How stress can boost the immune system

The study's findings provide a thorough overview of how a triad of stress hormones affects the main cell subpopulations of the immune system. They also offer the prospect of, someday, being able to manipulate stress-hormone levels to improve patients' recovery from surgery or wounds or their responses to vaccines.

You've heard it a thousand times: Stress is bad for you. And it's certainly true that chronic stress, lasting weeks and months, has deleterious effects including, notably, suppression of the immune response. But short-term stress -- the fight-or-flight response, a mobilization of bodily resources lasting minutes or hours in response to immediate threats -- stimulates immune activity, said lead author Firdaus Dhabhar, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and member of the Stanford Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection.

And that's a good thing. The immune system is crucial for wound healing and preventing or fighting infection, and both wounds and infections are common risks during chases, escapes and combat.

Working with colleagues at Stanford and two other universities in a study published online June 22 inPsychoneuroendocrinology, Dhabhar showed that subjecting laboratory rats to mild stress caused a massive mobilization of several key types of immune cells into the bloodstream and then onto destinations including the skin and other tissues. This large-scale migration of immune cells, which took place over a time course of two hours, was comparable to the mustering of troops in a crisis, Dhabhar said. He and colleagues had previously shown that a similar immune-cell redistribution in patients experiencing the short-term stress of surgery predicts enhanced postoperative recovery.

In the new study, the investigators were able to show that the massive redistribution of immune cells throughout the body was orchestrated by three hormones released by the adrenal glands, in different amounts and at different times, in response to the stress-inducing event. These hormones are the brain's call-to-arms to the rest of the body, Dhabhar said.

"Mother Nature gave us the fight-or-flight stress response to help us, not to kill us," said Dhabhar, who has been conducting experiments for well over a decade on the effects of the major stress hormones on the immune system. Last summer, Dhabhar received the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology's Curt. P. Richter Award for his work in this area, culminating in the new study.

The findings paint a clearer picture of exactly how the mind influences immune activity. "An impala's immune system has no way of knowing that a lion is lurking in the grass and is about to pounce, but its brain does," Dhabhar said. In such situations, it benefits lion and impala alike when pathogen-fighting immune cells are in positions of readiness in such places as the skin and mucous membranes, which are at high risk for damage and consequent infection.

So it makes perfect evolutionary sense that predator/prey activity and other situations in nature, such as dominance challenges and sexual approaches, trigger stress hormones. "You don't want to keep your immune system on high alert at all times," Dhabhar said. "So nature uses the brain, the organ most capable of detecting an approaching challenge, to signal that detection to the rest of the body by directing the release of stress hormones. Without them, a lion couldn't kill, and an impala couldn't escape." The stress hormones not only energize the animals' bodies -- they can run faster, jump higher, bite harder -- but, it turns out, also mobilize the immune troops to prepare for looming trouble.

The response occurs across the animal kingdom, he added. You see pretty much the same pattern of hormone release in a fish that has been picked up out of the water.

The experiments in this study were performed on rats, which Dhabhar subjected to mild stress by confining them (gently, and with full ventilation) in transparent Plexiglas enclosures to induce stress. He drew blood several times over a two-hour period and, for each time point, measured levels of three major hormones -- norepinephrine, epinephrine and corticosterone (the rat analog of cortisol in humans) -- as well as of several distinct immune-cell types in the blood.

What he saw was a pattern of carefully choreographed changes in blood levels of the three hormones along with the movement of many different subsets of immune cells from reservoirs such as the spleen and bone marrow into the blood and, finally, to various "front line" organs.

To show that specific hormones were responsible for movements of specific cell types, Dhabhar administered the three hormones, separately or in various combinations, to rats whose adrenal glands had been removed so they couldn't generate their own stress hormones. When the researchers mimicked the pattern of stress-hormone release previously observed in the confined rats, the same immune-cell migration patterns emerged in the rats without adrenal glands. Placebo treatment produced no such effect.

The general pattern, Dhabhar said, was that norepinephrine is released early and is primarily involved in mobilizing all major immune-cell types -- monocytes, neutrophils and lymphocytes -- into the blood. Epinephrine, also released early, mobilized monocytes and neutrophils into the blood, while nudging lymphocytes out into "battlefield" destinations such as skin. And corticosterone, released somewhat later, caused virtually all immune cell types to head out of circulation to the "battlefields."

