Kandel

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain

May 6, 2008

            I am writing about Kandel for my conference project, so I was curious to read his article this week.  I thought it was interesting how he noted that the growing field of psychopharmacology prompted the return to neurology in psychiatry.  It was also thought provoking to read, “behavioral disorders that characterize psychiatric illness are disturbances of brain function, even in those cases where the causes of the disturbances are clearly environmental in origin” (p.460).  Society, culture can cause disturbances in the way your brain actually functions.  As he states, “all sociology must to some degree be sociobiology This emphasizes Kandel’s integration of neurology and psychology.  The idea that learning can alter gene expression seems easy to conceptualize when I think about a fear response.  When I think about dysfunctional behavior learning, for example narcissism or domestic violence, actually changing neurons and gene expression I am repeatedly wowed. It is really amazing to me to think that everything thing one does has a neural pathway that can be altered by learning. Kandel continues, “There can be no changes in behavior that are not reflected in the nervous system” (p.464).  He also goes further to say that at times, these changes may not be detectable, but nonetheless they are occurring.  I liked his questions at the end which would work well with my conference work, regarding the different schools of though regarding consciousness. 

'Don't Cry, be a Man...it is Good for You!'

In the emerging field of emotion regulation, it has been taught that our emotions can be modulated, hopefully only after are they expressed and finally determined. I think Gross has done a good job in separating the terms of what an emotion, an emotional episode and a mood are from each other. It clarifies the picture but it also disintegrates it.
Can one definition exist without the other? Isn’t the primal question of what is an emotion further alienated from us by now defining how such emotional processes might shape the primal impulsive emotion? Can the term emotion be separated from the social, psychological, biological processes involved in attaining the final response? From this social perspective, does the definition of emotion and emotional process not seem interchangeable?
Gross has suggested a wide range of definitions to why we need to regulate our emotions, what are the processes and their benefit for our healthy acclimation in a social setting. Our capacity to adaptive, conscious coping process is the base for understanding emotional regulation. Other then my assumption that ‘let your feelings be your guide’ is the evolutionarily smarter mechanism it turns out that actually ‘he who keeps a cool head prevails’. Emotional adaptational intelligence can be quite necessary for us, not only in the context of social order, but in concern of mental health. Gross has noted a few plausible problems that might occur if non-regulation occurs: “emotion dysregulation is associated with clinical problems…sustained physiological response exceeding metabolic demand and immune suppression.” This lets us assume we should not blindly trust our emotions, which might harm us more in the long run then the suppression of the emotion at stake in the moment. His definition: “Emotion regulation must be inferred when an emotional response would have proceeded in one fashion but instead is observed to proceed in another.” Soon we discover that this is problematic as we need to first know the emotion which we will regulate; that does not necessarily always happen consciously but rather adaptively, and we may blur the two together, the initial emotion and the regulated response. (I wonder: If ego defenses occur out of awareness, why the term then? does not ‘id defenses’ suit it much better?)
He then proceeds into detail of four processes of emotional regulation:
1. Situation selection occurs when you select consciously in what situations you place yourself in, so you may avoid encountering unpleasant emotions associated with such kind of situations.
2. Situation modification is an unwanted situation in which emotional response might be provoked and we try to alter the situation in order to distance ourselves from the unwanted emotion.
3. Attentional deployment means literally shifting your emotional attention away from the situation that calls forth the unpleasant emotion; in other words distracting yourself from reality by concentrating on different tasks or ruminating in a subsequent emotional reality.
4. Cognitive change happens in the process of bonding meaning to a precept, elevating it to an emotional experience. For example when things go wrong one should ‘think positive’ this would be a cognitive reframing of a plausible unpleasant emotional situation, in order to decrease the overall negative emotions.
Last but not least he mentions, response modulation, which is directed at the ‘aftermath’ in emotional regulatory processes and tackles the response in an emotion generative situations. Regulating our behavior and response to the emotion is perhaps the most common process that is tangible to us; it is directed at modulation and emotional response, the final stages of James’s still accepted formula of emotional response tendency. It seems as though we feel we can execute more power over what we put out into the world rather then what we take upon us, in terms of emotions, emotional regulation and responding. The goal of this system is mostly context specific, matching our response to the expected social pattern.
Beyond the self-noted problematic data assimilation through interview and questionnaire methods, which is untrustworthy, there are many other unanswered perplexities in regards to this model of emotional regulation. The fact that it is all according to a ‘process model’ (emphasis mine) makes me suspicious. What about the idea that each individual has their own individual model for how they experience and deal with emotions in social context. Don’t we tend to generalize in a subject so subjective as emotional regulation? We have focused on the unwanted negative emotions but what happens when people are placed in situations in which they have to regulate positive emotions? Is this still healthy? Can such alteration eventually lead to a genetic change in emotional responsiveness? Will we ever reach a place of constant balance of emotions? Is this favorable? What would individuality mean and how could it be expressed if we would be at perfect harmonic, emotional reactivity? The question if emotional harmony can exist, might be answered once we learn to listen to our emotions, without immediately acquiring meaning to them. These multi-regulatory processes confined to a process-oriented approach is ought to bring us closer to understanding emotion regulation but I wonder if it really will, rather constrict us to a pattern, a diagram which makes a lot of sense and in a way seems oversimplified to me.
After Gross has spread the umbrella and clarified general formulation, social context of normal modes for regulation. We are invited through social neuroscience to look into the lens of specified disorders looking at structural detail and differences between individuals. The two papers are bound together through the idea that behavioral disorders are in turn the greater outcome of deregulation of emotions. By focusing on disorders it gives a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and contributes in our understanding of what a healthy mind requires in social adaptation.
Individuals as said, differ not only in efficiency of mechanisms, but in the amount of specific mental activations when such processes as emotional regulation should take place. People with behavioral disorders might have salient parts in their emotional regulatory mechanisms. Could one understand this idea through people that experience a ‘fit’ (= an uncontrollable emotional burst), individuals who in that moment cannot regulate their emotion, as the neural mechanisms are maybe unavailable?

