By Kristin Ostberg
Emotions researchers have traditionally focused on negative emotions: the fear, anxiety, and depression that make people sick. To try to explain the flip side–how positive emotions keep people well–researchers at Madison are looking at a constellation of qualities related to a person’s ability to regulate his or her emotions and recover from negative ones, or what they call positive affective style. Generally, the monkey with the positive affective style is the one that tends to move forward in the world where others hold back. It’s not that he’s shallow; he still suffers from the negative emotions that afflict most primates. It’s just that he gets over them faster.
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For years, neuroscientists avoided emotions. They’d study sense perception, cognition, even try to put their fingers on the pulse of consciousness itself before they’d mess with the tangled circuits of affect. Partly, they didn’t have the tools to measure their theories on the live human brain; they could take pictures of the brain’s structure, or they could measure its activity with electrodes, but they couldn’t observe brain activity as it was taking place until the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging, a process for imaging changes in blood flow. The phenomenally expensive piece of machinery that makes fMRI work didn’t come on-line for brain research until 1991.
When psychologist Edmund Rolls went to Madison in April to speak at the Health-Emotions Research Institute’s symposium (this year’s topic: “The Neurobiology of Positive Emotion”), he showed a slide of the cover of his most recent book, The Brain and Emotion, featuring an illustration of Pandora and her awful box. Pandora wasn’t sure if she should look into the box, he reminded his audience ominously. Are we? Then he launched into a sober discussion of whether the neurons in the orbito-frontal cortex of a rat can differentiate between the promise of a glucose and a saline reward.
The scientists at the HealthEmotions Research Institute aren’t the first to use the approach/withdraw response as a measure of emotion, but they are doing innovative work tracking the systems that regulate this response. In fact, they argue, there are two distinct pathways in the brain–one that activates the emotion, and one that effectively decides when to shut it off. Kalin and Davidson have split the pursuit between them.
The prefrontal cortex is the layer of gray matter that covers the foremost part of the brain’s sophisticated frontal lobe–the lobe associated with cognition and intelligence. Davidson first suspected the prefrontal cortex had some role in regulating emotion when he read a study observing that patients with lesions on the left side of their prefrontal cortices tended to be melancholy and depressed, while those with damage on the right were cheerier, even manic.
At the April symposium, Davidson listed a host of other positive qualities his left-lateral subjects enjoy–everything from positive affect while they’re dreaming to greater ability to anticipate positive incentives. When he was through, there was a question from the audience, someone wanting to know at what point all this positive affect becomes maladaptive. A little later someone else asked the same thing, citing studies that link right-lateral activity to empathy. Maybe these audience members were wondering how much they’d enjoy being surrounded by people who jump out of bed in the morning and go all out. Or maybe they weren’t sure they liked the idea of an absolute standard of emotional health.