The overall effect of these movements is to bolster immune readiness. A study published by Dhabhar and his colleagues in 2009 in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery assessed patients' recovery from surgery as a function of their immune-cell redistribution patterns during the stress of the operation. Those patients in whom the stress of surgery mobilized immune-cell redistributions similar to those seen in the confined rats in the new study did significantly better afterward than patients whose stress hormones less adequately guided immune cells to appropriate destinations.

The mechanisms Dhabhar has delineated could lead to medical applications, such as administering low doses of stress hormones or drugs that mimic or antagonize them in order to optimize patients' immune readiness for procedures such as surgery or vaccination. "More study will be required including in human subjects, which we hope to conduct, before these applications can be attempted," Dhabhar said. Closer at hand is the monitoring of patients' stress-hormone levels and immune-cell distribution patterns during surgery to assess their surgical prognosis, or during immunization to predict vaccine effectiveness.

The study was funded by the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the DeWitt Wallace Foundation, the Carl & Elizabeth Naumann Fund and the National Institutes of Health. The medical school's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences also supported this work. Dhabhar's co-authors were statistician Eric Neri at Stanford, and neuroendocrinologists at Ohio State University and Rockefeller University.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided byStanford University Medical Center. The original article was written by Bruce Goldman.

Stanford University Medical Center (2012, June 21). How stress can boost immune system.ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 15, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2012/06/120621223525.htm

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Daily Stress Takes a Toll on Long-Term Mental Health

"Our emotional responses to the stresses of daily life may predict our long-term mental health, according to a new study published inPsychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Psychological scientist Susan Charles of the University of California, Irvine and colleagues conducted the study in order to answer a long-standing question: Do daily emotional experiences add up to make the straw that breaks the camel’s back, or do these experiences make us stronger and provide an inoculation against later distress?

Using data from two national surveys, the researchers examined the relationship between daily negative emotions and mental health outcomes ten years later.

Participants’ overall levels of negative emotions predicted psychological distress (e.g., feeling worthless, hopeless, nervous, and/or restless) and diagnosis of an emotional disorder like anxiety or depression a full decade after the emotions were initially measured.

Participants’ negative emotional responses to daily stressors — such as argument or a problem at work or home — predicted psychological distress and self-reported emotional disorder ten years later.

The researchers argue that a key strength of the study was their ability to tap a large, national community sample of participants who spanned a wide age range. The results were based on data from 711 participants, both men and women, who ranged in age from 25 to 74. They were all participants in two national, longitudinal survey studies: Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) and National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE).

According to Charles and her colleagues, these findings show that mental health outcomes aren’t only affected by major life events — they also bear the impact of seemingly minor emotional experiences. The study suggests that chronic nature of these negative emotions in response to daily stressors can take a toll on long-term mental health.

In addition to Charles, co-authors on the study include Jennifer Piazza of California State University, Fullerton; and Jacqueline Mogle, Martin Sliwinski, and David Almeida of Pennsylvania State University."

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For more information about this study, please contact: Susan T. Charles at scharles@uci.edu.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "The Wear and Tear of Daily Stressors on Mental Health" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 oramikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

Source: Association for Psychological Science

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Emotionally Intelligent People Are Less Good at Spotting Liars

People who rate themselves as having high emotional intelligence (EI) tend to overestimate their ability to detect deception in others. This is the finding of a paper published in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology on18 May 2012.

Professor Stephen Porter, director of the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law at University of British Columbia, Canada, along with colleagues Dr. Leanne ten Brinke and Alysha Baker used a standard questionnaire to measure the EI of 116 participants.

These participants were then asked to view 20 videos from around the world of people pleading for the safe return of a missing family member. In half the videos the person making the plea was responsible for the missing person's disappearance or murder.

The participants were asked to judge whether the pleas were honest or deceptive, say how much confidence they had in their judgements, report the cues they had used to make those judgements and rate their emotional response to each plea.

Professor Porter found that higher EI was associated with overconfidence in assessing the sincerity of the pleas and sympathetic feelings towards people in the videos who turned out to be responsible for the disappearance.

Although EI, in general, was not associated with being better or worse at discriminating between truths and lies, people with a higher ability to perceive and express emotion (a component of EI) were not so good at spotting when people were telling lies.

Professor Porter says: "Taken together, these findings suggest that features of emotional intelligence, and the decision-making processes they lead to, may have the paradoxical effect of impairing people's ability to detect deceit.

"This finding is important because EI is a well-accepted concept and is used in a variety of domains, including the workplace."

