study found that young adults who described themselves as ‘very conservative’ had an average IQ of 95, while those who described themselves as ‘very liberal’ had an average IQ of 106.

6. Motivation can trump IQ

Although intelligence can be a wonderful asset to have, it doesn’t guarantee success.

Take maths, that bastion of nerd achievement. It’s true that being intelligent will give you a good start, but for real achievement you’ve got to be motivated.

A German study of 3,520 children found that after they got started at maths, their intelligence became less important than their motivation to succeed and how much they studied (Murayama et al., 2012).

7. Intelligence is in the eyes

Literally, that is.

A study by Shalev et al. (2013) has found that people who have wider blood vessels at back of the eye have higher levels of intelligence.

This is because retinal blood vessels are similar to those in the brain. So, wider blood vessels here may mean a better supply of oxygen to the brain.

This finding could even be important in diagnosing and treating brain diseases:

“Increasing knowledge about retinal vessels may enable scientists to develop better diagnosis and treatments to increase the levels of oxygen into the brain and by that, to prevent age-related worsening of cognitive abilities.” Shalev et al. (2013)

8. The intelligent sleep later

This is no longer a feeble excuse for hitting snooze.

Evidence has now been published that people who are more intelligent tend to go to bed later and get up later (Kanazawa & Perina, 2009).

The study examined the sleep habits of 20,745 adolescent Americans and found that on a weekday the ‘very dull’ went to bed at an average of 11:41 and woke up at 7:20.

In contrast, the ‘very bright’ went to bed at 12:29 and got up at 7:52. At the weekend the differences were even more pronounced.

We don’t know the nature of the connection from this study, but perhaps bright people find it more difficult to get to sleep because of all the worrying they’re doing.

9. Are smart people less racist?

Well, smart people certainly sound less racist. They know what they are supposed to think and say.

But, when they are tested on actual political policies, their views turn out not to be as enlightened as they might like.

These findings are based on a study by Geoffrey Wodtke, who explained:

“…although nearly all whites with advanced cognitive abilities say that ‘whites have no right to segregate their neighborhoods,’ nearly half of this group remains content to allow prejudicial real estate practices to continue unencumbered by open housing laws.”

So it seems smart people are better at concealing their views.

10. Smarter societies are happier

Are smarter people happier? Overall, probably not.

Studies which have looked for a connection between how happy people feel and how intelligent they are have mostly found no connection (e.g. Veenhoven & Choi, 2012).

However, when you look across nations, those that are, on average, smarter, are also happier.

So being smart might not benefit people’s happiness individually, but it may help contribute to everyone’s happiness.

Image credit: Kris Kesiak

Teen Myth: Marijuana is a ‘Safe Drug’

New research challenges the common teenage view that marijuana is a ‘safe drug’ in comparison to alcohol and tobacco.

New research challenges the common teenage view that marijuana is a ‘safe drug’ in comparison to alcohol and tobacco.

Especially among teens, there is perception that, in comparison to ‘dangerous’ legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is relatively safe.

Surveys suggest that one-third of high school seniors have tried pot in the last year and less than half of 17-year-olds believe the drug is harmful.

A new review of the evidence, however, to be published in Neuropharmacology, suggests the drug may have harmful consequences for the growing adolescent brain.

Hurd et al. (2013) reviewed data from more than 120 studies to examine the relationship between marijuana use and the teenage brain.

They find that marijuana may be harmful for a particular type of vulnerable adolescent, possibly leading to behavioural problems and addiction.

One of the study’s authors, Didier Jutras-Aswad explained:

“It is now clear from the scientific data that cannabis is not harmless to the adolescent brain, specifically those who are most vulnerable from a genetic or psychological standpoint. Identifying these vulnerable adolescents, including through genetic or psychological screening, may be critical for prevention and early intervention of addiction and psychiatric disorders related to cannabis use.”

While the research on the long-term effects of marijuana use, especially in vulnerable populations, is still relatively young, the warning signs are mounting:

  • A study of 1,037 individuals followed from birth found that persistent cannabis use was associated with cognitive decline over the years. More worryingly these problems continued even after drug use ceased (Meier et al., 2012).
  • A review of many studies on marijuana use has found that it can damage the encoding, storage, manipulation and retrieval mechanisms of memory (Solowij & Battisti, 2008).

