Some interesting research I've read
Depressed people are normally thought of as being somewhat disengaged
from the rest of the world, but psychologists at Queen's University in
Canada have found that mildly depressed students actually have a
heightened ability to detect other people's emotions.
Kate Harkness and colleagues asked 43 depressed and non-depressed
students to identify people's emotions from pictures that showed only
the eye region of their faces. The 16 students who were classified as
mildly to moderately depressed - based on their score on the Beck
Depression Inventory - performed significantly better (78 per cent
correct) on this emotion-recognition test relative to the 27
non-depressed controls (69 per cent correct). The depressed students
didn't take any longer over their answers and their superior performance
was not due to their being more sensitive to negative emotions only.
Also, there was no difference between the groups on two control tests,
one of which involved detecting people's gender just from pictures of
their eyes.
The researchers replicated their finding in a second experiment that
involved a larger sample of 81 students, and which controlled for the
influence of anxiety using the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire.
Again, students classified as mild to moderately depressed were better
at recognising the emotions shown in pictures of people's eyes.
Understanding other people's feelings requires two stages, the authors
said - the ability to detect emotions, followed by the ability to
interpret and reason about those emotions. The researchers believe
depressed people have an enhanced ability for the first stage paired
with negatively biased functioning in the second stage.
".hypersensitivity to others' emotional states may have pathological
implications simply because by being more sensitive, dysphoric and
depressed individuals have more opportunities to deploy their negative
biases in interpreting fleeting emotional reactions", the researchers said.
For the first time anywhere in the world, psychologists at
California-based company Omneuron and Stanford University have
demonstrated that people can be taught how to reduce their experience of
pain with the aid of real-time images of their brain activity.
Healthy participants had a painful stimulus applied to the back of their
hand. At the same time they learned to use mental strategies - such as
concentrating on another part of their body, or viewing the pain as a
neutral experience - to control levels of activity in their anterior
cingulate gyrus (a brain area known to be involved in pain perception),
displayed to them live using real-time functional magnetic resonance
imaging. All the while they provided a continuous rating of how painful
the stimulus was.
The researchers found that the pain was perceived as being significantly
less intense when the participants reduced the activity in their
anterior cingulate gyrus compared with when they increased activity in
that region. A similar effect was observed when the experiment was
repeated with patients suffering from chronic pain - they were able to
reduce their pain by lowering activity in their anterior cingulate.
A number of control conditions supported the researchers' interpretation
of the results. The same control over pain wasn't shown when a different
set of participants were taught the same mental strategies but without
the real-time brain images; nor when participants used real-time brain
images to learn to control activity in a part of the brain (the
posterior cingulate) not involved in pain perception; nor when
participants were given false real-time feedback of activity in their
anterior cingulate. "Any effects of expectation or suggestion created by
the displays themselves or by the subjects' perception of their control
over brain activation were identically matched in these control
subjects, who nonetheless did not show an improvement in their control
over pain", the researchers said.
Now that this study has demonstrated the feasibility of using real-time
brain images to help people learn to control an aspect of their
behaviour or mental experience, more work is planned to test the
potential benefit of this intervention with other conditions. The study
also raises interesting philosophical questions. Did the images of the
participants' own brains allow them to master their thoughts, or did
their mental strategies allow them to control their brain activity?
Which was the means and which was the ends to controlling their pain?
from the rest of the world, but psychologists at Queen's University in
Canada have found that mildly depressed students actually have a
heightened ability to detect other people's emotions.
Kate Harkness and colleagues asked 43 depressed and non-depressed
students to identify people's emotions from pictures that showed only
the eye region of their faces. The 16 students who were classified as
mildly to moderately depressed - based on their score on the Beck
Depression Inventory - performed significantly better (78 per cent
correct) on this emotion-recognition test relative to the 27
non-depressed controls (69 per cent correct). The depressed students
didn't take any longer over their answers and their superior performance
was not due to their being more sensitive to negative emotions only.
Also, there was no difference between the groups on two control tests,
one of which involved detecting people's gender just from pictures of
their eyes.
The researchers replicated their finding in a second experiment that
involved a larger sample of 81 students, and which controlled for the
influence of anxiety using the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire.
Again, students classified as mild to moderately depressed were better
at recognising the emotions shown in pictures of people's eyes.
Understanding other people's feelings requires two stages, the authors
said - the ability to detect emotions, followed by the ability to
interpret and reason about those emotions. The researchers believe
depressed people have an enhanced ability for the first stage paired
with negatively biased functioning in the second stage.
".hypersensitivity to others' emotional states may have pathological
implications simply because by being more sensitive, dysphoric and
depressed individuals have more opportunities to deploy their negative
biases in interpreting fleeting emotional reactions", the researchers said.
For the first time anywhere in the world, psychologists at
California-based company Omneuron and Stanford University have
demonstrated that people can be taught how to reduce their experience of
pain with the aid of real-time images of their brain activity.
Healthy participants had a painful stimulus applied to the back of their
hand. At the same time they learned to use mental strategies - such as
concentrating on another part of their body, or viewing the pain as a
neutral experience - to control levels of activity in their anterior
cingulate gyrus (a brain area known to be involved in pain perception),
displayed to them live using real-time functional magnetic resonance
imaging. All the while they provided a continuous rating of how painful
the stimulus was.
The researchers found that the pain was perceived as being significantly
less intense when the participants reduced the activity in their
anterior cingulate gyrus compared with when they increased activity in
that region. A similar effect was observed when the experiment was
repeated with patients suffering from chronic pain - they were able to
reduce their pain by lowering activity in their anterior cingulate.
A number of control conditions supported the researchers' interpretation
of the results. The same control over pain wasn't shown when a different
set of participants were taught the same mental strategies but without
the real-time brain images; nor when participants used real-time brain
images to learn to control activity in a part of the brain (the
posterior cingulate) not involved in pain perception; nor when
participants were given false real-time feedback of activity in their
anterior cingulate. "Any effects of expectation or suggestion created by
the displays themselves or by the subjects' perception of their control
over brain activation were identically matched in these control
subjects, who nonetheless did not show an improvement in their control
over pain", the researchers said.
Now that this study has demonstrated the feasibility of using real-time
brain images to help people learn to control an aspect of their
behaviour or mental experience, more work is planned to test the
potential benefit of this intervention with other conditions. The study
also raises interesting philosophical questions. Did the images of the
participants' own brains allow them to master their thoughts, or did
their mental strategies allow them to control their brain activity?
Which was the means and which was the ends to controlling their pain?