Source: British Psychological Society (BPS) [May 18, 2012]

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Psychologists reveal how emotion can shut down high-level mental processes without our knowledge

Psychologists at Bangor University believe that they have glimpsed for the first time, a process that takes place deep within our unconscious brain, where primal reactions interact with higher mental processes. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, they identify a reaction to negative language inputs which shuts down unconscious processing.

For the last quarter of a century, psychologists have been aware of, and fascinated by the fact that our brain can process high-level information such as meaning outside consciousness. What the psychologists at Bangor University have discovered is the reverse- that our brain can unconsciously 'decide' to withhold information by preventing access to certain forms of knowledge.

The psychologists extrapolate this from their most recent findings working with bilingual people. Building on their previous discovery that bilinguals subconsciously access their first language when reading in their second language; the psychologists at the School of Psychology and Centre for Research on Bilingualism have now made the surprising discovery that our brain shuts down that same unconscious access to the native language when faced with a negative word such as war, discomfort, inconvenience, and unfortunate.

They believe that this provides the first proven insight to a hither-to unproven process in which our unconscious mind blocks information from our conscious mind or higher mental processes.

This finding breaks new ground in our understanding of the interaction between emotion and thought in the brain. Previous work on emotion and cognition has already shown that emotion affects basic brain functions such as attention, memory, vision and motor control, but never at such a high processing level as language and understanding.

Key to this is the understanding that people have a greater reaction to emotional words and phrases in their first language- which is why people speak to their infants and children in their first language despite living in a country which speaks another language and despite fluency in the second. It has been recognised for some time that anger, swearing or discussing intimate feelings has more power in a speaker's native language. In other words, emotional information lacks the same power in a second language as in a native language.

Dr Yan Jing Wu of the University's School of Psychology said: "We devised this experiment to unravel the unconscious interactions between the processing of emotional content and access to the native language system. We think we've identified, for the first time, the mechanism by which emotion controls fundamental thought processes outside consciousness.

"Perhaps this is a process that resembles the mental repression mechanism that people have theorised about but never previously located."

So why would the brain block access to the native language at an unconscious level?

Professor Guillaume Thierry explains: "We think this is a protective mechanism. We know that in trauma for example, people behave very differently. Surface conscious processes are modulated by a deeper emotional system in the brain. Perhaps this brain mechanism spontaneously minimises negative impact of disturbing emotional content on our thinking, to prevent causing anxiety or mental discomfort."

He continues: "We were extremely surprised by our finding. We were expecting to find modulation between the different words- and perhaps a heightened reaction to the emotional word -- but what we found was the exact opposite to what we expected- a cancellation of the response to the negative words."

The psychologists made this discovery by asking English-speaking Chinese people whether word pairs were related in meaning. Some of the word pairs were related in their Chinese translations. Although not consciously acknowledging a relation, measurements of electrical activity in the brain revealed that the bilingual participants were unconsciously translating the words. However, uncannily, this activity was not observed when the English words had a negative meaning.

Source: Bangor University [May 08, 2012]

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Suppressing feelings of compassion makes people feel less moral

It's normal to not always act on your sense of compassion -- for example, by walking past a beggar on the street without giving them any money. Maybe you want to save your money or avoid engaging with a homeless person. But even if suppressing compassion avoids these costs, it may carry a personal cost of its own, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. After people suppress compassionate feelings, an experiment shows, they lose a bit of their commitment to morality. 

Normally, people assume that ignoring their compassionate feeling doesn't have any cost -- that you can just suppress your sympathy and walk on. But Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the authors of the paper, suspected that wasn't true. "Compassion is such a powerful emotion. It's been called a moral barometer," Cameron says. A sense of other people's suffering may even be the foundation of morality -- which suggests that suppressing that sense might make people feel less moral. 

The researchers showed each participant in their experiment a slideshow of 15 images of subjects including homeless people, crying babies, and victims of war and famine. Each participant was given one of three tasks. Some were told to try not to feel sympathy, some were told to try not to feel distress (an unpleasant, non-moral feeling), and the rest were told to experience whatever emotions come to them. The instructions were detailed, telling the people who were supposed to suppress an emotion exactly what that emotion was and that they should do their best to eliminate it. 

After each participant watched the slideshow, they were tested on whether they believed that moral rules have to be followed all the time and how much they cared about being a moral person. 

