The Emotional Life Of Your Brain

Richard J. Davidson “The Emotional Life Of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live—and How you Can Change Them”  Hudson Street Press 2012, 252 pp.

Back in 2009 I reviewed a book by Sharon Begley, “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain”, Ballantine, 2007, which dealt with this very same subject.  Sharon has now participated in the editing of this current book along with the author and scientist, Dr. Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., who is responsible for the seminal work in this field that Sharon had written about in 2009.  Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.  He was named one of the hundred most influential people in the world by Time in 2006 and has a strong personal relationship with the Dalai Lama.

Davidson’s extensive lab work analyzing subject brains has documented that our personalities (how we respond to the world around us) are determined by six dimensions which he traces to measured intensities in our brains.   He has found that “each of us is a color-wheel combination of the Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self-Awareness, Context, and Attention dimensions of Emotional Style; a unique blend that describes how you perceive the world and react to it, how you engage with others, and how you navigate the obstacle course of life.” (P. 225).

Following is a review from Jenna Goudreau, Forbes Staff; http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/04/26/the-emotional-life-of-the-brain/2/

Unlike emotional states, fleeting reactions triggered by an experience and lasting only seconds, and emotional moods, feelings that persist for a few hours or even days, Davidson says it is our emotional styles that shape our lives and how we respond to the world around us. Emotional style, traced to specific brain signatures, is comprised of six dimensions. Where you fall on the spectrum of each, he says, determines how you will feel, think and react. 

Resilience: How slowly or quickly you recover from adversity, determined by signals between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

Outlook: How long you are able to sustain positive emotion, based on levels of activity in the ventral striatum, a region of the brain critical for generating a sense of reward.

Social Intuition: How adept you are at picking up social signals from the people around you, shaped by the interplay between the amygdala and fusiform regions.

Self-Awareness: How well you perceive physical signals that reflect your emotions, determined by the insula’s ability to interpret signals from the visceral organs.

Sensitivity to Context: How good you are at regulating your emotional responses depending on the context you find yourself in, driven by activity levels in the hippocampus.

Attention: How sharp and clear your focus is, regulated by the prefrontal cortex.

Davidson explains someone thought to be “agreeable” is likely highly sensitive to context with strong resilience and a positive outlook.  A “conscientious” person has well-developed social intuition and focused attention style, while an “impulsive” person may have low self-awareness and an unfocused attention style.

“There is no ideal formula for the best emotional style,” says Davidson. Being low on the social intuition spectrum might benefit a computer programmer, he notes, while someone who is unfocused might excel in a fast-based environment where multi-tasking is critical.

The neural pathways that determine our emotions are partly genetic. Even infants seem to vary in temperament–some curious and outgoing, others fussy and anxious. Yet Davidson says how much genes contribute varies from 20% to 60% (versus the 100% heritability of sickle-cell disease and the 0% heritability of religious affiliation). That means our environments and experiences can have sweeping impact on our emotional approach…

…Our default responses may be wired into us, but with time, effort and practice, you can change your brain to transform your life. “Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize, is the organ of change,” Davidson says. Thus, engaging regularly in positive activities over time will rewire the brain’s neural pathways and increase your positive feelings. He recommends the following exercises to develop your abilities in each of the six dimensions.

To Boost Resilience: For five to 10 minutes at a time, four or five times a week, visualize someone you know who is suffering—an ill neighbor or a friend struggling in her marriage–and on each inhalation, imagine that you are taking on that suffering. On each exhalation, imagine the suffering is transformed into compassion, which will help ease the person’s pain.

To Increase Positive Outlook: Fill your home and workspace with upbeat reminders of happy times, like photos of your family or vacations, and change the pictures every two weeks. Find opportunities to compliment others and make the effort to express gratitude often, by offering a warm thank you and writing down the things you appreciate in others and in your life.

To Become More Socially Intuitive: When in public, watch people’s body language and try to guess what they’re talking about and what emotions they are expressing. Start to also take notice of friends and colleague’s facial cues and body language and how it corresponds to their tone of voice.

To Enhance Self-Awareness: Initiate a daily mindfulness meditation. Choose a time when you feel the most awake and alert, sit upright, concentrate on your breathing, notice the sensations in your body and, if you become distracted, bring your focus back to your breath.

To Better Regulate Emotional Reactions: To identify what produces a strong reaction in you, regularly make a list of the specific events or behaviors from the day or week that triggered your response. Then spend about 15 minutes thinking about these behaviors while breathing deeply until you feel comfortable and more relaxed.

To Increase Focus and Attention: Spend 10 minutes every day sitting in a quiet room with your eyes open. Focus on an object (a lamp or a piece of art), keep your attention and eyes trained on it, and if your thoughts begin to wander, bring them back to the object.

“A lot of the work that we’ve done on strategies to change these styles was inspired by my relationship with the Dalai Lama, the inspiration for us taking meditation seriously,” says Davidson. “Well-being is strongly related to your emotional and physical health. If your emotional style is not working for you, the first and most important ingredient of change is awareness.”

My Notes:

Pg. 11:  Through mental training you can alter your patterns of brain activity and the very structure of your brain in a way that will change your Emotional Style.

Pg. 32:  People in cultures as different as New Guinea and Borneo, Japan and Brazil and the United States, formed the same facial expressions when they felt any of six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. 

Pg. 92: 

·        Shyness and sociability are related to where you fall on the Social Intuition dimension.

·        Emotionality is related to Resilience and Outlook.

·        A tendency to become distressed is related to Resilience.

·        Adaptability primarily reflects Sensitivity to Context.

·        Impulsivity is related to where you fall on the Attention dimension (being Unfocused tends to make you more impulsive).

·        Generally positive or negative emotions are products of the Resilience and Outlook dimensions.

Pg. 95:  The reason genetically based traits can be altered is that the mere presence of a gene is not sufficient for the trait for which it codes to be expressed.  A gene must also be turned on, and studies of both people and lab animals have shown that life experiences can turn genes on or off.  In the terms of the shop-worn debate called nature vs. nurture, nurture is able to act on nature.  Genes alone do not increase the risk of delinquency and criminality; that requires a bad environment too.

Pg. 108:  The fact that the correlation between behavioral inhibitions at age three and behavioral inhibitions at age nine was .03 means only one thing.  Behavioral inhibition is not a stable enduring trait.  Because a child at age three is shy or bold provides little predictive value for their future classification.

Pg. 140:  Dividing mental disorders into 365 distinct disorders (DSM 5^th edition planned for 2013 release) does not conform to how the brain functions.  A better approach is to place people along neuroscientifically grounded continua.

Pg. 142:  Many of the social signals we transmit—those of interest or boredom, surprise or pleasure or trust—come from around the eyes.  Because the muscles around the eyes convey true emotion, this region of the face is crucial to social communication.  Autistic children avoid looking at the eyes of a person they are talking to.  When they look into someone’s eyes their brains and bodies are flooded with messages that they interpret as threatening.  Only by looking away can they stop this onslaught. 

Pg. 174:  Cognitive-behavior therapy, which was developed in the 1960s, is at bottom a form of mental training.  It focuses on teaching patients to respond to their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in a healthy way. The idea is to reappraise dysfunctional thinking, helping people escape the pattern in which they think, The fact that she didn’t want to go out with me a second time means I am a total loser and will never be loved.  Patients learn to recognize their habit of catastrophizing, of turning everyday setbacks into calamities, and with these cognitive skills, they can feel sadness and experience disappointment without tumbling into the abyss of depression.