Teenagers should be aware that, for those with particular vulnerabilities, like neuroticism and anxiety, marijuana is not as harmless as many assume.

Image credit: miggslives

Psychology in Brief: 6 Things We Didn’t Know Last Week (5 July 2013)

Make kids eat veg–How to be happy–Women sidestep maths stereotypes–Exercise protects brain from stress–The secrecy heuristic–Creative power of death.

Make kids eat veg–How to be happy–Women sidestep maths stereotypes–Exercise protects brain from stress–The secrecy heuristic–Creative power of death.

Six things we didn’t know last week from the world of psychology:

1. Make kids eat veg

The answer to getting kids to eat more veg, according to this study, is to have them read specially designed books on nutrition:

“These children […] more than doubled their voluntary intake of vegetables during snack time after the three-month intervention, whereas the amount that the control group ate stayed about the same.”

The books even outperformed more traditional approaches:

“When the conceptual program was pitted against a more conventional teaching strategy focused on the enjoyment of healthy eating and trying new foods, the results showed that both interventions led to increased vegetable consumption. Yet, the children in the conceptual program showed more knowledge about nutrition and a greater overall increase in vegetable consumption.”

2. How to be happy

What can we do to make ourselves happier? Some standard answers to this age-old question are in this BBC article which rounds up research from the World Happiness Database. Here are a few of the more eye-catching facts:

  • Men tend to be happier in a society where women enjoy greater equality.
  • Being considered good looking increases men’s happiness more than it does women’s.
  • You tend to be happier if you think you’re good looking, rather than if you actually, objectively speaking, are.
  • Having children lowers your happiness levels, but your happiness increases when they grow up and leave home.

For a more nuanced response, check out this Psychology Today article which praises being curious, finding meaning, celebrating success, taking risks and even embracing negative emotions:

“Happy, flourishing people don’t hide from negative emotions. They acknowledge that life is full of disappointments and confront them head on, often using feelings of anger effectively to stick up for themselves or those of guilt as motivation to change their own behavior. This nimble mental shifting between pleasure and pain, the ability to modify behavior to match a situation’s demands, is known as psychological flexibility.”

3. Women sidestep maths stereotypes

Neat research reported by the BPS Research Digest suggests women can get better at maths by pretending to be someone else. It’s all about sidestepping the stereotype that women are worse then men at maths:

“Overall, men outperformed women on the maths task. But women who took the test under someone else’s name, be it male or female, performed better than women who performed under their own name, and they did just as well as the men. The effect was stronger for women who cared more about maths.”

It would be interesting to see if the same effect held true for other types of stereotypes as well. Also, can we avoid our bugbears by pretending to be someone else?

4. Exercise protects brain from stress

A study on mice suggest another advantage of exercise: it makes the brain more resilient to stress. When researchers compared ‘runner’ mice with lazy-old-sit-around-the-house-doing-nothing-all-day-long-mice, they found that:

“…when mice allowed to exercise regularly experienced a stressor — exposure to cold water — their brains exhibited a spike in the activity of neurons that shut off excitement in the ventral hippocampus, a brain region shown to regulate anxiety.”

5. The secrecy heuristic

In a week when secret information once again hit the headlines, the NYT has a piece explaining the psychological shortcut or ‘heuristic’ that we tend to overvalue secret information. Psychological studies show that we automatically assume that information which is secret is more useful, important and accurate, although this isn’t necessarily the case.

“There are several reasons people might inflate the value of secret information. Sometimes, of course, secret information is genuinely of higher quality and affords real strategic advantage over public information. With that in mind, people may overgeneralize about the association between secrecy and quality to contexts where it is unwarranted.”

Which means that:

“If people exaggerate the value of secret information, they may too readily cede privacy in the interest of national security, even if they value that privacy highly.”

6. The creative power of death

If you’ve ever struggled to come up with a humorous caption for a cartoon or photo then perhaps what you need is an unconscious reminder of your own mortality. A new study had people trying to caption a cartoon from The New Yorker. The results suggested that:

“The captions written by individuals who were subconsciously primed with the word death were clearly voted as funnier by the jury. By contrast, the exact opposite result was obtained for the students who consciously wrote about death: their captions were seen as less humorous.”

But why is that?