People who had suppressed compassion did, apparently, have a change in their sense of morality: they were much more likely to either care less about being moral or to say that it's all right to be flexible about following moral rules. Cameron thinks this is because suppressing feelings of compassion causes cognitive dissonance that people have to resolve by rearranging their attitudes or beliefs about morality. 

Choosing not to be kind is a common experience. "Many of us do this in daily life," Cameron says -- whether it's declining to give money to a homeless person, changing the channel away from a news story about starving people in a far-off land, or otherwise failing to help someone in need. "In past work, we've shown that people suppress their compassion when faced with mass suffering in natural disasters and genocide. To the degree that suppressing compassion changes how people care about or think about morality, it may put them more at risk for acting immorally." 

Source: Association for Psychological Science [March 15, 2012]

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Women happier in relationships when men feel their pain

Men like to know when their wife or girlfriend is happy while women really want the man in their life to know when they are upset, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association. 

The study involved a diverse sample of couples and found that men's and women's perceptions of their significant other's empathy, and their abilities to tell when the other is happy or upset, are linked to relationship satisfaction in distinctive ways, according to the article published online in the Journal of Family Psychology. 

"It could be that for women, seeing that their male partner is upset reflects some degree of the man's investment and emotional engagement in the relationship, even during difficult times. This is consistent with what is known about the dissatisfaction women often experience when their male partner becomes emotionally withdrawn and disengaged in response to conflict," said the study's lead author, Shiri Cohen, PhD, of Harvard Medical School. 

Researchers recruited 156 heterosexual couples for the experiment. Of those, 102 came from the Boston area and were younger, urban, ethnically and economically diverse and in a committed but not necessarily married relationship. In an effort to find couples who varied in the ways they resolved conflicts and controlled their emotions, they also looked for couples with a history of domestic violence and/or childhood sexual abuse. The remaining participants, from Bryn Mawr, Pa., were older, suburban and middle-class married couples with strong ties to the community. In all, 71 percent of couples were white, 56 percent were married and their average length of relationship was three-and-a-half years. 

Each participant was asked to describe an incident with his or her partner over the past couple of months that was particularly frustrating, disappointing or upsetting. The researchers' audio recorded the participant making a one- to two-sentence statement summarizing the incident and reaction and then brought the couples together and played each participant's statements. The couples were told to try to come to a better understanding together of what had happened and were given approximately 10 minutes to discuss it while the researchers videotaped them. Following the discussions, the participants viewed the videotape and simultaneously rated their negative and positive emotions throughout, using an electronic rating device. The device had a knob that moved across an 11-point scale that ranged from "very negative" to "neutral" to "very positive." 

Using these ratings, the researchers selected six 30-second clips from the videotape that had the highest rated negative or positive emotions by each partner. The researchers showed the clips to the participants and had them complete questionnaires about their feelings during each segment as well as their perceptions of their partner's feelings and effort to understand them during the discussion. They also measured the participants' overall satisfaction with their relationships and whether each partner considered his or her partner's efforts to be empathetic. 

Relationship satisfaction was directly related to men's ability to read their female partner's positive emotions correctly. However, contrary to the researchers' expectations, women who correctly understood that their partners were upset during the videotaped incident were much more likely to be satisfied with their relationship than if they correctly understood that their partner was happy. Also, when men understood that their female partner was angry or upset, the women reported being happier, though the men were not. The authors suggest that being empathetic to a partner's negative emotions may feel threatening to the relationship for men but not for women. 

The findings also show that the more men and women try to be empathetic to their partner's feelings, the happier they are. The authors suggest that this research should encourage couples to better appreciate and communicate one another's efforts to be empathetic. 

Source: American Psychological Association [March 05, 2012]

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What does love look like?

What does love look like? A dozen roses delivered on an ordinary weekday? Breakfast in bed? Or just a knowing glance between lovers? 

While outward displays of love are fairly easy to discern, a researcher in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences is taking a decidedly "inward" approach to documenting this most complex of human emotions. 

Sandra Langeslag, an expert in biological psychology, is using brain-imaging tools such as electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify and assess the neurocognition of romantic love. 

"I want to understand how the brain works when humans are attracted to one another," says Langeslag, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Laboratory of Cognition and Emotion. 

By associating specific brain impulses with psychological data related to romantic love, Langeslag is at the forefront of research bridging the gap between emotion -- a state of mind derived from one's circumstances -- and cognition, which is acquiring knowledge through thought and experience. 

