“With an estimated 44 million adults affected, chances are that you know someone with a mental disorder. Many scientists believe that a variety of these brain ailments arise from complicated interactions between multiple genes and the environment. Now new technologies, including a tool known as a microarray that allows researchers to evaluate thousands of genes in a single experiment, are helping push the field forward. In examples of recent work, microarray studies provided insights into how sets of genes link to depression and schizophrenia. Altogether, new findings are helping researchers better understand the underpinnings of mental disease so they can develop improved treatments.” Brain Briefings

(Society for Neuroscience)

Over Time, People ‘Catch Mood’ of Friends, Lovers

It seems that couples and roommates tend to have similar emotional reactions as time goes by. So if your roommate or lover laughs out loud at movies or gets weepy over hurt puppies, you may too — given time.

This so-called emotional convergence seems to be beneficial to friendships and romantic relationships, making them stronger and longer lasting.

Everyday experience suggests that people are capable of “catching” the mood of a spouse or friend, said lead author Dr. Cameron Anderson. But he told Reuters Health that he was surprised by the extent to which peoples’ emotions converged in his study, which is reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Yahoo! News

As the article points out, however, an alternative explanation is that similarity of emotional reactions may predispose for relationship persistence. The study did not demonstrate that reactions become more similar over time, longitudinally. If its hypothesis is true, however, one way to think about this is to reconceptualize emotions as properties of the interpersonal field rather than the individuals. Not a novel concept in psychiatry; for example, it is the grounding of many family interaction theories with enduring psycholigical pedigree, and of revered psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullvan’s interpersonal psychiatry. This way of thinking about things also resonates with the new neurobiological findings about our emotional resonance circuitry to which I point in the post below this one.

Curious why it is a visceral human tendency to ‘own’ emotions as internal rather than conceive of them interpersonally. One possibility — it certainly seems important to draw distinct boundaries of the self and sort phenomena into definitively into ‘mine’ and ‘not-mine.’ There are serious consequences of the failure to do that. I have long argued that extreme social dysfunction such as schizophrenia is first and foremost a disorder of this boundary-drawing function, which by the way has its own neurobiological circuitry. Not agreeing with the consensus notions of where you end and the rest of the world begins is a profoundly alienating and alarming existential state.

Misleadingly vague title for a very important finding.

Preliminary observations of stroke patients with problems relating emotionally to others suggest that in order to feel empathy, people must be able to imitate the actions of others. In other words, to understand what others are feeling, you must put yourself physically in their shoes.

Stroke can damage any area of the brain, but the patients in question all have lesions to one particular brain structure – the insula, which lies between the frontal and temporal lobes on both sides of the brain.

On tests of their ability to gauge the emotions being experienced by people from their facial expressions in photographs, these patients perform very poorly compared to healthy controls.

…(I)f the insula does turn out to be the key to their emotional deficit, it would fit very well with data … on the neural correlates of empathy.

Understanding the linkages between brain and social behavior is one of the frontiers of neuroscience with immense implications. A crucial concept only recently elucidated is that of “mirror neurons”, of which longtime FmH readers will know I have previously written. Here’s a link to Ramachandran’s discussion of the notion several years ago at The Edge.

“With an estimated 44 million adults affected, chances are that you know someone with a mental disorder. Many scientists believe that a variety of these brain ailments arise from complicated interactions between multiple genes and the environment. Now new technologies, including a tool known as a microarray that allows researchers to evaluate thousands of genes in a single experiment, are helping push the field forward. In examples of recent work, microarray studies provided insights into how sets of genes link to depression and schizophrenia. Altogether, new findings are helping researchers better understand the underpinnings of mental disease so they can develop improved treatments.” Brain Briefings

(Society for Neuroscience)