Emotions Decisions and Behavior Across the Life Span: Surprises from Social Psychology

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only check out our YouTube original channel you see TV Prime at youtube.com slash you see TV prime subscribe today to get new programs every week [Music] thank you everyone for coming to our last session in our series here you guys have been a great audience everyone has commented on what lively discussion and great questions and so we expect that tonight last night we're really we've waited a while and then we finally get to hear dr. Wendy berry Mendez speak tonight who is the co-chair of this series wendy is it's really a pleasure to introduce her she's been one of my kind of funnest and most inspiring colleagues in all my years Wendy got her PhD in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara and then we were lucky to have her here at UCSF as a postdoc and after that she spent four years at Harvard in the psychology department and really knocked their socks off every year she was nominated one of Harvard's best professors and UCSF worked very hard to pull her back and this is her first year back here she is the Sarlo Ekman endowed chair in the study of human emotion her her research line is very fascinating and broad but also with a tremendous amount of depth as you're going to hear about you'll hear about one line of research or research on Aging and decision making the overall theme is embodiment how emotions thoughts and intentions are experienced both in the body and in the brain how they affect nervous and the system and the hormonal system and in turn how these physiological changes work back to effect our thinking or our behavior and she's also just says what makes us most human how we respond to other people particular people of other groups stigmatized groups or groups of different social economic class etc so she's a true social psychologist at heart and really studies the group process and the psychological processes that explain why we do the things we do the surprising lessons from social psychology which we'll hear about she's won many awards early career awards and just recently the Spence transformative early career award and she's absolutely besides being prolific in her papers she's trained so many students who have gone on to great do great things she puts a tremendous amount of time in mentoring and in regulating what we read in the scientific journal she is a she's an editor on several journals she's always reviewing at least one or more probably usually probably many more papers at a time so she's very devoted to service and we all have a tremendous amount respect for thank you so much for speaking thank you and thank you ELISA for that lovely introduction I'm excited to be here in year last night and all the other speakers have actually made it quite easy for me this evening because a lot of the concepts that I'm going to talk about you've heard other speakers talk about but I will put a slightly different spin on it because I'm a social psychologist so as ELISA described one of my research themes and the theme that I'll talk about tonight looks at how emotion influences our behavior and decision-making and we typically start with a fairly common model in psychology and and you see it up here that we have some emotional response this emotional response triggers a change in our brain or bodies this change in our brain and bodies triggers what we call an action tendency basically a motivational state that drives us towards something or away something makes me it makes our us freeze or flee or fight and those that constellation or coordinated response of our brain and our body and this motivational state can then shape and influence our decisions in our behavior so here's an example when we're disgusted we crinkle these knows these muscles around our nose call the lavatory labia these nose crinkling actually helps attract the nasal passages with the idea being that contaminants are less likely than to get into our brain and our body but it also triggers things like a decline in our gastrointestinal responses that's that nausea feeling if something's really disgusting that those physiological changes then tend to be associated with a distancing we're disgusted we want to move away and this can influence our behavior and our decision-making what's interesting about disgust is we can have both physical disgust something's disgusting feces body violations but also things can be morally disgusting what's interesting about moral disgust and physical disgust is their experience exactly the same way in the body so our body often doesn't know the difference between physical disgust and moral disgust and I just start with that as a way to sort of frame the kind of work that I do but here's the important feature that I'll talk about tonight this trajectory of responses from the emotion to the response in our body to the behavior can all be influenced and shaped by top-down processes like cognition how we think about the emotion context that could be where are we we might be terrified of a snake in the jungle and rightly so but if we're at a Wild Animal Park all of a sudden the context is very different even though it's exactly the same feature that we're seeing right still snake in the grass and there are developmental factors early life so babies and teenagers often have a very different trajectory coordinated a response from an emotion to a behavior so I'll not talk about this tonight but I'll just give you a a bottom line of this one response most people when they're afraid they withdraw they see more risk in their environment they're less risk-taking I'll tell you the one group who doesn't do that teenage boys now when they're afraid they do the exact opposite thing that everybody else seems to do and that is they approach they take much more risks that's sort of fascinating there's lots of reasons why that's the case and again like I said I'm not going to talk about that tonight but that's an example that this process does not work statically across our life course and there's some very interesting lessons that we learn in later life and with aging so I'm going to my talk is split really kind of in two halves I mean they influence each other this first half I'm really gonna just talk about some basic science associated with these mind-body connections and then in Part two I'm gonna test these same models in older adults with some hypotheses about what we may or may not expect so I want to talk a little bit about what it means to have a top-down influence in this trajectory from emotion to behavior and and here I'll thank Bob Levinson last week for really kind of contextualizing this idea of reappraisal so when we have an emotional response we can just let's think about something like fear right that seems so clear and obvious I'm afraid but we can reappraise we can rethink oh that snake isn't dangerous I'm gonna Wild Animal Park or that tiger isn't scary it's it's behind a cage and that seems really obvious but we can do that with our own emotions if I was thinking about my talk today I could be really excited this is gonna be a lot of fun you guys have been a great crowd or I could be thinking gosh you know they ask a lot of questions what if I don't know the answer they're gonna throw eggs at me right I can sort of think my way into getting more excited about the talk or more fearful and how we think about our emotions going into an event can dramatically influence our brain and body I'm going to tell you about how we can study how cognition can shape those emotional states context is also very interesting I gave you the example of location but I'm going to give you a different example tonight and that is your body your body positioning right we think of it as so simple I'm sure I would feel the same emotion if I were lying down then if I were sitting up but I'm gonna show you some data that shows just a manipulation of how we're sitting standing how our face is configured can influence our emotional state so I want to start with this idea the distinction between good stress and bad stress you know I think stress has gotten sort of a bad rap especially among researchers and but illicit I think did a really nice job sort of setting this idea not all stress is bad and actually some stress is very good it helps us activate we want our bodies sort of flooded with catecholamines when it's time to perform or it's time to think quickly and this distinction between good stress and bad stress ends up being critically important for both health and also our performance in be and behavior so here's an example of a good stress bad stress distinction that I use a lot you know imagine not your student and you sit down to take a test now for some of you this might be a few years ago but remember back when you know you really wanted to do well you studied really hard they put the test in front of you and you just know that whole first page right that creates sort of this approach state your heart still beating fast but now more blood is gonna get to your brain and out to your muscles and you're actually gonna perform better or Atuk you have to get get in front of a lot of people and talk this response of your body of a strong heart rate but your vasculature system right the system that carries the oxygenated blood out from your