Optimism and Cognition

I found your comments about emotions and memory very interesting. Does an optimistic mindset have anything to do with cognitive ability?

In the past, although anecdotal studies have linked optimism with positive health behaviors, research was not specifically geared to evaluating cognition in older adults. Scientists decided to evaluate data from the Health and Retirement Study in an attempt to determine whether optimism was associated with cognitive impairment in older adults. The researchers discovered that an optimistic mindset was prospectively linked with a reduced risk of developing cognitive impairment. Therefore, developing an optimistic mindset may be one way to slow down if not prevent cognitive impairment in older adults. The questions then become individually: Do you look at the glass half full or half empty? (There really is no half empty glass, only half full.) Do you look for the positive aspects in any given situation or immediately identify whatever is negative? Do you put on a happy face each morning as you begin the day? 

Interrupters and Motivators

I heard a talk show host mention emotional interrupters and motivators. I couldn’t listen to the end. Can you explain those for me?

 Shame and Guilt are often referred to as emotional interrupters. They get your attention. They may be helpful and healthy or false and unhealthy. Typically, they are learned reactions, some as far back as very early childhood. Fortunately, because they are learned, you can learn healthier reactions. Surprise and Disgust are emotional motivators that may arise with any core emotion. They can increase not only the strength of the emotion but also the resulting action or behavior you choose to exhibit. They also can be learned reactions, some carried forward from the past 3-4 generations and passed on to the next 3-4 generations. Emotional Intelligence is designed to help you build skills to manage emotions and feelings more effectively. EQ can also help you differentiate between false shame and guilt and healthy shame and guilt and choose healthier responses and behaviors. EQ can help you to define how you choose to respond to surprise and disgust and the behaviors you want to exhibit.

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Where Feelings Come From

Think of feelings as the conclusions or interpretations the brain makes about what the emotion means, what it might be trying to communicate, and its relative importance to you. A collection of brain structures work together to create a feeling: some in the brain stem and in the cerebral cortex including the insular cortex. You are not responsible for every feeling that arises. You are responsible for the feelings you choose to hang onto and act on because your brain created them. Since feelings always follow thoughts, to change the way you feel, change the way you think. There are hundreds of feeling words for a relatively small number of pure emotions. Happy, elated, delighted, and euphoric for joy; terror, panic, worry, and anxiety for fear; rage, fury, resentment, and irritation for anger; and miserable, unhappy, depressed, and sorrowful for sadness. 

What Emotions Do

Emotions are designed to:

1.     Get your attention

2.     Connect the conscious with subconscious

3.     Provide you with information

4.     Give you energy to take action

5.     Help you make moral and ethical decisions

6.     Bind your perceptions to your conscious beliefs, making

what you think about seem even more real at the time

Uterine scans of fetal facial expression registered at least joy, anger, fear, and sadness. The left  hemisphere lights up in the presence of joy; the right hemisphere is activated with the protective emotions of anger, fear, and sadness.

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Emotions & Feelings Simply Put

Can you give me a more simple explanation of the difference between emotions and feelings?

 Emotions are measurable physical responses in the brain and body that are triggered by internal or external events. Compare them with an orange highway sign alerting you that something is changing ahead that may require you to alter your lane or speed. Each cord emotion comes with differing gestures, postures, behavioral patterns, memories, facial expressions, and physiological markers. The pre-frontal areas are believed to help moderate the expression of emotions. Feelings are the subjective conclusions or explanations created by the brain to help explain what the emotion might be trying to communicate and its relative importance to you. This process likely occurs in the pre-frontal cortex located directly behind the forehead. If you want to feel a different feeling, you have the ability to change a feeling by changing your thoughts.

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Emotions as Alterations

What really is an emotion?

 Dr. Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, was the winner of the 2010 Honda Prize for most important international awards for scientific achievement. A renowned neuroscientist, he heads the USC Brain and Creativity Institute. Damasio has explained the difference like this. An emotion consists of a very well-orchestrated set of physical changes that arise in the brain and body, the general purpose of which is to make life more survivable by managing a danger or an opportunity or something in between. It is a process set in one’s genome and it’s going to be similar across even other species. You may smile and a dog may wag its tail, but in essence, each represents a program in the brain and body that is represent a similar process. Emotions are designed to get your attention and give you information, which gives you an opportunity to decide what, if any, behavior you choose to exhibit in response.

PAC & Brain Emotion Signatures

Using fMRI and MVPA scanning, researchers at the University Medical Center of Geneva in Switzerland were able to identify signatures of emotion in the primary auditory cortex (PAC) of study participants. They were able to match distinct patterns of brain activity as different emotions were heard by the brain. This technique enabled them to identify which emotion was being heard and processed in the brains of the participants from other alternatives. This discovery pointed out that the PAC is not just a sensory region of the brain but also plays a specialized role in the processing of distinct emotions. Understanding the emotions of others is vital to one’s social skills. The authors hope these findings may help unravel the distorted brain pathways that may manifest as unhelpful emotional responses in some psychiatric disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, autism, depression, personality disorders).

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