“[a] substantive body of work suggests that humor functions as a natural and often effective means of down-regulating stressful or traumatic experiences.”

Perhaps this helps explain why Woody Allen is so funny.

Image credit: opensourceway

What “The Love Bridge” Tells Us About How Thoughts and Emotions Interact

How much control do you have over your emotions?

How much control do you have over your emotions?

Have you ever wondered why one person can speak in public without apparent nerves while another crumples under pressure?

Or why one elite athlete can shake off their nerves to win Olympic gold while another chokes?

Even with ample experience some people never seem to learn to cope with their emotions.

A key insight comes from a controversial psychology study carried out on a rickety bridge by Dutton and Aron (1973).

The love bridge

Men crossing the bridge were approached by an attractive woman who asked them to fill out a survey. The men were chosen because they were known to be nervous and this was exaggerated by the fact the bridge was swaying, its handrails were very low and there was a 230-foot drop to the river below.

After the men filled out the survey the woman gave them her number and said they could call her if they wanted the study explained in more detail.

A little further up men crossing another bridge were also being approached by a female researcher half-way across. The difference was that this bridge was sturdy, did not sway and was only a few feet above a small stream.

One of the key tests was: how many people would call up the attractive woman?

On the stable, safe bridge only 2 out of the 16 participants called. But, on the rickety bridge, 9 out of 18 called. So something about the rickety bridge made people more likely to call.

Fear transformed into attraction?

Dutton and Aron’s explanation was that it’s how we label the feelings we have that’s important, not just the feelings themselves. In this experiment men on the rickety bridge were more stressed and jittery than those on the stable bridge. And the argument is that they interpreted these bodily feelings as attraction, leading them to be more likely to make the call.

So: fear had been transformed into attraction.

This explanation is now controversial because subsequent studies have found that it’s rare to be able to reinterpret a negative emotion like fear into a positive one like attraction. Indeed some studies have specifically shown it can’t be done (Zanna et al., 1976).

However, we can reinterpret one positive emotion into a different positive emotion, and the same for negative emotions.

Certainly neutral bodily feelings can be interpreted either way. That’s why you can have a strong cup of coffee and the arousing effect might contribute to either elation or irritation, depending on how your day is going.

For a more extreme example think about the physical feeling you get on a roller-coaster. It’s not dissimilar from being mugged. You sweat, the knees wobble, the heart races and the bowels loosen. But one experience people will pay for and the other everyone would pay to avoid.

Of course the aftermath of each experience and the interpretation is quite different.

Going back to the original questions: the speaker who tries to reinterpret their nerves as excitement and anticipation is likely to do better than one who thinks of them as signals to run away and hide.

In the same way the athlete who deals with performance anxiety by trying to channel it into their race will do better than the athlete who allows it to overwhelm them.

Our emotions aren’t just things that happen inside us which bubble up from the deep over which we have little or no control. Like conscious thoughts their effect on our behaviour depends on how we interpret them.

Emotions aren’t the opposite of rationality, they are part and parcel of rationality and do respond to how we think. While Dutton and Aron’s experiment may have been flawed, the motivating idea behind their experiment was not: how we label and interpret our feelings can fundamentally change our experience of them.

Image credits: Jamie Hladky & _chrisUK

11 Goal Hacks: How to Achieve Anything

Goal-setting research on fantasising, visualisation, goal commitment, procrastination, the dark side of goal-setting and more…

Goal-setting research on fantasising, visualisation, goal commitment, procrastination, the dark side of goal-setting and more...

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What Alcohol Does to Your Mind: Attentional Myopia

Alcohol makes us attentionally ‘short-sighted’ — this helps explain its popularity and its variable effects.

Alcohol makes us attentionally ‘short-sighted’—this helps explain its popularity and its variable effects.

We tend to think of alcohol as primarily a disinhibitor, but this can’t really explain its varying effects. Sometimes it seems to make us loud and boisterous, sometimes quiet and contemplative, sometimes sad and depressed, along with all the shades and combinations of these, and other emotions.

Continue reading “What Alcohol Does to Your Mind: Attentional Myopia”

Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive

How pushing a thought out of consciousness can bring it back with a vengeance.

How pushing a thought out of consciousness can bring it back with a vengeance.