heart to your to your brain but also to your hands and feet dilates it opens up almost like a hose and the more that dilates the more blood can get out to the effector muscles and up to the brain we call this stress state challenge and there's a way to identify this physiologically and I'll talk about that quite a bit behaviorally a challenge state is associated with much better cognitive performance people do better under a challenge state than a threat State and not surprisingly they do a lot better in physical performance as well so it's now so when you're doing aerobic exercise it basically looks like challenge reactivity but I'm talking about challenge when you're doing something that's not metabolically demanding not aerobic right sitting down and taking a task there's no reason that your muscles would need all that oxygenated blood but they actually can benefit from it and this is associated with all more more approach behavior I put fight and flight it's sort of it's sort of tricky and I could talk about that distinction but basically challenge can be associated with fighting if you have the resources to actually beat your opponent but also fleeing if that's sort of the best outcome if the Lions chasing you that deers gonna be a lot better off or gazelle what is that I don't know what it is but anyway he's gonna be a lot better off if more oxygenated blood gets out to the I think it's a gazelle so compare that to a threat response right same test you studied it's important somebody puts it down in front of you and you don't you don't recognize any of the questions this isn't at all what you studied we have to give a talk and you're looking at it faces and they're scowling and shaking their heads and somebody is calling out yes right that's going to change your physiology and ultimately change your performance and we see much worse performance with threat and I actually wanted to give you one of my favorite examples of how threat can affect your performance when a lot of people are looking the lights are shining and let's see what happens but you flew in last night you didn't get here till 3:00 in the morning and you haven't slept a wink I'm pretty much have coffee flowing through my veins right now do you really but as a college student I'm not maybe that's not so rare yeah I'm up pretty late mostly I'm kind of insomniac I guess okay but you know what you feeling good I'm feeling good you know the rules and the lifelines and you're ready to play we're gonna fight be ready ready okay then let's blow [Applause] surge protectors to protect their possessions from unexpected surges of one electric current water flow air pressure buyer's remorse I would say what [Music] [Applause] you could clearly get the idea that poor chase you know he didn't get any sleep the lights are shining down on him this is what he's been thinking about and dreaming about and he basically had no more resources to cope and it made him say the wrong answer when he clearly knew the right answer now I will tell you I did show this to all my undergraduates at Harvard right before it was a midterm to encourage them to sleep the night before I don't know how effective it was but I always reminded them of poor chase Sampson something like 5 million people have watched this on YouTube now poor chase so that's the idea that that our stress our current acute stress response can influence what we actually know right so Bob Sapolsky if you haven't read when Z Y zebras don't get ulcers he has this great example of having to meet his future in-laws and he goes over to their house and he he's playing a game with his future mother-in-law and he really wants to make a good first impression and he can't remember the word casserole you know it's this kind of vague word and it's sort of the idea that he had this flood of glucocorticoids and cortisol and it's affecting his ability to actually think of something that would be easy to retrieve so this is how stress can hurt us but again there's also a bright side that stress can actually make you perform better so the first couple studies that I'm gonna talk about is how can we sort of think about or reappraise rethink our stress day to actually make it more beneficial help us perform better and have a more positive physiological response and one of my favorite quotes by William James is the greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another now this is a more than a oh sorry one thought over another thank you or once though over another yeah one thought over another with the idea being that rumination or sorts for separating about something is a choice that you made to sort of think over and over or to anticipate something scary and sort of keep thinking about it rather than focusing your energy on what the task is at hand so here's the study that we did and I'm actually going to talk about two studies both with reappraisal and how you think about your emotional or stress State and what we did in the first study is we introduced the idea of reappraisal to people about to complete a very stressful laboratory task and I'll tell you about that in a minute and we were interested in shifting people's threat state to a challenge state and its study to weaves the same reappraisal manipulation for students about to take a very important exam specifically the Graduate Record exam that determines if they get into graduate school so here's the method um we recruited an Guiness first part is all gonna be you know relatively young subjects and just just show you the phenomenon and then I'll go up to later life we bring in young subjects to the lab around 22 years old and we tell everybody we want you to do a mock job interview so I think Melissa talked about this it's called a tree or social stress task evaluators come into the room and they stare at you you respond to questions that they ask first you have to give an impromptu speech on your strengths and weaknesses and in fact what's most upsetting about this kind of paradigm is they just look at you very stoically and if in fact if anything they look a little bit negative now that tends to make people very very stressed and at the later part of this stress task is then they have to do mental arithmetic and this could be a variety of ways but a common way is you started a five digit number and you count backwards in steps of seven the evaluators harass you a little bit come on faster faster that's wrong start again and again it's a very stressful situation but what we did is we randomly assigned so before they they knew they had to do this stressful job talk or stressful interview and we randomly assigned our participants to one of three conditions one condition was we told 1/3 of them about reappraisal we said you know we basically taught them about challenge we said when you feel your heart beating and everybody's heart beats and goes fast and their blood pressure may even increase just tell yourself that this arousal is functional this means that more blood is getting ejected from the heart more blood is getting up to your brain and this will help you perform better the other third we gave another instruction to but this was intended to be a control condition we said to them now when you feel stressed we want you to do is just kind of ignore ignore the stress ignore the source of this dress ignore the stress if anything it's almost like a suppression manipulation but don't pay attention to it and the other control condition was no information so they know they have to give a speech we told a third of the participants different things about their stress and arousal with one third of the group not hearing any instructions so what we measure in something like this is we ask people how do they feel what are their appraisals how stressful does the situation feel what are your resources that you bring to the task and what are your emotions that you feel we also measure their cardiovascular reactivity I'm going to tell you a little bit about this the kind of measures that we collect and we also look at some cognitive processes things like executive functioning and vigilance for danger so let me tell you a little bit about the kind of measures that we collect no I won't say too much um some people often will think oh you collect heart rate we do much more than heart rate we're specifically looking at the amount of blood that's being ejected from the heart on each beat and how we can collect something like that is with this technique called impedance cardiograph what this does is it puts out an external current into the body you can't feel it and we can determine the exact amount of blood being ejected on each on each heartbeat and that tells us a lot about the cardiovascular conditioning we also measure things like respiration electrocardiograph and blood pressure so now I want to tell you a little bit about the executive functioning but I have to ask a question first who hasn't by show of hands who has never heard of a strict task Stroup Stroup okay will you be my assistant you can stay there it's not scary okay strip what I'm gonna do is I'm going to strip what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna advance the screen in there is gonna be a word on the screen and all I want you to do is tell me the color of the font that the word is written in okay the color okay ready and I'm gonna be timing you down to the