Human brain wired to be negative – Bing video
Psst! The Human Brain Is Wired for Gossip.
With the human brain always being filled with self-rage. Hearing gossip about people can change the way you see them — literally. Negative gossip actually alters the way our visual system responds to a particular face, according to a study published online by the journal Science. And it adds to the evidence that gossip helped early humans get ahead.
The findings suggest that the human brain is wired to respond to gossip, researchers say.
“Gossip is helping you to predict who is friend and who is foe,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University and also an author of the study. Barrett is part of a team that has been studying how gossip affects not just what we know about an unfamiliar person but how we feel about them.
The team has shown that getting secondhand information about a person can
have a powerful effect. But Barrett and her team wanted to answer another question:
Once hearsay has predisposed us to see someone in a certain way, is it possible that
we literally see them differently?
That may seem like a strange thing to ask. But it makes sense when you consider that
the human brain has a whole lot of connections between regions that process visual information and areas involved in our most basic emotions, Barrett says.
So the team brought in volunteers and had them look at faces paired with gossip. Some of these faces were associated with negative gossip, such as “threw a chair at his classmate.” Other faces were associated with more positive actions, such as “helped an elderly woman with her groceries.”
Participants in the study were shown a neutral face paired with (A) negative gossip,
(B) positive gossip, (C) neutral gossip, (D) negative nonsocial information, (E) positive nonsocial information, and (F) neutral nonsocial information. Science/AAAS
When the study participants viewed the faces again,
their brains were more likely to fix on the faces associated with negative gossip.
Then the researchers looked to see how the volunteers’ brains responded to the different kinds of information. They did this by showing the left and right eyes of each person very different images. So one eye might see a face, while the other eye would see a house.
These very different images because something called binocular rivalry.
The human brain can only handle one of the images at a time. So, it unconsciously tends to linger on the one it considers more important. And the researcher found that volunteers’ brains were most likely to fix on faces associated with negative gossip.
“Gossip doesn’t just influence your opinions about people, it actually influences how you see them visually,” Barrett says. The finding suggests we are hardwired to pay more attention to a person if we’ve been told they are dangerous or dishonest or unpleasant, Barrett says.
“If somebody is higher than you in the food chain, you want dirt about them.
You want negative information, because that’s the stuff you can exploit to get ahead.”
~ Frank McAndrew, Knox College psychology professor.
Other scientists say that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
“I was actually pretty excited to see this paper,” says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “For years, people like me have been saying that our intense interest in gossip is not really a character flaw.
It’s part of who we are.
It’s almost a biological event, and it exists for good evolutionary reasons.”
Even when primitive humans lived in small groups, they needed to know things like who might be a threat and who was after a particular mate, McAndrew says. And learning those things through personal experience would have been slow and potentially dangerous, he says.
So McAndrew says one shortcut would have been gossip.
“People who had an intense interest in that — that constantly were monitoring who’s sleeping with who and who’s friends with whom and who you can trust and who you can’t — came out ahead,” he says. “People who just didn’t care about that stuff got left behind.”
And it makes sense that our brains pay special attention to negative gossip, McAndrew says. “If somebody is a competitor or somebody is higher than you in the food chain, you want dirt about them,” he says. “You want negative information, because that’s the stuff you can exploit to get ahead.”
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Lack of sleep normally leads to a low mood – but in one case could have the opposite effect. (Picture: Getty) © Provided by Metro
Missing an entire night’s sleep can have a surprising benefit
Story by Anugraha Sundaravelu
Pulling an all-nighter once in a while might not be so bad for you, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that one night of total sleep deprivation enhanced certain brain pathways which correlated with better mood in some healthy and depressed individuals.
For most people, a lack of sleep leaves us crabby and unable to function properly the next day. However, for many patients with depressive disorder, sleep deprivation induces rapid and effective mood improvement.
The amygdala is a pivotal brain region affected by depression. This study showed that going without sleep for one-night enhanced amygdala connectivity to the anterior cingulate cortex in line with a mood boost for some people.
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The research team mapped brain region activity to see why some people
receive a healthy boost from what’s considered negative for most.
‘Our findings might have implications for the development of fast and unique antidepressant interventions,’ said the researchers who worked on the study.
In a sleep deprivation experiment conducted on 38 healthy individuals and 30 patients with major depressive disorder, along with 16 people who were allowed uninterrupted sleep, researchers explored the effects of total sleep deprivation (TSD) on mood and functional connectivity networks.
Pulling an all-nighter once in a while might not be so bad for you,
according to a new study. (Picture: Unsplash)© Provided by Metro
The experiments were performed for five consecutive days and participants underwent three MRI scanning sessions. Participants underwent three resting-state fMRI scans over the five days. The first was after a normal night’s sleep on the morning of day two as the baseline.
In the groups that were totally deprived of sleep, participants had their second brain scan on the morning of day three after no sleep. Then participants were allowed two nights of restful sleep and had their final brain scans on the morning of day five. All participants completed a standard psychological test evaluating mood swings, every two hours during days two to five.
As expected, most participants showed a worsening mood immediately after missing
a night’s sleep. Thirteen out of 30 (43%) depressed participants experienced mood improvement, and the remaining 17 participants saw their moods worsen or have no change after one night of sleep deprivation.
After one night of restful sleep, 20 major depressive disorder participants experienced mood improvement, and the remaining participants experienced mood worsening or no change.
The amygdala is a pivotal brain region affected by depression.
(Picture: Unsplash) © Provided by Metro
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The amygdala is the part of the brain with the core of fight or flight response,
processing fearful or threatening stimuli and signaling other parts of the brain for
a response action. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) brain region is involved with
both the ’emotional’ limbic system and the ‘cognitive’ prefrontal cortex.
Among other things, it plays a significant role in the ability to control and manage emotional states or affect regulation. The findings suggest that amygdala–ACC network connectivity may reflect the resilience to mood disruption after sleep loss and thus may be a potential target for antidepressant interventions.
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According to the researchers, one potential explanation for the individual differences in the effects of sleep deprivation might be in the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep duration. Major depression has previously been associated with abnormalities in REM sleep.
The absence of REM sleep with sleep deprivation is suspected to give some participants
a break to improve control of the amygdala, resulting in an antidepressant effect.
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