It sometimes feels like our minds are not on the same team as us. I want to go to sleep, but it wants to keep me awake rerunning events from my childhood. I want to forget the lyrics from that stupid 80s pop song but it wants to repeat them over and over again ad nauseam.

Continue reading “Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive”

12 Laws of the Emotions

Explore the psychology of the emotions with these 12 laws.

Explore the psychology of the emotions with these 12 laws.

We tend to think of our emotions as having laws unto themselves, but one psychological researcher has suggested that our emotions do follow certain general rules.

Professor Nico Frijda puts forward twelve laws of the emotions (Fridja, 2006). As with most laws there are exceptions, but these have been synthesised from years of psychological research and hold true much of the time.

1. The Law of Situational Meaning

The first law is simply that emotions derive from situations. Generally the same types of situation will elicit the same types of emotional response. Loss makes us grieve, gains make us happy and scary things make us fearful (mostly anyway – see all the other laws).

2. The Law of Concern

We feel because we care about something, when we have some interest in what happens, whether it’s to an object, ourselves, or another person. Emotions arise from these particular goals, motivations or concerns. When we are unconcerned we don’t feel anything.

3. The Law of Apparent Reality

Whatever seems real to us, can elicit an emotional response. In other words how we appraise or interpret a situation governs the emotion we feel (compare with laws 11 & 12). The reason poor movies, plays or books don’t engage us emotionally is because, in some sense, we fail to detect truth. Similarly it’s difficult to get emotional about things that aren’t obvious, right in front of us. For example grief may not strike when we are told about the death of loved one, but only once it becomes real to us in some way – say when we pick up the phone to call them, forgetting they are gone.

4, 5 & 6. The Laws of Change, Habituation and Comparative Feeling

The law of habituation means that in life we get used to our circumstances whatever they are (mostly true, but see laws 7 & 8). The emotions, therefore, respond most readily to change. This means that we are always comparing what is happening to a relatively steady frame of reference (what we are used to). As a result our emotions tend to respond most readily to changes that are relative to this frame of reference.

7. The Law of Hedonic Asymmetry

There are certain awful circumstances to which we can never become accustomed. If things are bad enough, it is impossible to escape negative feelings like fear or anxiety. On the other hand positive emotions always fade over time. No matter how much we are in love, how big the lottery win, or how copious the quantities of drugs consumed, positive emotions like pleasure always slip away.

8. The Law of Conservation of Emotional Momentum

Time doesn’t heal all wounds – or if it does, it only does so indirectly. Events can retain their emotional power over the years unless we re-experience and re-evaluate them. It’s this re-experiencing and consequent re-definition that reduces the emotional charge of an event. This is why events that haven’t been re-evaluated – say, failing an exam or being rejected by a potential lover – retain their emotional power across the decades.

9. The Law of Closure

The way we respond to our emotions tends to be absolute. They often lead immediately to actions of one kind or another, and they will brook no discussion (but see laws 10, 11 & 12). In other words emotional responses are closed to goals other than their own or judgements that can mitigate the response. An emotion seizes us and send us resolutely down one path, until later that is, when a different emotion sends us down the opposite path.

10. The Law of Care for Consequences

People naturally consider the consequences of their emotions and modify them accordingly. For example anger may provoke violent feelings towards another, but generally people refrain from stabbing each other willy-nilly. Instead they will shout, hit their head on the wall or just silently fume. Emotions may absolutely dictate a type of response, but people do modulate the size of that response (usually!).

11 & 12. Laws of the Lightest Load and the Greatest Gain

The emotional impact of an event or situation depends on its interpretation. Putting a different ‘spin’ on a situation can change the feeling. The law of the lightest load means people are particularly motivated to use re-interpretations to reduce negative emotions. For example we might reduce the fear of the credit crunch by generating the illusion we won’t be affected. The exact reverse is also true: whenever a situation can be reinterpreted for a positive emotional gain, it will be. For example anger can be used to make others back down, grief attracts help and fear may stop us rashly attempting difficult or dangerous tasks.

Exploring the emotions

You may not agree with all of these ‘laws’, for example this is quite an individually based account of emotion, and tends to downplay the social aspects of emotion. Nevertheless it is an excellent starting point which provides a very useful way of thinking about emotions, and helps pave the way for examining individual emotions.

[Image credit: Victor Bezrukov]

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