Differences Between Sadness And Depression

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In the United States, close to 10 percent of the population struggles with depression, but sometimes it can take a long time for someone to even understand that they are suffering. One difficulty in diagnosis is trying to distinguish between feeling down and experiencing clinical depression.

A new TED-Ed video can help someone make the distinction. With simple animation, the video explains how clinical depression lasts longer than two weeks, with a range of symptoms that can include changes in appetite, poor concentration, restlessness, sleep disorders (either too much or too little), and suicidal ideation. The video briefly discusses the neuroscience behind the illness, outlines treatments, and offers advice on how you can help a friend or loved one who may have depression.

Unlike the many pharmaceutical ads out there with their cute mascots and vague symptoms, the video uses animation to provide clarity about the mental disorder. It’s similar in its poignant simplicity to the HBO short documentary, “My Depression,” based on Liz Swados’s book of the same name.

GOOD Magazine | TED-Ed on YouTube

Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for ... Watch the YouTube Series, with new episodes every other Sunday.

More here

Glass Brain

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... It’s not possible to know exactly what another person is thinking, but neuroscientists from UCSD and UCSF are on their way. They created a “glass brain” software that shows a person’s brain reacting to stimuli in real time.

The implications for virtual reality and digital communication are tremendous, according to Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, who has been collaborating with the neuroscientists. “We’re trying to identify which critical factors can most help people feel like they’re face to face,” says Rosedale, whose new company, High Fidelity, is currently working on a next generation virtual world.

The neuroscientists used an MRI to scan the brain of Rosedale’s wife, Yvette. Then, for the recent SXSW demo, they fitted her with a cap covered in electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes, which record brain activity. Sitting beside Yvette, Rosedale donned an Oculus Rift headset, which allowed him to see a 3-D picture of her brain activity. “In the middle of the presentation, somebody said ‘tickle her.’ I wouldn’t dare--she’d kill me. But I put my hand on her side and squeezed, and you could see the motor cortex activity lighting up all of a sudden,” he says.

This moment was particularly powerful for Rosedale, because it neurologically demonstrated the physical intimacy between himself and his wife. For him, that’s exactly why the glass brain software could be so useful. “There’s this theory of the brain that says we’re all kind of dancing together,” he says. “When I talk and you nod, you’re following the rhythm of my voice and guessing when my sentences will end. That’s something that we may be able to see with the EEG.” Rosedale says cell phone communication is “so terrible” because the delay, however small, disrupts this human interplay. “On the phone, you often can’t make a response sound like ‘mm-hm,’ close enough to the end of my sentence for me to feel it,” he says, “so one of the emotional elements of communication is lost.”

The glass brain software can similarly help improve the facial expressions and physical reactions of virtual reality avatars. “It will let us put a number on the quality of virtual communication and then compare that number to what happens face-to-face,” he explains. By hooking more subjects up to the glass brain and have them interact, “we can hopefully find out why video conferencing just doesn’t seem to work.” 

Even if we will never know exactly what other people are thinking, Rosedale believes that watching a brain’s real-time response can lead to greater honesty. Right now, people won’t put on EEG caps for business meetings, but he says that in the future, technology will make brain activity transparent to everyone at the table. As evidence, he points to an iPhone app that can measure heart-rate based on how the skin flushes. “What if I could show, based on what’s happening in your brain, that you wanted to interact with me in a intimate manner?" he asks. "You can lie on a phone call but it will be harder to lie in virtual reality because of how your body and brain will be moving.” 

Fast Company

Rino Stefano Tagliafierro | Beauty

Animator and filmmaker Rino Stefano Tagliafierro has always found the intensity of the emotions he encounters through classical paintings unmatched by other artforms. And when he sat down to craft his latest short film, Beauty, he sought to convey the emotional impact of that artwork on him to an audience who might not be otherwise moved.

"The idea of Beauty is born from the desire to (convey) the main emotions that every person encounters throughout his life path," says Tagliafierro. "Classical art has always attracted my most intense emotions, so I decided to (let it) represent them."

