Your brain's green-eyed monster

Envy, is an unenviable feeling. Most people feel ashamed about it and refuse to acknowledge the feeling publicly. If you're envious of a co-worker's promotion or a friend's recent success you're probably likely to hide these feelings at the risk of social alienation. Often referred to as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy is not considered a virtuous emotion. And although there may be some evolutionary benefits to envy (I'll explain later), it usually is a destructive emotion that causes numerous problems (i.e. increase in low self-esteem and depression).

First I should alert you to a common misconception that envy and jealousy are the same thing, and thus can be used interchangeably. Actually jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have to another. For example, one might be jealous of losing his girlfriend to the good-looking guy across the street. Envy involves the pain and/or frustration of, say, not having the guy across the street's good looks. In the example above, you can see that envy involves two people, and jealousy typically involves three people.

In a very interested study on envy, researchers in Japan looked the at fMRI scans of individuals' brains as they were told to imagine scenarios where they were envious of various people. In it, researchers found that envy elicited brain activity in the dorsal anterior circulate-cortex (dACC), the area responsible for processing both physical and emotional pain. In another interested caveat, researchers also measured levels of schadenfreude, known as the feeling of pleasure at the envied one's misfortune. Again, this is probably not a feeling that most would willingly admit to, especially when it comes to friends, family, etc. However, it appears that the emotion is normal and quite common. When participants of the study imagined the downfall of the envied one, researchers found increased activation in the ventrial straitum which is rich with dopamine. Activation in this area produces a good feeling, meaning that the participants took pleasure in the imagined character's demise.

These feelings come from our tendency to measure our own success against someone elses. This is called social comparison. Social comparison is helpful because it can assist us in striving toward our goals. However it can also lead to anger and frustration at not reaching those goals due to envy. We only compare ourselves to people with comparable skill sets and abilities to our own. I will never be envious of LeBron James' ability to dunk a basketball and LeBron will never be envious of my "vast" knowledge in psychology. However, LeBron could be envious of Kobe Bryant. After all Kobe does have a couple of NBA championships under his belt. Perhaps Kobe is a bit envious of all the attention LeBron receives and takes pleasure in his having an off night. You see envy can only show up if we believe what the other person has is attainable.

So why do we feel envy if it's so destructive? Emotions can have both adaptive and maladaptive components. Negative emotions like anger and fear can compel us to act on a situation that may be harmful to us. Sadness can help us get through a period of morning. Of course we strive to feel positive emotions such as joy and love. Our hedonistic tendencies to approach these positive feelings drive our daily lives. However envy seems less functional given it's often toxic consequences. I encourage everyone to check out Robert Plutchik's (1980) list of basic emotions for more information. In it you'll see that he list eight basic emotions, in that there are secondary and tertiary emotions. Pluchik states that envy is a secondary emotion to anger. In other words a functional emotion can sometimes be followed by a dysfunctional or maladaptive emotion. There is nothing extraordinary about that really, however the envy researchers briefly pointed to a reason why envy may, in fact, be functional.

Like many psychological theories, the researchers' reasoning was born out of evolutionary psychology. They hypothesized that envy could drive animals to vie for the attention of their mothers, allowing them to obtain more food and attention, which would then increase their chances of survival. This certainly makes sense, though it would be difficult, if not impossible to measure. Luckily we've evolved to be much less instinctual and much more thoughtful. Meaning that although we might naturally feel envy, and even feel schadenfreude we can modulate those feelings by using self-control.

In pain and joy of even, the brain may play a role - The New York Times

Defending Social Neuroscience

Interesting read in Scientific American today. UCLA associate professor Matthew Lieberman defends the field of social neuroscience in his response to a recent paper criticizing the field. The paper, Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience, essentially describes SN as pseudo-science, stating, among other things that statistical results are "implausibly high." For the sake a full disclosure I should mentioned that I haven't read the offending article. Still I think that Lieberman's rebuttal is worth a read.