Mikal Shapiro

I suppose it is only appropriate that in the final weeks of conference work, we would be studying emotion regulation. What better way to learn how to manage the end-of-year pressures? For example, according to Lerner et al., subjects expressing anger and disgust versus fear in response to stress-challenge tasks exhibited lower cortisol responses and blood pressures. The lesson here: Frustrated with schoolwork? Don’t get scared… Get pissed! It’s better for your health (Lerner et al, p. 258). I find it particularly funny that the “annoying” tasks used in the above experiment were math-related problems--recalling the arithmetic we were instructed to calculate during a presentation on memory (and the ensuing fear-filled facial expressions). It’s interesting to note that in the Lerner et al article, anger is associated with a greater sense of control over a stress-filled situation and is thus related to optimism; the stuff of progressive social uprising? Vive la Revolution!
When we discussed optimism in earlier readings, we discovered that feeling un-pragmatically positive could have negative effects on our ability to prepare and respond to real situations. Though this may be the case, “people often have positive illusions about themselves that maintain their mental health” (Cacioppo et al, pg. 106). Self-relevant processing (associated with m-PFC activation--a site related to moderating socially-appropriate actions and personality) often results in over-estimating our own abilities to the benefit of our actions. When we think we can do better than we really can, we often do better than we normally would (“Positive Illusions and Well-Being Revisited,” Taylor and Brown, 1994--this was cited in the Cacioppo et al article and I highly recommend it). “Realism” in our self-perceptions is not as important as a positive and consistent sense of “self.” Although the study of social neuroscience has in the past focused mainly on psychopathology, researchers “now pay greater attention to normative emotional regulatory processes” such as maintaining a solid sense of self as it relates to a larger community (Gross, p. 274). By developing a greater understanding of the biology behind socially relevant emotions (which emotions aren’t socially relevant?) and “healthy” emotion regulation, we can develop more clearly an understanding of the bi-directional communication between higher cognitive functions and deeper, less conscious processes of affectation. This understanding can, in turn, facilitate a more vital definition of the importance of emotions in our personal and social lives than psychology, philosophy, or biology can reveal alone. Reading articles about these cross-disciplinary approaches is inspiring, especially given the history of separation between the fields. Kandel’s article on the new directions of psychiatry reminded me of the fact that psychiatrists have suffered en masse from their own ego-driven defense mechanisms by “[spending] most of the decades of [psychoanalysis’] dominance… on the defensive” (p. 458). It’s amazing that he was encouraged not to read or do any research during his studies in psychiatry at Harvard!
Gross furthers the merging of disciplines by dialoging emotions in a way that allows other disciplines to participate in the conversation. By acknowledging the social, psychological and biological economics of emotional processes, he proposes that emotional “well-being may be most likely when we (a) regulate emotion antecedents so that we are emotionally engaged by those pursuits that have enduring value…” (p. 288). These “pursuits” are surely personally and culturally defined and depending on how and in which ways we spend our resources on them, we can either herald or negate (counter-intuitively) what gives our lives meaning. In developing a more sophisticated awareness of our emotional economics--biologically, psychologically, and socially--we can nurture Gross’ notion of a “cooperation between reason and emotion… helping us decide which battles are worth taking up and which to avoid” (p. 288) This kind of cognitive/emotion middle-road approach may pave the way for the multiple disciplines of social neuroscience to move forward with less contention--by contributing to a more inclusive, more effective feeling-brain language.

