#the non-eudaimonic lifestyle i fear

[alsbrainblog]

The Neuroscience of Happiness

What is happiness and how can we boost it?

It’s easy to think of happiness as just a positive emotion that involves feeling ‘good’ and content. However, a happy person doesn’t walk around feeling like this 24/7; they still experience life’s ups and downs - they just deal with them better and foster an overall positive lifestyle.

The World Happiness Report 2015 (1) has a chapter on the ‘Neuroscience of Happiness’, written by R. Davidson and B. Schuyler, that emphasises four aspects of well-being, noting how they each play an important role in the notion of happiness. These consist of 1. Sustained positive emotion, 2. Recovery from negative emotion, 3. Empathy, altruism and pro-social behaviour, and 4. Mindwandering and mindfulness. I’m going to talk through each of these briefly.

1. Sustained positive emotion

The ventral striatum is a nucleus of neurons within the brain, and has been showed to activate when we think ‘happy thoughts’ such as winning the lottery, or when we see a photo of our child. Examining both healthy control subjects and depressed patients, Heller et al. (2) found that positive images caused the ventral striatum in both groups to activate to a similar degree. However, when this activation was measured over a longer period of time, differences between the groups began to appear. Specifically, healthy subjects showed sustained nucleus activation as the experiment progressed whereas depressed patients did not.

As a follow-up, they then found that antidepressant treatment went hand-in-hand with both sustained ventral striatum activation and an increase in reports of positive feelings in depressed patients (3). Prettyyy cool.

It was also found that people with greater sustained activation of the ventral striatum (and the dorsolateral prefrontal region) had lower levels of the body’s stress hormone, cortisol, suggesting less activation of stress responses (4). It seems to be that measuring the sustained activity of these brain areas can predict our psychological well-being and cortisol levels to an impressive degree.

So, sustaining the happy feeling is our first important factor. Next up...

2. Recovery from negative emotion

AKA resilience, AKA “the maintenance of high levels of well-being in the face of adversity”.

One way of measuring emotional recovery is observing the brain’s activation following the presentation of a negative emotional stimulus. The logic here is that slow, prolonged activity reflects a “continuation of the emotional response when it ceases to be relevant” (1)- therefore, fast recovery following a negative stimulus should reflect better well-being.

The happiness report considers the brain’s amygdala a central node for resilience due to the piles of evidence implicating its role in fear and anxiety. Therefore monitoring amygdala activity is sensible for assessing resilience.

Participants viewed emotional images, and then were sometimes subjected to loud bursts of sound - the level of ‘startle’ they exhibited was used as a measure of sustained emotional arousal. Remove the negative image and the ‘startle’ diminishes faster for some people than others. Those people who recover better (faster) following negative events show higher scores on the Purpose in Life subscale. (5)

The report even suggests that opportunities that provide moderate levels of adversity may help us learn emotional regulatory strategies to help us recover from the really bad events that knock us down. So, y’know, maybe there’s another reason to stand up for yourself if someone cuts in front of you in a queue... you’re training your brain to be more resilient. 

3. Empathy, altruism, and pro-social behaviour

What about our social relationships? It’s well known that happy people have fulfilling, supportive social connections. Social isolation has shown to activate the physical pain regions of the brain (6), buying gifts for people feels good, and pro-social behaviour can activate feedback loops of increased wellbeing and even more pro-social behaviour and so on.(7)

Empathy has shown to manifest itself in the emotional centres of the brain, seeing someone hurt often makes you experience similar feelings in similar brain areas (8). Research has shown that if you feel more connected to someone (even if they just support the same team as you) you’re empathetic reaction to their experiences is stronger. (9)

Our good friend, the ventral striatum (a ‘happiness’ centre for the brain), activates when we receive money and  when we donate it to charity. In fact, evidence shows that it is even more active when giving than receiving! It make sense that those who find giving to charity intrinsically rewarding (via the ventral striatum) are more likely to engage in donating. (10)

Our other good friend, the amygdala (fear and emotion centre), has shown to have both increased volume and bigger response to faces of people in fear (i.e. representing sensitivity to the suffering of others) in individuals who are classed as “extraordinary altruists” and might, say, donate a kidney to a stranger. (11)

If we can train ourselves to be to show more empathy (sharing the feelings of others), compassion (concern and desire to help others), and recognise/be mindful of our own emotions, the evidence suggests that, not only do we get better at understanding people’s feelings, but we also become happier people ourselves.

Going back to our favourite wordy brain regions, the ventral striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, research has shown that stronger increases in connectivity between these two brain areas predicts more helping behaviour. All about training that brain!