In Defense of the Value of Social Neuroscience - Scientific American

The NFL will not bow to your "science"

My parents bought a football helmet for me when I was a kid. It was an awesome, San Francisco 49ers helmet. I was so stoked that I didn't even care that I had to cut out the ear pads so the helmet could fit my enormous head. I wanted to hit someone every time I put it on ... hard. I was a kid, so I knew nothing about concussions or brain injuries. In fact, I was convinced that the players were cyborgs. Now I kind of wish they were. As much as I enjoy a good, hard hitting football game, I can't help but wonder about the punishment these guys put their brains through.

Here's something you might not know: You're brain doesn't enjoy being knocked up against your skull. It does things to it that, you know, make it not work right. Case in point, doctors at Boston University's School of Medicine last month found a sixth case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy out of six players who were tested for the conditions, according to an article in the New York Times. CTE is a condition that usually manifests itself in a number of debilitating ways, including demetia, decreased cognitive and motor skills, mood changes, and a number of other problems. Scientists say: "Holy Crap!" The NFL says: "Meh."

“I think that there are many questions that still are out there as to whether there is a kind of traumatic encephalopathy associated with football. I think we don’t know. I think that there is not enough scientific evidence to say that there is.” -- Dr. Ira Casson, co-chairman of an NFL panel that studies concussions.

So doctors are opening up former NFL players skulls, and finding that 50 year old guys have 80 year old brains and that doesn't concern you Dr. Casson?

OK. Let's just take a look at the statistics for a minute. Certainly six is not a very large sample size given the population of retired NFL players. Psychologist rarely look at entire populations, rather they select a psuedo-random number of indivuals from the population. This is called a sample. The article specifically mentions NFL veterans age 36-50. So let's say that the population of NFL veterans age 36-50 is 100 former players, and researchers decided to take a sample of six players or 6 percent of the sample population. After analysis they find that ALL six players are found to have the condition. Meaning that this disorder occured in 100 PERCENT of the sample group. This is what the BU doctors found. That is just r-i-d-ridiculous. I would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that most researchers strive for the 5-10 percent range, depending on the statistical test.

Just the drive the point home a little more ...
Imagine that the CDC comes to your neighborhood of about 100 people. They randomly test 10 percent of the population for a fatal illness, and the ENTIRE sample size has this illness. That is cause for alarm. Yet the NFL takes the position that these findings are not significant enough to warrant any action on their part, i.e. amending the information they give players regarding head injuries to include warnings about long-term, possibly life-threatening brain damage. The league currently informs players that repeated brain trauma does not cause long-term damage if treated immediately and properly.

Honestly, I'm not sure that NFL players would even take this into consideration. So many former players talk passionately about the game, saying they would take every hit again. I guess there isn't a whole lot the league can do about that attitude. Still, that's no excuse not to fully educate players on the risks they take every time they step on the field.

New Sign of Brain Damage in the N.F.L. -The New York Times

Infant-parent psychotherapy programs for high-risk mothers

As promised, not all post will be about social neuroscience. The Sunday NY Times featured a story on a clinic in New York that offers mental health services to at-risk new mothers and their babies. The article discusses several women who experienced numerous mental health problems before, during and after pregnancy. Psychologists help these new mothers cope with the pressures of parenthood and with their often difficult pasts that typically include physical and psychological abuse.

This work is extremely important for a couple of reasons. One, high-risk parents often produce high-risk children, and that will have a negative affect on society for years to come. Second, when we think about this in terms of synaptic plasticity (see previous blog post), it makes sense that these children who are raised under such stressful conditions are more likely to be depressed, anti-social, and generally unhealthy children.

The New York Times: For Mother and Child at Risk, Care that Includes a Psychologist

Welcome!

If you're reading this it's probably for one of two reasons: I threatened begged you, or you have at least a passing interested in brain science. Hopefully it's the latter. In this blog I hope to highlight some of the great research that is being done in the area Social Neuroscience, Social Psychology, and Social Cognition. I may include posts on other topics in psychology from time to time as well if I find them to be particularly interesting.