social neuroscience

Lily Thom
This week’s readings examined some of the ways that neuroscience might contribute to psychiatry and the emerging interdisciplinary field of social neuroscience. Cacioppo et al make an argument for neuroscience’s ability to contribute to our understanding of mental disorders. I thought the work effectively strikes a balance between social and biological factors and gets at the heart of how inextricable these two forces are in determining human behavior. They give an impressively extensive overview of neuroscience findings, which was very exciting because now we really have a context for how all these findings fit into what we have learned this semester.
Kandel’s look at interdisciplinary possibilities is very critical of the psychiatric side of the field, particularly because of its roots in psychoanalytic theory. However, Kandel does a good job of explaining the historical reasons why psychoanalysis split with biology and showing that this is not a predestined or natural divide for these fields. He emphasizes that this schism occurred in part because neural findings at the time were just not advanced enough to contribute to Freud’s emerging model in a meaningful. Yet with our current understanding of the brain and genetic expression Kandel proposes some ways in which the fields might find common interest. It’s interesting to imagine how Freud’s model of the mind might be different if he had access to the findings Kandel discusses. On the other hand, neuroscience’s model of the mind may also look different without Freud’s contributions on conscious and unconscious aspects of the mind.
Gross’ discussion of emotion regulation focuses on many distinctions between different aspects of emotional experience. I was intrigued by this comment: “I prefer to think of a continuum from conscious, effortful, and controlled regulation to unconscious, effortless, and automatic regulation (275).” Especially in light of the findings about unconscious emotion, I think that this is a helpful model. I think this speaks to LeDoux’s model by acknowledging a range of interactions between feelings and conscious appraisal. What do others think?
Lerner et al study the differences between indignation (anger and disgust) and fear in response to “annoyingly difficult stress-challenge tasks.” They found that fear displays were positively associated and indignation displays were negatively associated with cardiovascular and cortisol stress levels. They distinguished between indignation, as a situation-specific response and dispositional hostility as a stress disorder with comorbidities. Thus, it seems that in certain situations anger is an adaptive response that can mediate stress. This made me think back to a study that arose in my presentation about parent-child discussion of emotion. The study (Miller and Sperry, 1988) illustrated a difference in expressions of anger between inner-city, single working-class mothers and upper-middle class parents. For working-class mothers, anger was an important tool to teach children who needed to learn to face challenging situations throughout life. Lerner at al explain that indignation can confer a sense of control. This seems to allow the angry study participants to externalize the stressful, annoying aspects of situations rather than internalizing stress or blaming themselves. This may be a truly important skill for working-class people who may face unfair, discriminatory or dehumanizing situations on a daily basis. Interestingly, anger and indignation are usually a fundamental part of movements for social change and civil rights struggles. Perhaps this is because those emotions infer on oppressed people that sense of control that Lerner at al mention. However, Lerner et al point out that adaptive use of indignation may easily approach chronic hostility and its accompanying health disorders.