millisecond of how quickly you can do this color the font ready very good you ready for another one faster you can good good ready for another one yeah thank you thank you very much okay so write what she just demonstrated is that we have so and the answer was yellow it's very very common of the error that she made we have a prepotent or automatic response to read to do and that's and you should write in it nobody thinks this is wrong by the way if you did exactly what's supposed to happen that automatic response has to be inhibited to do the task which is you have to shut down your prepotent response to read to then say the color of the font will you do just a couple more for me okay again color of the font it's great it's great this last one was deliberate in terms of using the word embarrassed because in addition to a standards troop which is just naming the colors there's also what's called an emotional stroop and the idea of an emotional strip is again you're naming just colors right so down here it's you know red green blue blue red but these on the left are what are called threat words now they're matched with neutral words in terms of their frequency in the english language the length and there's actually a hundred threat words and a hundred neutral words but the idea is and what's been shown with this task is that people who are anxious maybe are higher in anxiety disorders or I we make anxious in a laboratory take longer to get through the threat words why because those words Varis discourage distress they're pulling your attention and it's taking longer to get through the threat words than the neutral words this is what we did after that interview so the interviewers came in gave this very sort of stoic stony silence to the participant they do a speech they do a math task they leave and then we make them do a regular Stroup an emotional stroop what we care about is the time to get through threat words compared to neutral words and those are all counterbalance meaning some people see neutral words first then threat words some people see threat words than neutral words so what happened the people who reappraised who we're told you know arousal is functional this is a good thing what they showed physiologically is a much more efficient or positive physiological response what this measure is is your change in cardiac output so just from sitting there to doing a task more oxygenated blood is being pumped out now everybody's heart rate hi sometimes 25 30 beats per minute increases but what's important is their heart rates not just high but is also being more efficient in addition and maybe blood pressures even easier to think about their blood pressure for people who reappraised is lower so they didn't have as much sort of threat or anxiety if they thought about their reappraisal or they thought about their arousal is functional and finally their change in vascular resistance right so the gay and this is the hose that see they're tightening or opening up in the control in the ignore conditions sort of your standard stressor you see much more tightening of the vasculature this is why people's hands get cold during stress right the vasculature is tightening and less blood is getting out there and your hands get cold there's always a big joke in my lab that I'm always trying to find my students right before they have to give a talk to feel their hands to see how cold they are and they either try to warm them up right before I get to them or they hide from me but the idea is that if their hands are cold they're threatened right and they're not gonna do as good of job I'm really a supportive mentor I swear but you know it's just this thing that you know cold hands tend to be associated with more threat so what happened with the emotional stroop what we found is for both the control and the ignore condition they had more interference what that means is just like it was I was hard for her to say yellow and she said Green instead of the font color the people in the control and ignore condition took much longer to get through those threat words words like embarrassed and distress it was harder forced them to name the font colors because those words the meaning of those words were pulling their attention more than the neutral words and you completely eliminate that effect in reappraisal so the ideas that they were able to inhibit this sort of feelings of vigilance and anxiety if they were told that arousal was functional now what if we take that same paradigm and we apply it to something that matters test-taking now students can have you know some students have a lot of test anxiety others have less but there is definitely some important tests that one has to take in their life in this and they sort of build it up that it determines their future and that doesn't always play out into a sort of good success if they put too much pressure on it so we were interested in using a reappraisal strategy to combat test anxiety so in this study we brought in sixty students who are all about to take the GRE and again this is the general record exam that students take trying to get into PhD programs and the truth is it probably does determine which program you get into it they weigh it very very heavily so you know students can study for you you know for months to take this test and they certainly sort of build up to it so all these students that came into the lab were planning to take the GRE within three months and they write to the lab and they knew that they were coming in to take a practice Jerry and here's where we manipulated reappraisal versus control for half the subjects we told them about challenge we told them about real data so this isn't even deception we said there is data from 20 years all the way to the present that shows that the more sympathetically activated you are and what that means your sympathetic nervous system your heart rate beating faster the more that that activates the better you do on exams the better your math performance specifically actually there's some evidence that it can also improve verbal scores and we told them about this versus a control condition where we basically reiterated instructions we didn't give them any strategies we are a ten saliva samples right before they hear about the instructions and then right before they take the actual exam and we measure these the saliva samples we look at the amount of catecholamines or and thats related to your sort of sympathetic nervous system arousal then they take a practice giri and they return to the lab within three months after taking the actual giri and bring in their score reports so we get to see how they actually did so what these are these first pieces of data are this this is what we extracted from the saliva and this is a measure of the sympathetic nervous system activation and you could see that in the reappraisal condition our students had much higher increases this is relative to a baseline so they heard that arousal was functional arousal is good for you and then right before the test they had higher arousal more importantly it improved their performance on the math what you see here these are the reappraisal your control subjects we didn't tell anyone all right we didn't tell them anything they got a better math score on this practice Giri than the control subjects now we did everything to these analysis means we controlled for their SAT scores we controlled for their GPA we controlled for their major major the effect remains furthermore during the Giri we gave them scrap pieces of paper if in the math condition a lot of times what you're doing in the math is you're executing right you're doing the mathematical formulations the people in the reappraisal condition who we told that arousal is functional that the changes in their body are good had many many more sheets and writing on their scrap paper than the people in the control condition it activated them and in that activation in the execution it increased their test scores what was most remarkable to us is that this effect was still observed when they took the actual Giri they came back to the lab with their actual test scores and you can still see if they were in the reappraisal condition now we never debrief them meaning we didn't send them off saying hey that thing that we told you isn't true because it was true and they went in to the actual Giri with a different mindset or orientation that then benefited their math scores as well when we asked them about how do they feel when they were actually taking the GRE you also see some really nice differences between the people who heard about reappraisal and those that didn't hear anything so did arousal help performance people in the reappraisal condition said absolutely much more than control were you worried about feeling anxious much more in control than reappraisal and how unsure of you of your performance were you and this is sort of you know how uncertain you were much more unsure uncertain in the control condition or you were more certain in the reappraisal so we think this nicely showed that how we think about our stress responses can not only influence our physiology and something like attentional vigilance but now in a very real-world situation their test scores so now I want to move from sort of how we think about emotions to how we assess emotions do we how do we think about the emotions that