"The traditional [scientific] view is that cognition and emotion are two different things," says Luiz Pessoa, a professor of psychology and director of the lab. "But we believe they interact to a great extent -- that there aren't two completely separate sets of brain areas related to each." 

Langeslag's research began a decade ago while still an undergraduate in her native Netherlands. She already had a strong interest in biological psychology, and decided to explore the biological aspect of romantic infatuation and attachment when she herself fell in love. 

"That got me to thinking, 'Wow, what's happening to me? Why do I feel the way I feel?'" she recalls. 

Langeslag wrote her master's thesis on the physiological traits of romantic love, conducting research on fellow students in the Netherlands who had identified themselves as being in love. The testing involved a battery of questionnaires combined with brain imaging data supplied by EEG, which measures electrical impulses, and fMRI, which measures precise areas of blood flow. 

By showing the test participants a series of images, whether of their beloved, a friend or a stranger, Langeslag was able to detect a specific brainwave pattern called P3 that represents "motivated attention." The P3 brainwave was very pronounced when subjects where shown pictures of their own partner, she says, leading her to believe that people pay close attention to their sweethearts, even in the face of distractions like friends dropping in or an attractive stranger entering their field of view. 

Langeslag did similar research while pursuing her doctorate in emotional memory, also in the Netherlands. Now at Maryland, she continues to analyze her data collected from overseas while she and Pessoa examine another aspect of cognition and emotion: how a person's reasoning ability is affected by negative stimuli, such as the threat of receiving an electrical shock. 

Ultimately, Langeslag believes her neurocognitive research on romantic love will help other scientists studying the biological aspects of romantic behavior. 

"Love is not a psychiatric disorder, but people that are in love are kind of crazy," she says. "Although we're not looking to cure anyone from being in love, we should continue to explore every aspect of this that we can." 

Author: Tom Ventsias | Source: University of Maryland [February 10, 2012]

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What Are Emotion Expressions For?

That cartoon scary face – wide eyes, ready to run – may have helped our primate ancestors survive in a dangerous wild, according to the authors of an article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors present a way that fear and other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person’s feelings to the people around him. 

The basic idea, according to Azim F. Shariff of the University of Oregon, is that the specific facial expressions associated with each particular emotion evolved for some reason. Shariff cowrote the paper with Jessica L. Tracy of the University of British Columbia. So fear helps respond to threat, and the squinched-up nose and mouth of disgust make it harder for you to inhale anything poisonous drifting on the breeze. The outthrust chest of pride increases both testosterone production and lung capacity so you’re ready to take on anyone. Then, as social living became more important to the evolutionary success of certain species—most notably humans—the expressions evolved to serve a social role as well; so a happy face, for example, communicates a lack of threat and an ashamed face communicates your desire to appease. 

The research is based in part on work from the last several decades showing that some emotional expressions are universal—even in remote areas with no exposure to Western media, people know what a scared face and a sad face look like, Shariff says. This type of evidence makes it unlikely that expressions were social constructs, invented in Western Europe, which then spread to the rest of the world. 

And it’s not just across cultures, but across species. “We seem to share a number of similar expressions, including pride, with chimpanzees and other apes,” Shariff says. This suggests that the expressions appeared first in a common ancestor. 

The theory that emotional facial expressions evolved as a physiological part of the response to a particular situation has been somewhat controversial in psychology; another article in the same issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science argues that the evidence on how emotions evolved is not conclusive. 

Shariff and Tracy agree that more research is needed to support some of their claims, but that, “A lot of what we’re proposing here would not be all that controversial to other biologists,” Shariff says. “The specific concepts of ‘exaptation’ and ‘ritualization’ that we discuss are quite common when discussing the evolution of non-human animals.” For example, some male birds bring a tiny morsel of food to a female bird as part of an elaborate courtship display. In that case, something that might once have been biologically relevant—sharing food with another bird—has evolved over time into a signal of his excellence as a potential mate. In the same way, Shariff says, facial expressions that started as part of the body’s response to a situation may have evolved into a social signal. 

Source: Association for Psychological Science [December 22, 2011]

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Ability to Love Takes Root in Earliest Infancy

The ability to trust, love, and resolve conflict with loved ones starts in childhood -- way earlier than you may think. That is one message of a new review of the literature in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. 

"Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behavior in romantic relationships 20 years later," says psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, the author, with University of Minnesota colleagues W. Andrew Collins and Jessica E. Salvatore. "Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren't aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind," about how you'll be treated or how worthy you are of love and affection. 