4. Mindwandering and mindfulness

Using a smartphone app, Killingsworth & Gilbert (12) sampled more than 2000 people to see how often their minds ‘wandered’ from the activities they were engaged in and how happy/unhappy they were in that moment. They found that, in general, people were less happy when their minds wander from the task at hand. In fact, one experiment showed that some college students would rather suffer electric shocks than sit in a room alone for 6-15 minutes. Imagine that, some of us hate being left to our own thoughts so much, we’d rather be electrocuted... is our own company really that unpleasant? (13)

In the absence of a task, our brain’s ‘default mode network’ becomes active, coinciding with the feeling of mindwandering (14). We can counter the negative feelings that this brings using mindfulness - a technique that’s all the rage on meditation apps.

Alright, bear with me as I explain this vague concept: mindfulness involves looking inward and simply paying attention to your body and mind in a non-judgemental way. Just observing, reflecting, and breathing. People often focus on their breathing, and just have a moment to themselves without the noisy buzz of the outside of the world distracting them. Some people do it by staring at a single small object and focusing on its features, or taking note of the different background sounds they can hear. It’s a refreshing task, just taking a pause from life, detaching oneself, and has shown to decrease activity in the ‘default mode’ regions and improve well-being. Furthermore, counting our breaths (a form of mindfulness) has shown to reduce our level of distraction from stimuli in experimental research. (15)

Summary

That was a lot, I realise, but according to The World Happiness Report these are the big four constituents of happiness and well-being. Individuals who can better sustain positive feelings, ‘bounce back’ from negative experiences, engage in altruism and empathy (nobody regrets taking part in community-driven projects and charitable actions!), and improve their mindfulness show elevated well-being.

Remember that you can train these skills, and subsequently the brain regions and connections that they relate to, to become a healthier, happier individual! However, I’ve written this whole blog post and even I struggle to practice mindfulness and could definitely carry out more altruistic actions - but remember self-improvement and the pursuit of happiness is a gradual process that we work towards step by step.

Stay happy, my friends.

Al 

(1) Davidson, R. J., & Schuyler, B. S. (2015). Neuroscience of happiness. World happiness report, 88-105.

(2) Heller, A. S., Johnstone, T., Shackman, A. J., Light, S. N., Peterson, M. J., Kolden, G. G., … Davidson, R. J. (2009). Reduced capacity to sustain positive emotion in major depression reflects diminished maintenance of fronto-striatal brain activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(52), 22445–50. doi:10.1073/pnas.0910651106

(3) Heller, A. S., van Reekum, C. M., Schaefer, S. M., Lapate, R. C., Radler, B. T., Ryff, C. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2013). Sustained ventral striatal activity predicts eudaimonic well-being and cortisol output. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2191–2200.

(4) Heller, A. S., Johnstone, T., Light, S. N., Peterson, M. J., Kolden, G. G., Kalin, N. H., & Davidson, R. J. (2013). Relationships between changes in sustained fronto-striatal connectivity and positive affect in major depression resulting from antidepressant treatment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(2), 197–206. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12010014

(5) Schaefer, S. M., Morozink Boylan, J., van Reekum, C. M., Lapate, R. C., Norris, C. J., Ryff, C. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2013). Purpose in life predicts better emotional recovery from negative stimuli. PloS One, 8(11), e80329. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0080329

(6) Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The pain of social disconnection: Examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(6), 421–34. doi:10.1038/nrn3231

(7) Aknin, L. B., Dunn, E. W., & Norton, M. I. (2011). Happiness runs in a circular motion: Evidence for a positive feedback loop between prosocial spending and happiness. Journal of Happiness Studies, 13(2), 347–355. doi:10.1007/s10902-011- 9267-5

(8) Lamm, C., Decety, J., & Singer, T. (2011). Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain. NeuroImage, 54(3), 2492–502. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.014

(9) Hein, G., Silani, G., Preuschoff, K., Batson, C. D., & Singer, T. (2010). Neural responses to ingroup and outgroup members’ suffering predict individual differences in costly helping. Neuron, 68(1), 149–60. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.09.003

(10) Moll, J., Krueger, F., Zahn, R., Pardini, M., de Oliveira-Souza, R., & Grafman, J. (2006). Human fronto-mesolimbic networks guide decisions about charitable donation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(42), 15623–8. doi:10.1073/pnas.0604475103

(11) Marsh, A., Stoycos, S. A., Brethel-Haurwitz, K. M., Robinson, P., VanMeter, J. W., & Cardinale, E. M. (2014). Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/ pnas.1408440111

(12) Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. doi:10.1126/science.1192439

(13) Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., … Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–7. doi:10.1126/science.1250830

(14) Callard, F., Smallwood, J., Golchert, J., & Margulies, D. S. (2013). The era of the wandering mind? Twenty-first century research on self-generated mental activity. Frontiers in Psychology, 4(December), 891. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00891

(15) Anderson, B. A., Laurent, P. A., & Yantis, S. (2011). Value-driven attentional capture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(25), 10367–71. doi:10.1073/pnas.1104047108