we're experiencing and there's actually really kind of nice and large literature on writing we're disclosing emotions and sort of written form and this would research has been going on for about the last 20 years Jamie Pennebaker at UT Austin has written books about it there's been men analysis and what they show is that people who tend to disclose their emotions in journal style writing tend to have better health and we sort of take this as you know sort of good evidence but I think there's some important caveats and I and I think it's Beth demonstrated in this recent paper about people expressing their emotions after 9/11 now this study was really remarkable because it's done by Roxie silver who's down at UC Irvine and she basically has a panel of respondents from all over the US there already convened Rocsi silvers interesting because she basically studies trauma after sort of important critical disasters and and she is one of the psychologists waiting for something to happen so you can study how people respond I'm and she had a panel of 14,000 respondents and who she had lots of data before 911 and then she continued to gather data from them immediately after so she's able to track their mental health their physical health both before and after disasters occur and what Roxie had just published a couple years ago is some data where she looked at how mental and physical health was affected by people in her respondent panel who chose to express their emotions after 911 versus not and how that happened is the within the week of 911 the respondents received an email and there was an open dialogue box that said if you would like to express some emotions about how you're feeling about 911 please do so here and then people could either choose to do write something or not unlike this entire literature it went on and on about how writing disclosure was good for you what Roxie found is people who chose to write and the more they wrote predicted in now it's two years and then four years later actually more distress declines in mental health and declines in physical health that basically in this at least for her study the expression of emotions and also the intensity of the emotions expressed was not associated with sort of these positive outcomes but rapture but actually some negative outcomes and there's sort of lots of sort of speculations about why you know who chooses to express also this was an example of something for which you have no control right and sort of it's difficult to make meaning out of what happened so we started we were sort of inspired by this because what thinking about negative emotion does it's sort of brief it forces you to reflect sometimes reflection is good but to the extent that it makes you ruminate and perseverate we thought actually this could ultimately be a bad thing and so we wanted to study it in the lab and here what we did is we wanted to look at people's responses when they were feeling one of two negative emotions I'll tell you what we chose the negative emotions in a minute we chose shame and anger these are two very specific emotions that are manifested in the body very differently anger is much more of an approach emotion shame is withdraw they have different physiological signatures but importantly anger tends to let me talk about shame shame requires some self-evaluation some self-consciousness right to be ashamed you know you have to know that somebody else saw something or knows something that you did it's like embarrassment in anger you can be angry and you don't necessarily have to have self-reflection so we were interested in looking at how people experienced anger versus shame combined with whether they assess how they thought about anger versus shame and I'll explain that in a second so we're assigning people to anger ashame and they're either reporting on their emotions or not and then we're measuring their cardiovascular activity in their performance so let me tell you how we did this so all participants are completing a very difficult math task it's actually a couple different math tasks now math math tests are great because everyone does poorly but why it's great is we can influence how they respond during the math task right this failure by manipulating whether they blame their self and make it a shame response right I'm bad at math gosh I'm so terrible why are we and that's an internal attribution or we can make people angry make an external attribution how do we do that we make it the experimenter responsibility that they are being incompetent rude they're setting these expectations that nobody could possibly do this so how we do this is everyone's doing a difficult math task and for anger the experiment acts sort of incompetent in roon now they sing all the same word so it's all their actions and in shame the experimenter is pleasant but condescending like oh gosh everyone else seems to be able to do this I'm not sure what's wrong and that's horrifying let me tell you the emotion assessment manipulation is that for half of the subjects they don't report on their emotions at all during the experiment we asked some other things but we never asked how do you feel with the report condition they're constantly assessing their emotions do you feel angry do you feel shame do you feel sad you feel anxious so the question is if I'm thinking about my emotions does that change the how I experience the emotion and let me just show you and I'm worse we're uncertain on how loud this is gonna be if you can hear it but I just wanted to give you a sense of the range for people who are in the anger condition versus the shame condition so first I'm going to show you anger and you might have to turn up the volume okay it's alright I'll describe it on okay um sorry so what you would have seen is in the anger condition there's a lot of talking back I'm not done yet you know leaving you know gosh you know and one woman rolls her eyes mouths fu she really hates this experimenter and the shame there's tons of apologies I'm so sorry I'm so bad at math I'm so sorry so the the behavior of the shame versus anger is very very clear and again we're manipulating this only was sort of like very subtle responses from the experimenter so what happened well as we expected with shame no matter whether you report your emotions or not because it's self conscious right I have to be I have to know right I feel bad I'm embarrassed I'm sorry I'm bad at math the assessing versus not assessing or reporting or not reporting emotions doesn't change anything about the behavior the way it's experienced in the body or any of the outcomes I mean these are the physiological responses again this is cardiac output and the resistance of the vasculature but what I highlighted and want to underscore is that when you're angry and you think about it and you assess you actually have a much worse response you stay angry longer your blood pressure is higher your vascular resistance constricts and you're less efficient in your heart rate so if I ask you are you angry and you are angry that actually extends the process of being anger angry in addition it also hurt their performance so if they were still angry right people are still mad we just never asked them about it so they didn't self assess and that's what you see here in the yellow bar and this is the number correct during the math task so they're doing much better if they're angry but that they're not thinking about it but when you had a report that you were anger in grade then you see an impairment in performance okay so the last thing that I wanted to talk about sort of in this basic part is I want to talk about some bottom-up influences so I talked a lot about top-down meaning how we think about the emotions how we label the emotions and how that influences our body and our behavior but you know things can emanate from bottom-up and here's actually a really old study about manipulating features of the face and how that influences if we think something's funny or not so this is actually 1980 study and where they had subjects either hold a pen with their teeth activating the zygomaticus major muscles these are your smiling muscles or holding the pen with your lips which doesn't activate your zygomaticus major holding the pen with your teeth and then rating cartoons these cartoons were rated much funnier a series of cartoons are rated funnier when you're holding a pen in your teeth with the idea being that you've potentiated by activating these muscles you've potentiated the feeling of funny and humor so we were interested and sort of extending this to a body position and while we were running the study we were actually scooped by a good friend of mine in Texas who did the same study almost with neural activation and what he did is he had people recline or sit upright and then they were insulted by another participant who was a Confederate and he measured neural activation while this was happening now what you need to know is that in anger typically there's a shift in frontal cortical asymmetry or the electrical activity in the brain there's more of a shift left in withdraw states there's more of a shift right when people were reclining and insulted they did not shift left when they were sitting upright they did another another way to say that is if you are fighting with your spouse day laying down right because what's our propensity