This week’s readings focus primarily on the degree of impact environment has on both mental and physical illnesses/dysfunctions. To what degree can our emotional and physical well-being be influenced by self-control and environment? And to what degree is it predetermined?
Gross speaks of emotion-regulation and of how people manage their emotions. He is saying that we have the ability to regulate our emotions, to choose our ‘emotional battles’ for what’s better in the long run, and to modulate emotion to “optimize human functioning.” While I agree with him to a certain degree, ideally, I agree with Adler and co. in stating that emotional well-being is largely determined by our perception of control and resources available to us to alleviate our concerns.
Adler and co. believe that well-being is heavily shaped by environmental factors. Socio-economics have an alarming influence on wellbeing. It has been shown that people of lower socioeconomic standing and lower hierarchal positions demonstrate more “mortality and morbidity,” and often have less control and opportunity in ameliorating their situation. Education, living conditions, access to health care, levels of stress and mobility all have an influence on physical and mental health. Thus, poverty and social standing (which is more often than not determined at birth) can strongly determine a person’s predispositions.
It is not to say, that do not have different levels of emotions. Some of us, like Kabbaj’s rats, are HR while others are LH. However, he stresses, “Behavior depends on the environmental conditions, the stressor severity and the animal’s coping mechanisms,” (1010). In turn, our behavior often reflects and is exemplified by neurological blueprints for our behavior, in this case: differing levels of 5-HT, glutocorticoid receptors, decreased D2 receptors and increased D1 receptors.
Just as neurological activity reflects behavior in rats, they do so also in humans. The inability for autistic kids to rely on their intuition and their engagement in slow deliberation may be reflective of neurological structures. In Allman & co’s article, they found that VENS might be partially responsible for the defective intuition that autistic kids often have. They are found mostly in the right hemisphere and may be related to the right-hemisphere dominant social-emotion localization. Here, behavior reflects neurological patterns too the connections of ACC and FI might be irregular in autism).
In the Lerner article, facial displays of emotions (James, Ekman), subjective accounts, and physiological response to stressors are measured. Those who displayed fear had higher cardiovascular and cortisol stress responses, whereas those with disgust/anger did not. Control of the situation and level of certainty affected the subjects’ states (as in autistic kids and socioeconomic discussion). It is, "healthier" to be angry than fearful... (perhaps because one exhibits more perception of control than the other and many disorders are anxiety-based). Who knows.
Kandel discusses how psychiatry, since WWII, has been a “therapeutic art,” and has had little focus on biology. Our gene expression (not template) is highly influenced by life’s forces. Kandel stresses that all psychiatry is biological, resulting in neurological/synaptical changes in the brain’s structure. Thus, contrary to popular belief, genes and brain activity can be ‘learned’, be modified, and be susceptible to social and behavioral influences. Psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacology, together, change the patterns of action and level of neurological activity in our brains. Therefore, the marriage of brain science, psychology and sociology show promising advances in each respective field.
From anxiety to anger to autism to schizophrenia and depression, all behavioral demonstrations have a neurological and structural basis. We need not always rely on drugs, however, because conversation and other stimulating activity changes the nature of the neurological pathways. All articles reflect James’ idea of emotion in one way or another and explain the adaptive, biological drive for emotion and its regulation. Our ‘higher-order’ processes and (i.e. VENS) have developed in relatively recent years and have late emergence in phylogeny and ontology. These neurological developments shape our emotions and are shaped by our emotions.
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I was also intregued by Lerner et al. Stress response paper and the fact that it's healthier to react with anger or disgust than with fear. Fear is an emotion that can completely control a person and provent them from taking action and combating the stress. I never thought of anger being positive but I could see how being angry causes a reaction that could initiate positive actions to eliminate stress. However, I would not go as far as saying that anger triggers optimistic perceptions of risk. I agree that disgust could trigger a sense that events are relatively predictable and under individual control. This reaction is extremely beneficial in helping deal with stress responses.
Likewise; I guess having a type A personality isn't so bad after all, or at least it probably won't increase the chances of acquiring a stress-related disorder.
The article I liked most is "Neurobiological Bases of Individual Differences in Emotional and Stress Responsiveness." I think the differences between LR and HR rats constitute an accurate model for human behavioral tendencies. At least in my experience, most people who don't do drugs will generally take less risks than those who do. It's also interesting that the LR rats had higher densities of dopamine and serotonin receptors than HR rats in some parts of the brain. Those who prefer not to take drugs might be happier at baseline or on a normal basis, and the same seems to hold true for humans.
It's always pleasing to me to read about neural correlates of behavioral differences; so often people are blamed for crossing social boundaries when the reasons why are not clearly understood, but the reasons inevitably lead back to the brain. In this case, it doesn't seem reasonable to me to blame someone with fewer dopamine and serotonin receptors for using drugs more often than someone who doesn't have the same problem.
I thought Gross's comparison between Carver and Scheier and William James's definitions of emotions in terms of emotion regulation was interesting. How we regulate our emotions depends entirely on how we define an emotion, therefore if an emotion is a "system that monitors the rate at which the discrepency between a goal and a reality is being decreased", its hard to pinpoint exactly how regulation fits into this (although i think its a very interesting idea). James theory is a bit more workable in this context with his idea of "response tendencies" and how these might be adapted.
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