While those attitudes can change with new relationships, introspection, and therapy, in times of stress old patterns often reassert themselves. The mistreated infant becomes the defensive arguer; the baby whose mom was attentive and supportive works through problems, secure in the goodwill of the other person. 

This is an "organizational" view of human social development. Explains Simpson: "People find a coherent, adaptive way, as best as they can, to respond to their current environments based on what's happened to them in the past." What happens to you as a baby affects the adult you become: It's not such a new idea for psychology -- but solid evidence for it has been lacking. 

Simpson, Collins, and Salvatore have been providing that evidence: investigating the links between mother-infant relationships and later love partnerships as part of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. Their subjects are 75 children of low-income mothers whom they've been assessing from birth into their early 30s, including their close friends and romantic partners. When the children were infants, they were put into strange or stressful situations with their mothers to test how securely the pairs were bonded. Since then, the children -- who are now adults -- have returned regularly for assessments of their emotional and social development. The authors have focused on their skills and resilience in working through conflicts with school peers, teenage best friends, and finally, love partners. 

Through multiple analyses, the research has yielded evidence of that early encoding -- confirming earlier psychological theories. But their findings depart from their predecessors' ideas, too. "Psychologists started off thinking there was a lot of continuity in a person's traits and behavior over time," says Simpson. "We find a weak but important thread" between the infant in the mother's arms and the 20-year-old in his lover's. But "one thing has struck us over the years: It's often harder to find evidence for stable continuity than for change on many measures." 

The good news: "If you can figure out what those old models are and verbalize them," and if you get involved with a committed, trustworthy partner, says Simpson, "you may be able to revise your models and calibrate your behavior differently." Old patterns can be overcome. A betrayed baby can become loyal. An unloved infant can learn to love. 

Source: Association for Psychological Science [December 14, 2011]

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Was Darwin wrong about emotions?

Contrary to what many psychological scientists think, people do not all have the same set of biologically "basic" emotions, and those emotions are not automatically expressed on the faces of those around us, according to the author of a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. This means a recent move to train security workers to recognize "basic" emotions from expressions might be misguided. 

"What I decided to do in this paper is remind readers of the evidence that runs contrary to the view that certain emotions are biologically basic, so that people scowl only when they're angry or pout only when they're sad," says Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, the author of the new paper. 

The commonly-held belief is that certain facial muscle movements (called expressions) evolved to express certain mental states and prepare the body to react in stereotyped ways to certain situations. For example, widening the eyes when you're scared might help you take in more information about the scene, while also signaling to the people around you that something dangerous is happening. 

But Barrett (along with a minority of other scientists) thinks that expressions are not inborn emotional signals that are automatically expressed on the face. "When do you ever see somebody pout in sadness? When it's a symbol," she says. "Like in cartoons or very bad movies." People pout when they want to look sad, not necessarily when they actually feel sad, she says. 

Some scientists have proposed that emotions regulate your physical response to a situation, but there's no evidence, for example, that a certain emotion usually produces the same physical changes each time it is experienced, Barrett says. "There's tremendous variety in what people do and what their bodies and faces do in anger or sadness or in fear," she says. People do a lot of things when they're angry. Sometimes they yell; sometimes they smile. 

"Textbooks in introductory psychology says that there are about seven, plus or minus two, biologically basic emotions that have a designated expression that can be recognized by everybody in the world, and the evidence I review in this paper just doesn't support that view," she says. Instead of stating that all emotions fall into a few categories, and everyone expresses them the same way, Barrett says, psychologists should work on understanding how people vary in expressing their emotions. 

This debate isn't purely academic. It has consequences for how clinicians are trained and also for the security industry. In recent years there's been an explosion of training programs that are meant to help security officers of all kinds identify people who are up to something nefarious. But this training might be misguided, Barrett says. "There's a lot of evidence that there is no signature for fear or anger or sadness that you could detect in another person. If you want to improve your accuracy in reading emotion in another person, you have to also take the context into account." 

Incidentally, the theory that emotional expressions evolved for specific functions is normally attributed to Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. But Darwin didn't write that emotional expressions are functional. "If you're going to cite Darwin as evidence that you're right, you'd better cite him correctly," Barrett says. Darwin thought that emotional expressions – smiles, frowns, and so on –were akin to the vestigial tailbone – and occurred even though they are of no use. 

Source: Association for Psychological Science [December 13, 2011]

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