right I mean think about you're laying in bed with your loved one you get an argument you want to sit up right because anger is this approach state if you lay down right you're gonna dampen that anger response but we did the same thing we wanted to look at that in both anger and shame could the body position potentiate an emotion experience right so if I'm leaning forward I'm pitched for it will that make me angrier or more importantly if I'm pitched back will I dampen my anger response similarly if I'm ashamed and I'm pitched for it can i dampen ashame response and that's what we wanted to do so we brought in our subjects and we induced anger a shame in the same way that I just described so an experimenter he's either you know very pleasant but kind of sending while you're feeling during this difficult math task or they're incompetent and rude and you get angry at them and the other thing we manipulated is weather where people were pitched back straight up were pitched forward and again we're measuring cardiovascular activity and here's a little fun thing that we added a response to a moral judgment question now moral decision-making psychologists grown over the last few years barring a lot from philosophy and there's lots of little moral dilemmas that we use but this is the one particular one that we used in this study it's a like standard lifeboat questionnaire you're on a cruise there's a fire on board there's a lifeboat you get into lifeboat but too many people get into the lifeboat the whole scenario is written in the first person it's basically the lifeboat is going to go down unless you get a person off this life back you see a guy leaning over the side we asked two questions is it morally acceptable to push the guy into the water saving the lives of the remaining people it's the only way these remaining people are gonna live and we just ask yes or no this is a utilitarian moral judgment and how morally acceptable is it to do this they're given these are standard questions they've been answered by thousands of people and I'll even tell you some sort of basic statistics on these but we were interested in how your emotion but also your body position can influence these answers to these questions and morals are always interesting to study in the context of emotion because we think of our moral judgments as immutable right the law is blind to you know the emotion but we show over and over again tiny little changes in posture and emotion influence something that we think of a sacred as a moral judgment so here's what happens and I'll just kind of give you the bottom line on this so what happens to our body when we're experiencing an emotion and we're either in an incongruent body position right laying down when you're angry or spit forward when you're ashamed and what to notice here is this is during anger this is your sympathetic activation and what you see is that when you're in pitch back or the avoid position you have a much lower sympathetic response right so I would say that leaning away dampens physiology associated with anger that's the idea if you lay down when you're angry you're not going to be as angry similarly if you're in the shame condition and you're pitched forward your body doesn't respond like a typical shame response instead you have more this physiology that's associated with approached or challenged so we dampen shame when you were in a perch oriented position and of course here's what's fun were you more likely to say it's morally acceptable depending on your emotion and body position and the answer is they both mattered when people were in the anger condition and approached more than 70 percent said it's fine to push the guy into the water right none of the other conditions showed that effect now in general like I said tens of thousands of people have answered this like the questionnaire and something between 30 and 40 percent of people are likely to say it's morally acceptable so this over 70 percent so we basically potentiated this moral decision based on what people see is completely irrelevant to what they think their moral decisions are based on and it wasn't just anger right it was anger and the positioning so I had a summary in my slides but I actually think Charles Schultz in 1960 did a better job summarizing it Charlie Brown says this is my depressed stance you know when you're depressed it makes a lot of difference how you stand the worst thing you could do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you start feeling better if you're gonna get any joy out of being depressed you gotta stand like this nothing like getting scooped from by Charles Schultz 50 years before he ever did the study yeah so that's my initial summary on this first part I think what we're trying to show is that both top-down and bottom-up influences can shape physiological responses associated with emotions and can affect behavior but as I said in the beginning these effects are can be limited people have individual differences in it reception it or reception is the ability to sense your internal states there's personality factors some people ruminate more some people sort of anticipate stress more they think about more before it happens but also developmental factors like aging and this is where I want to switch now talking a little bit about the lifespan and how lifespan influences these mind-body connections so when we think about embodiment and I think Alissa for doing such a nice job introducing how we think how we approach research in my lab we're thinking about you know how our thoughts influence our body but also how our body influences our thoughts and when you start piecing together mind and body effects you've kind of hit three critical pieces of the puzzle interoception which again Bob talked about sensing the internal state so you guys are all sitting here I want you just to actually close your eyes and see without using your hands if you can sense your heart beating just for a second now I'm gonna be totally honest I can't do it I can't feel my heartbeat some people are wildly good at this I'm not gonna tell you too many sex differences tonight but I have a little bit of news for you women are worse than men men are better at this interoception now in a standard study we could do lots of things to increase your it reception one of the things that we can do is we could give you a trace of your ECG so you could see every time your heart beats you know I need to start watching that feedback I mean this is basically what biofeedback was and still is right does that help you sort of heat now sense your heart rate another way that you can do it you sort of get up and we make people do jumping jacks or run on the on the treadmill now you can fill your heartbeat right a little bit more this interoception affects our ability to report on emotions and differentiate emotions people with very good interoception are more likely to experience differentiated emotions right so people with poor door reception if you ask me what's wrong they're more likely to say I just feel bad I don't know what it is I feel bad but with very precise or keen interception they're more likely to say I'm really sad or I'm sad and then I was angry so they showed more granularity in their emotion report another way to think of mind and body is proprioception now that's the awareness of your body in space this is again what Bob was talking about with dancers are very good at this means static or dynamically if you close your eyes and I sort of position your arms like a clock could you tell me precisely how your arms are positioned now that also can affect your experience of emotion in interesting ways and finally there's the intensity and specificity of your physiological response so some people have a very large reaction to different emotions or different features in the environment some people have less intense responses and what's interesting about all of these all of these factors is that they decline in with age interoception declines quite a bit here's the latest study but this is there's lots of data supporting this and I'll explain what this number means in a second but that heart beat detection task and there's actually a whole standard protocol where you start getting your heart beat going we're doing jumping jacks to get the feedback we do all these things to get your new you to increase your ability to detect your heart rate and then we start removing those features like the visual feature not putting your hand can you do it and as we age we're not good not as good at detecting our internal states and what this correlation means is as the older you get um the worse you are at those tasks proprioception or the awareness of your body also declines for both static and dynamic movement and we've actually known this for a lot of years and there's such a large literature you can do a meta-analysis meaning try to put all the day together and again that declines in older age and the last thing is this intensity and specificity of physiological responses I'm sure all of you have been on a treadmill or a little recumbent bike recently and you look down and what's the first thing you're reminded of that as you get older for every decade your target heart rate goes down right so this is your body has more difficulty sort of responding you know we bring 18 year old men into the lab we get their