So many of you are wondering just what the heck is Social Neuroscience. In a nutshell, social neuroscience is basically a combination of social psychology (the study of how individuals and groups interact) and neuroscience (the scientific study of the nervous system). As social neuroscientists, we study how biological processes affect behavior and visa versa. Now I should be clear that I am merely a novice in this area. I'm doing research in this area while I pursue my bachelor's degree in psychology. I plan to study social neuroscience in grad school next fall, so don't be fooled. I am no expert! Therefore I will be referring to several experts in this field as we go on this neural journey. Some names that you'll see on this blog a lot are NYU professor David Amodio, Ph.D., and University of Chicago professor John Cacioppo, Ph.D. Both have published numerous studies in the area of race-based prejudice. Patricia Devine, Ph.D., from the University of Wisconsin is another well-known social neuroscientist, along with Eddie-Harmon Jones, Ph.D., of Texas A&M. In my early posts you'll read a lot about Dr. James Sidanius. Sidanius is a social psychologist who, along with Dr. Felicia Pratto developed the concept of Social Dominance Orientation.

Social dominance is a measure of social attitudes, specifically egalitarian or anti-egalitarian beliefs. It proposes that certain individuals will tend to prefer hieracrchies because these individuals often benefit from that social order. Sidanius and Pratto (2001) offer many reasons for the existence of these hierarchies and how those at the top perpetuate anti-egalitarianism. I will discuss SDO in greater detail over the coming weeks.

While Sidanus and Pratto (2001) offter a more social view of discrimination, researchers at Harvard began to look at the nervous system and it's role in both passive and active prejudice. Social psychologist Anthony Greewnwald, Debbie McGhee, and Jordan Schwartz developed the Implicit Associations Test to measure the unconscious processes that effect our behavior. Researchers developed this as a means to test implicit bias, since individuals are unlikely to explicitly state that they have bias against any particular group. The test measures response times to images of people from various social groups. I won't go into the dirty details of the study, I will, however encourage you to take the test. I think it's just one of those things you have to experience yourself.

I fall somewhere in between SDO and IAT. I believe that through evolutionary processes, we are hard-wired to adapt to certain things in the environment. We are programmed to seek out things perpetuate our existence (sex, food, sleep), and to avoid things that are bad for us, (poison, snakes, etc.). An aversion to poison seems to come naturally. Poison tastes bitter, so we avoid it. One can easily see how early humans developed taste receptors that could discriminate between poisonous plants and nutritious ones. Snakes are another example, but not quite as clear cut. Are we afraid of snakes because that fear is somehow innate, or are we socially conditioned to fear snakes? I think most people take the position that both explanations are true. So if that's the case, could we apply this conventional wisdom to our interactions with people? If so, what does that mean for human relations? Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb (1949) put forth a theory on synaptic plasticity: the idea that the more certain neural actions are preformed, the more they are reinforced. For example. Remember when you first started to drive? Your jerking and clumsy transitions from the break to gas pedals where probably enough to give your instructor the dry heaves. The movements involved in driving are very complicated. It's something our brain isn't used to preforming initially. From adjusting your mirror, to putting the car into drive and stepping on the gas pedals, it takes a while for this to become a seamless interaction of movements. But eventually it does, and you don't even have to think about what it took for you to go from leaving the driveway at your home to entering the office parking lot.

So what does this have to do with prejudice? We all know about the often negative portrayals of minority groups in the media. Having these images enter your brain on a regular basis is a way to socially condition an person to equate "black male," with "gun," or "woman" with "weak." If our brain can seamlessly associated "red light" with "stop," it makes sense that our brains can also make race or gender-prejudiced associations, and that these associations are not always conscious.

This is where my research interest lie. I want to look further into these associations, not because I want to prove that we're all hopeless bigots. To the contrary actually. If the brain can create these associations, we can also create new ones. That's the beauty of synaptic plasticity. But to do that we must know what's going on neuronally. Hopefully this blog will help -- just a little bit -- in that process.