The resulting project, Beauty, is a tour through the human life cycle--from birth to death--that draws on those classical paintings to tell that story in an absorbing way. By adding subtle animation to the artworks he chose, Tagliafierro actively depicts the motion that's only ever implied in the original pieces. The result is a stunning, haunting series of moving images that makes the work feel alive in different--often surreal--ways.

Hypnotic. Disturbing. Gorgeous.

More at Fast Company

Cheating Really Does Feel Wonderful

New research suggests that the feeling of guilt associated with cheating on an exam or lying on tax returns is actually just a figment of our imagination; a feeling our memories conjure up after the fact to make us feel better about being unethical. Because in actuality — according to a new study, "The Cheater's High," conducted by researchers from the University of Washington, Harvard, London Business School, and Penn — cheating feels pretty damn good.

The researchers conducted six different experiments offering participants a multitude of opportunities to cheat (both directly and indirectly, sometimes with the lure of financial gain and sometimes not). They found that the cheaters generally felt thrilled, satisfied, and superior about their dishonesty. “We were a little appalled,” University of Washington postdoctoral research associate Nicole E. Ruedy — the lead author of the study — told the New York Times. “The fact that people feel happier after cheating is disturbing, because there is emotional reinforcement of the behavior, meaning they could be more likely to do it again,” Ruedy said.

Journal of Personal and Social Psychology via Gawker

Open Culture | Reading Literary Fiction Improves Emotional Intelligence

A new study published this week in Science concludes that you may get something unexpected from reading great literary works: more finely-tuned social and emotional skills. Conducted by Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd (researchers in the psych department at the New School for Social Research), the study determined that readers of literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or non-fiction) find themselves scoring better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence. In some cases, it took reading literary fiction for only a few minutes for test scores to improve.


Open Culture | 500 Free eBooks | 750 Free Online Courses

Monkey Monday | Gorilla Joy

Kesho, and his younger brother Alf, were brought back together to live in a new Gorilla Colony at Longleat Safari Park. They have also been joined by a third brother, six-year-old Evindi. The brothers were born at Dublin Zoo but separated when Kesho, a 13-year-old western lowland silverback, was moved to London Zoo to be part of a breeding programme.

Longleat keeper, Mark Tye, said: "The keepers from Dublin weren't entirely sure the brothers would even know each other, but the moment they met you could just see the recognition in their eyes." Mr Tye added: "We had been slightly concerned how they would react to each other and whether the big brother could put up with little Alf's playfulness. However they have formed a really tight bond in just a few weeks and Kesho is actually incredibly tolerant; allowing both Alf and six-year-old Evindi to jump all over him."

"What you're seeing is exactly what you think you're seeing," he said. "Two intelligent social mammals, who were separate, are pleased to see each other again and play together. It is gorilla joy, being reunited with someone you used to have good times with and now you can again, so it's gorilla happiness."

BBC News via Terribly Cute

Thanks, tomB

Monkey Monday | Koko Watches "Tea With Mussolini"

YouTube

Koko watches intently a DVD movie on her TV that she has seen several times before. It is called Tea with Mussolini. When it comes to a sad part, where the boy has to say goodbye to all of his relatives and waves goodbye on the train, Koko turns away from the TV. She then proceeds to sign: "Frown, sad, cry, bad, trouble, mother and Koko-love." Her eyes also look very watery. (Gorillas cry too.)

Lesson: There is mounting scientific evidence that great apes can feel empathy for others. This example points to the possibility that gorillas, in particular, may also be able to empathize with fictional human characters portrayed by actors—or at least be moved by them.

Your Brain In Love

Graphic: James W. Lewis, West Virginia University (brain), and Jen Christiansen.

Click image to enlarge

... Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neuro­transmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure. Conversely, psychiatrists might someday help individuals who become dan­gerously depressed after a heartbreak by adjusting those chemicals.

Passion also heightens several cognitive functions, as the brain regions and chemicals surge. “It’s all about how that network interacts,” says Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, who led the study. The cognitive functions, in turn, “are triggers that fully activate the love network.”