heart rate up to 180 you know they they respond quickly really fast as UAH well for lots of reasons you don't want to go up to 180 but you'd it's just harder to get that kind of sharp increase and also a sharp decline so there's lots of flexibility that's lost as we age I do want to sort of underscore now and I'll say it a couple times exercisers especially in later life you really start seeing these effects so they maintain their it reception they maintain their prep reception and they maintain more flexibility in their physiology and their reactions to psychological stress also as we age declines so take these kind of ideas of embodiment and contrast that to what's been an explosion in embodiment studies here's one of my favorite ones it actually appeared in science by John bard she's a social psychologist and what these studies dude and these are by social psychologists who always are doing something clever and subtle they they had participants come to the lab and the experimenter met them outside and they had to go up an elevator to the lab and as the experimenter and participant are in the elevator the experimenter starts fumbling with some papers and has a drink and they say to participate could you hold this for me as they're fumbling so the participant holds this drink for all the way up to the top of the elevator and then the experimenter gets their drink back in that subject does a couple different things but the target questions are did you like your experimenter at the end of the experiment did you like them really nice were they warm if they were handed a hot cup of coffee versus a cold iced coffee the subjects rated the experimenter is warmer the Association the subtle Association of a worm when you first meet somebody influenced their judgments of them right that's remarkable right because you you have no certain they were never able to sort of piece that together that that influenced them in that same article they talked about another study this was a subjects came to the lab for a consumer product test and they opened up this envelope and there was icy hot patches and in this envelope said either activate IC or activate hot and we want you to touch it and feel it and rate it this is a good product would you buy it did you like it and then right after that we said Oh congratu they said congratulations you want a prize because you're our 20th subject you can either take the prize for yourself well you could give it to your friend and you just have to figure out and tell us which one you want to do because there was a reason you need to the name if they had randomly been assigned to do the hot and felt the hot right they were more pro-social there were more likely to give that prize to their friend then take it for themselves with the idea being that warmth activated these pro-social tendencies same author john barge who's at yale and is without question the creative guy he had people randomly assigned to sit in a hard firm chair or this soft cushy chair and then they had to negotiate i'm in a simulated negotiation the price of a car people who sat in his firm chair held stronger to their price than people and the comfy chair okay now this is all predated actually from years of embodiment studies with one of my favorites this was probably thirty years ago where they brought in subjects and they put headphones on the subjects and they said these are brand new headphones to optimize the sound you need to nod your head up and down when you're listening so people sat there listening and nodding their head up and down or we they were told these are new headphones to optimize the sound you need to shake your head back and forth we have half the people nodding and half the people shaking their head after they listen to some music then over the headphones they heard a persuasive argument and this persuasive argument was presented to students and it was all about raising tuition usually students don't want to raise tuition but if they were randomly assigned to be sitting there nodding their heads they were more likely to say yes I'm persuaded by your arguments to raise tuition okay so these are all just kind of really fun examples of how these subtle changes in our in our body these bottom-up processes can influence our judgments but remember I just prefaced it with all of these declines and mind-body associations as we age so we actually started a series of studies where we wanted to know would you see embodiment the body men effects decline in older adults and that was sort of our first goal and then the second goal was a little bit deeper which is would there be compensatory strategies right if you stop relying on much on your body as much to make decisions do you then learn look externally and use external information and that was sort of uh that was our working hypothesis with some important caveats which should be that exercise protects from these effects and that younger subjects who have similar sort of declines in mind-body because of neuropathy or nerve damage like for example people with type 1 diabetes she so shows similar effects of older age so let me tell you how we got to that we had been studying how stress affects cognitive performance in younger adults for years and niña approached me about doing some of this work in older adults so we had run a study we where we brought in young and old adults so defined younger adults for 25 to 40 older adults were 65 to 80 and again we exposed everyone to this very stressful task it wasn't a job interview though because that would have made sense instead we asked some sort of current event questions and and now we're a fairly relevant like what do you think of the cost of prescription medication what are your opinions on purity reform so things that were relevant and important but during this interview the same kind of interview our evaluators either gave kind of the stonyface negative feedback or during the conversation the evaluators kind of loosened up and smiled and leaned forward now you could imagine a stressful task with somebody staring at you and all of a sudden they're like nodding and giving you feedback you feel better and typically people that's when people get challenged or there was a control condition where there are no evaluators and here what we're looking at is we're looking at this subjective experience and memory and and we're gonna contrast that with some hormones that are related to age so we're collecting saliva samples that were a saying for this hormone called dehydroepiandrosterone and I'll tell you a little bit about this so DHEA is actually the most abundant hormone in your body you have tons of it when you're 20 you hit your kind of life peak and then for each decade you lose some more when you hit 80 or at about 10% of your peak DHEA now you could go to GNC and buy it over the counter it's synthetic I mean here are just some fun things that I searched on Google for DHEA here are the images these are the promises of the people who sell DHEA of what it'll do for you it promises to give you bigger muscles lean you out give you energy increase your bone growth make you more fertile give you glowing skin this is the most common that it'll boost your cognitive performance and my favorite that'll increase your sex drive so so you can we can go to GNC and get this or you actually can try to increase it by exercising more and also calorie restriction might increase DHEA but we were interested in luck and everybody differs and their levels of DHA so we're we're interested in looking at people's level of DHA and how it may predict who's more vulnerable than others who might have higher DHA so here's a quick study timeline I just want to so people arrive and we did get a saliva baseline and they get to rest and then after their stress period we tell them a story this is a memory test the story is something like Anna Thompson from South Boston was robbed to fifty six dollars on her way home from work the other night she has two kids she needs to feed the police officers were so touched by this story that they had a donation to help her through the holidays something like that but basically a paragraph story with lots of some specific details and then we asked participants to go ahead and tell us that story back and they did so now we get sort of initial memory then they get to find out that they do with the stress task they meet the evaluators the evaluators come in and then we manipulate negative or positive feedback during the stressful task and then we ask about their positive and negative emotions so here's just some quick data first of all as you age and as I told you there's actually quite a bit of a decline in in dehydroepiandrosterone and this isn't surprising so much lower levels of DHA among our older subjects I thought this was quite remarkable there was no memory effects for the initial memory so we told the subjects the story of Anna Thompson from South Boston and they were able regardless of age to tell us the story back so there were no initial memory effects I'm sorry did I I should have mentioned then right after that stress task we have prai's memory test that's 35 minutes after the initial one okay and that's what we're looking at here what would the memory foot of x after stress and what you see here so here's our younger adults the higher the number the more you remembered 35 minutes and also remember you have this intervening stress task now not surprisingly even for younger subjects compared to the control condition you remember less after stress task cortisol is higher you remember less cortisol directly affects the hippocampus memory is impaired but look at the bigger difference for our older subjects so stress had more of an effect and specifically the negative stress right the negative feedback where most people are threatened impaired memory more but memory basically stayed just like the younger subjects in the control condition where there was no stress and even remarkably in this positive stress condition so the takeaway there is that it was only when it was especially de stressful or negative situation that we saw more of these memory declines by age but what was most remarkable is when we looked at individuals level of DHEA s now what you see here on this axis this just means these are people with low levels of DHEA and these are high these are all older subjects so this means among people have low DHEA anyway because they're older those who for their age group had much higher we're able to retain their memory so here the negative stress did not impair their memory at the same levels of people with low levels of DHEA right so if you come in with lower levels of DHEA then you're more vulnerable to this negative stress manipulation when we asked about emotions just like Laura Carstensen who was your first speaker and I think did such a beautiful job kind of setting up this whole series we found sort of this effect she finds which is our older subjects reported lots of positive emotions even after this negative feedback they they still loved it and they thought everybody was charming and said there wasn't this response that they felt bad but that seemed hard to imagine right because we we could look at their behavior we could look at their risk-taking for example we saw all these other changes but at least in a self-report level they didn't look like our younger subjects and then we looked at the relationship these correlations basically the more their body responded how is that so associated with what they said okay so for younger subjects something like cortisol right a stress hormone the higher that stress hormone the more they said this is threatening but the more they self-reported that this was a stressful situation or the more cortisol increase they had the more negative emotions right because these are all positive numbers and that's all what a correlation means but now look at these numbers these are basically close to zero for older subjects there's there was not a relationship between their body changes and what they said now and this is sort of what God is thinking about how do these relationships change over time and how does our thinking change our body so now let's go back to our embodiment from the face so we ran this very classic study with young and old subjects we brought in 122 participants young and old the oldest one in this case was 82 and we randomly assigned our young and old participants to put the pen in their teeth versus the pen in their mouth and they read and rated five cartoons on how funny they were now what we expected is at the pen and the teeth versus pen in the mouth would not have any flow influence on older subjects and that's what we found so maybe because the loss of elasticity in the face but what you see here is for young subjects they put the pen in their teeth and all of a sudden the cartoons are very funny right versus the pen in the mouth no effect for older subjects similarly we ran the same proprioception experiment right we pitched older subjects forward versus back compare them to younger subjects and again the prediction is that this body influence is not going to affect our older subjects we brought in two hundred and eighty participants we made the mix you know it exposed them to anger a shame we had them manipulated the body position here's some nice sort of data just showing much lower sympathetic activation this is your how hard the or fast the hardest beating much lower for older subjects but here's where it becomes interesting right so when our younger subjects are in an are angry and an approach but they have a more efficient cardiac profile than if they're in the avoid position but no difference for our older subjects it didn't matter similarly with the vascular responses they're the tightening of the vasculature this changes depending on how our younger subjects were sitting welder subjects not so much then we asked how did they feel right so for younger subjects they feel much angrier when they're in the approach position then when their avoid position we make them angry older subjects in a difference shame we are do we get our younger subjects will say they're ashamed when they're in the avoidance position that dampens in the younger position no difference for our older subjects so maybe our older stuff just just think this is all really silly you're just not telling us what they really think we measure things like risk-taking so when people are angry they take more risks now there we do see the older subjects respond with more risk when they're angry so they take more risk but their body position doesn't matter right this bought the whether they were pitch forward or pitch back or sitting upright if they were angry they took more risks if they were ashamed or another study where we made them afraid they took less risks so it's not that there's no effect it's not like they're just able to say this is a dumb experiment yeah I've had a lifetime of experience what the hell are you guys doing it's that their body in this case wasn't providing additional information about how they should respond so so now in isolation one interpretation is that these data might be that older subjects are simply less influenced by subtle manipulations but remember we had a second poll the second goal who is that if you can't rely on your body as much for information that you would rely more on external signals so for me in my lab that meant let's put pupils feet put let's put pupils feet in a footbath this is what we did what we did is I don't know why it's doing that we manipulated the appearance of a foot bath where we put the exact same temperature of water in everybody's foot baths just 85 degrees but we manipulated whether the foot bath appeared to have cold water or hot water the cold water manipulation was it had blue lights and in the pilot study we actually put fake ice cubes but we ended up not putting in because some people didn't want to put their feet in if they saw ice cubes so it's just blue lights and then for some reason my heart isn't working but what it is is red lights but more importantly we had a smoke machine where it looked like steam was coming out so we put this foot bath in front of our participants and we said we want you to put your feet in here and then you're just gonna do some consumer product ratings do you like the foot bath how warm is it how cold is it do you enjoy it or you having a good time with your feet in the foot baths with the prediction being that the external cues would guide the ratings of our older subjects but the but these external cues would not influence the rating of our younger subjects okay so we brought in 127 subjects to do this they randomly assigned a test either the hot or cold foot bath football foot that's always 85 degrees and while their feet are in the foot bath they've evaluated it for how comfortable it is or warm so here's just some of the data now this is a huge effect meaning the effect is wildly large if our older subjects just saw and put their feet in a foot bath that had red lights and would look like steam they said it was much warmer those who said it was more comfortable and they enjoyed it more but if the lights were blue they thought it was colder if anything our younger subjects saw a flip and I think it's because they expected right the hot it should be hot and then they put their feet it's not as hot as they expect it but again this is a rather large effect the external cues drove the decisions but they weren't relying on the information from their body my last study that I'll talk about uses some false information to fool people into thinking they're having more of a physiological response and it uses what's called a false heart rate paradigm in this study we show participants these kind of you know kind of interesting landscape pictures and all subjects have an ECG sensor on them so we're measuring their heart rate and while they're rating these pictures and how they rate these pictures they have a slide box and if they like the picture they move the slide box over if they don't like the picture they move it to the left so they're looking pictured and they're raining how much they like good versus not and everybody's hearing sounds but for half the subjects we say the sounds that you're hearing is your heart rate so you can hear your heart rate as you're rating these pictures for the other people we're saying those sounds are just to drown out the noise just ignore those sounds if you think it's your heart rate what we what we did is we speed up that noise boom boom boom boom boom as you're looking at three target random pictures okay everybody so this has been used before if they think that's their heart rate they use that