Scientific American via Neatorama

Researchers Use Tarantulas To Map How The Brain Processes Fear And Panic

Using video of the 8.7-inch-long [Brazilian salmon pink tarantula], British researchers showed that the human brain engages several different systems when evaluating threats. For instance, the part of the brain that engages when a threat is approaching is different from the part that is activated when a threat is receding, they reported Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Previous work had shown that avoiding a threat people were trained to fear in the lab caused brain activity to switch from anxiety-related regions to panic centers. But it was not clear that people would respond in the same way to something they feared naturally. The researchers chose a spider species for the test because fear of spiders is one of the most common phobias in human beings, said Dean Mobbs, the study's lead author and a neuroscientist at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England.

The researchers recruited 20 volunteers and placed them in a magnetic resonance imaging machine to watch which parts of their brains were activated during different stages of the experiment. Each volunteer was asked to place a shoeless foot into a box that was connected to a row of five other boxes.

The researchers asked the subjects how scared they thought they would be when the tarantula was placed into each of the boxes. Then they showed them four-second videos of the creature entering the compartments. When the tarantula was placed far away from the foot, the MRI machine showed brain activity in the part of the prefrontal cortex involved in recognizing threats. As the tarantula appeared to move closer to the foot, a different fear system kicked in inside a primitive region of the midbrain associated with the fight-or-flight response. In other words, as the spider advanced toward people's feet — regardless of its absolute distance — their brains switched from anxiety to panic.

In addition, as the tarantula appeared to recede, the MRI machine registered increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. Mobbs said this area might emit a safety signal that dispels the fear signal.

The subjects were led to believe that the tarantula was entering a box while they lay in the brain scanner, but in reality there were no spiders present. The video was prerecorded so the scientists could control for the tarantula's movements.

When people underestimated their own fear, they also remembered the tarantula being bigger than those who had a better handle on their own fear responses. That suggests fear affects cognition as well, Mobbs said.

... The researchers tested only people whose fear of spiders was low to middling. But learning where proper fear responses break down in people with phobias or anxiety issues could eventually help researchers develop targeted therapies for them, Mobbs said.

As if being shoved into a claustrophobia-panic-inducing teeny-tiny MRI tube wasn't enough.

Los Angeles Times

Read the Abstract [Neural activity associated with monitoring the oscillating threat value of a tarantula] here.

The Sight Of Meat Seems To Calm Aggression

Frank Kachanoff, a psychology researcher at McGill University, conducted an experiment on the emotional responses of people to images of meat. He discovered a positive correlation between meat encounters and a calmer disposition:

Kachanoff recruited 82 men and asked them to punish an aide with various volumes of sound each time he made an error while sorting photos, some with pictures of meat, and others with neutral images. The researcher had anticipated participants who watched the aide sort meat photos would inflict more discomfort on him, but he was surprised when those pictures did not provoke aggressive behaviour.

Via Neatorama

Recovering From A Romantic Breakup Is Like Recovering From Cocaine Addiction

Ari | Absurdist Nonfiction

Abstract:

Romantic rejection causes a profound sense of loss and negative affect. It can induce clinical depression and in extreme cases lead to suicide and/or homicide. To begin to identify the neural systems associated with this natural loss state, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study 10 women and 5 men who had recently been rejected by a partner but reported they were still intensely "in love." Participants alternately viewed a photograph of their rejecting beloved and a photograph of a familiar, individual, interspersed with a distraction-attention task. Their responses while looking at their rejecter included love, despair, good, and bad memories, and wondering why this happened. Activation specific to the image of the beloved occurred in areas associated with gains and losses, craving and emotion regulation and included the ventral tegmental area (VTA) bilaterally, ventral striatum, medial and lateral orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex, and cingulate gyrus. Compared with data from happily-in-love individuals, the regional VTA activation suggests that mesolimbic reward/survival systems are involved in romantic passion regardless of whether one is happily or unhappily in love. Forebrain activations associated with motivational relevance, gain/loss, cocaine craving, addiction, and emotion regulation suggest that higher-order systems subject to experience and learning also may mediate the rejection reaction. The results show activation of reward systems, previously identified by monetary stimuli, in a natural, endogenous, negative emotion state. Activation of areas involved in cocaine addiction may help explain the obsessive behaviors associated with rejection in love.

More at the Journal of Neurophysiology

Via Gawker