information to say that they'd like the picture more okay we predicted that older subjects especially would be influenced by that noise okay and that's what you see with with when you just think that boom boom boom is noise and not your heart rate you don't like the pictures that were that have the speed up noise more than other pictures but if you think that's your heart rate you like the pictures more if you're younger but look at that huge increase if you're older now you're using that information this must mean I really like the picture with the idea that it's hard to sort of judge your own changes and it's easier to be influenced by these external signals so I wanted just to mention the caveats before we and I mentioned that almost all these effects disappear when we look at exercise and exercise doesn't have to be dramatic exercise could just be people who walk almost every day but you don't see nearly these effects I mean especially the footbath look that if you just look at the older subjects who exercise we don't see the same kind of huge effects so even moderate exercise can really sort of help blunt these effects of loss of embodiment and younger subjects interestingly when they have report more somatization so tingling arms or tingling hands and feet numbness and their periphery they basically look like 70 year olds so it's it's not so much an age effect but what happens to our bodies whether for some people it's because they have type 1 diabetes or they lose nerve damage but or they stop exercising but it seems to be an effect that's more associated with the changes in the body that can occur with age and with that I will close and then take your questions a couple of people asked me over the weeks to give you the information and now this is in your packet of all the speakers who you heard from and their lab contacts if any of you are interested in participating in anything and with that I thank you for your attention I was gonna go a different way that's a good question um where I was going to go is there are some advantages of a threat State compared to a challenge state with things like so if participants are threatened they're quicker at seeing an angry face and a crowd of positive faces but your question was a little bit different so do you can positive feedback actually to distract you from from your test we don't see that I mean typically people do have a more positive response and things like decision-making tends to be improved with positive feedback but it's a good point so the question was when the students came back to the lab within three months with the actual GRE scores where do we interview them and see what they had actually remembered and gleaned and we did and and in some of it you saw the data because we asked you know how do they remember it you know it was it was interesting though because some students say oh I didn't you know cuz then we really debriefed them at the very very end we said you know what we were doing in this study is part of what science is supposed to do is educating people too we said you know there was this control condition where we didn't say anything and the reappraisal condition that's the condition you were in if that were the case and lots of students said I didn't remember that but they would then still yeah this is what my life was like this is a professor or you said that I don't remember that said hey I heard that you said that or the control people so one of the things that we did is we said we told people either you know we just reiterated the instructions or we told him about reappraisal do you remember which condition you were in and sometimes they would say the wrong one so so that you know that's a little bit of it's not so much a head-scratcher because that is what it you know students and and subjects sometimes don't remember the details but we think that's part of sort of the insidious nature of some of this information is that it then just becomes part of how you see the world and not so much you know if if we said look we think this is going to improve your GRE scores could that have backfired and a lot of time in social psychology these very subtle manipulations need to be very careful because if people know or sort of aware they're not as effective I'll respond to both so the first comment / question is the extent to which those GRE results still persisted after three months which I agree is remarkable and why and how did that happen and I'll mention there is a recent science paper that showed a 30 minute brief belongingness intervention which basically brought minority students into a lab and right when they were freshmen and sort of talked about how the university cares about minority students four years later predicted GPA so that brief belonging versus a control condition where they just came in and kind of learned about the history predicted better grades all the way through college and even through four years it appeared in science by Greg Walton who's also a professor at Stanford now I just saw Greg on Monday why do these little interventions because we you know we do huge interventions in the lab and we can't move anything around right it's crazy and these brief ones do and I think it goes back to that question that I was responding to a little bit you know when something's more subtle why does that why is that sticky you know there's people resist when they feel like they're being persuaded but these subtle manipulations seem to have these longer lasting effects and we think it's because they're just stickier the people don't resist them it's not that you're telling me to do this so I really did feel like this and the extent to which those brief belonging interventions shaped how they perceived all the information from the university you know that's sort of the idea did they see the university as just more inclusive every time you know they went to an introductory class I mean is that how it's doing it I think it's a really good question and we're not 100 100 percent sure of how how we're gonna nail down that mechanism and then the second question was giddy oh yeah Oh which is a great question the question is you know do there are these classic findings of sort of this bystander intervention effect that people are less likely to intervene if they think more people are going to and with age do you actually see a reverse sort of personal responsibility you know I don't know anybody who does that work and I think it's a great question and I can actually imagine coming up with the a reasonable theory to test of why you would expect age to be associated with more personal responsibility and and not the expectation that somebody else is going to come and help that's great yeah so the question is how are we able with this telling them to help to think about their physiology [Laughter] so and I will say this net studies yeah that's and that studies been replicated what we think is happening you know so we're telling people that arousal is good for you well who you think we're doing is we're sort of allowing them and liberating sort of this response that you then don't want to shut down right if you were just told that that arousal is good for you then when you start feeling your heartbeat you're not going to do the strategies that one can do to lower their heart rate you're gonna just let that sort of you know feel comfortable in it and that's why we think we're getting larger sympathetic activation when we tell people look this is a good response that then people aren't trying to down-regulate you know as you saw from Bob's talk people can down regulate their responses and we think that's what people might naturally do if they think those responses are gonna hurt them and we think we're basically liberating them from that constraint yeah yeah the question was on the results of 9/11 from Roxie silver study if people initially responded and then responded a lot you know why is that predictive of later problems and and I think she did a very nice job sort of speculating on why that was I mean what is it doing it's kind of picking up sort of early signs of distress right and and maybe you know it wasn't my project I read the paper but I also read that and thought you know I wonders the extent that I didn't need to respond to this respondent panel I wanted to go talk to my family about it I mean maybe it was too anonymous and maybe what that was getting and the people who didn't have the social networks to then go talk about it so I think to the extent that and then you know again the more people wrote the worst health outcomes they had so if somebody writing you know this big diary on the internet rather than going and talking about it with a loved one and does that like more likely to pick up people who might be lonely or don't have somebody to talk about so I think there are other reasons lots of possibilities but what was important about it is that it wasn't just expression is good right sometimes expression can mean that it's diagnostic of other sort of limitations okay and with that thank you all so much I hope you have wonderful holidays and you are great audience [Music] [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 34,946

Rating: 4.8328691 out of 5

Keywords: embodiment, aging, social psychology

Id: VPfPMGSkeJ4

Length: 88min 23sec (5303 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2012