The Power of (Secure) Love | Omri Gillath, PhD | TEDxOverlandPark

[Music] you who out here wanna be happy I know okay so I'm gonna say we all do although I saw that there was one guy out there that the Grinch but the pursuit of happiness is not only our constitutional right but it's also something that we're all striving for and for centuries people have been trying to figure out the key to happiness philosophers poets theologians and scholars I mean all coming back to the same conclusion the pursuit of happiness the way to get there goes through love so having a close relationship where you love someone and being loved by someone is the main way to get to happiness let me give you an example maybe you heard about the longitudinal Harvard study this is a study that follow-up young males from their days in college at baking 1938 all the way to today so we're talking about 80 years and this is one reason why this study is so famous because it's so lengthy and the other reason that it's famous is because of some of the participants maybe you heard about one of them JFK anyone hurt yeah okay so a bunch of different other people were on it and the main question of this study was what makes us happy all right so so people went through many many different things they go out of school go to jog got married you know go to divorce etc etc etc and the researchers found one factor that made people happy it was the money it wasn't fame wasn't even giving a TED talk go go figure but the one thing that they found was having the ability or the capability to be in close relationships so being loved again and especially what they found was about mom mom's love and having these gonna stay but kind of relationships feeling kindness and all these happy warm feelings was the number one predictor of being happy now happiness is not just important for mental health and well-being and a sense of happiness it's also important for physical health and our longevity so recent a review that studied the results of 150 studies show that if you don't have these close ties so if you don't have these close relationships if we don't feel love and you are at risk as much as if you were smoking or heavy drinker right and it's more dangerous than obesity or being physically inactive right so you know what we think about love is something can obstruct but it's actually very very important for us it's important for mental health and our physical health however you know some people have difficulties with love and close relationships when I say some I mean many and when I talk about difficulties I don't talk about you know the fact that he had last night was your partner but who's gonna wash the dishes and by the way honey I did and it's more about not having these relationships right so I know if you knew that but the singles is the fastest-growing demographic in the u.s. there are more people every today that are in this industry more graphics there are less people than ever today that are married and even the people that do find a relationship and do get into a relationship have an issue was finding love and feeling loved and as a researcher I'm trying to understand why is that why do we have these these connections so for the last 20 years and I've been studying that i'm social neuroscientist as you heard before i do my research and using experiments and and all kinds of all these kind of techniques and i'm trying to study issues associated with close relationships love and and sex it's like kind of good job for a for a living now and and what i'm doing i'm using attachment theory which is a series of describes how we attach how we connect to each other right some people think attachment is what you said in your email no we're talking about how you boy it's that too but it's how we bond to close others right so these are just that the relationship that are the closest to us these are not your you know 300 friends on facebook these are actually the people that you can turn to when you're feeling down or someone you can turn to when you want to share your success right and in my research in focusing specifically on attachment style so these are individual differences between people can I go back to why some people have relationships and others you know now according to the theory there are three different attachment styles there's the anxious style these are people that are preoccupied with fears and anxiety of rejection and abandonment they're they're the ones who are worried all the time that their partner doesn't love them or doesn't love as much as they do and and these are the people that have very strong issues about their close relationships and and staying in them the other type is avoiding people these are people that are kind of the opposite they want to stay away from others they want to avoid closeness they want to avoid intimacy and they have issues with trust and dependence they don't want to depend on others and they want others to depend on them and then finally there is security these are the people that actually have it easy going to get into their relationships and and usually they are the ones who have the long lasting satisfying relationships and actually 55 percent of the populations are secure so the majority of people are secure but then again 45% of the people are not and what we're trying to understand in my lab is why where are these differences coming from what is the reason that some people are anxious others are avoidant and so on now a recent article in The New York Times when I suggested a very simple answer summarizing years of research think it's all your parents fault yeah mom it's all your fault yeah well you know decades of research and thousands of studies would suggest that a lot of it is about your parents so if you had supportive responsive sensitive parents you are more likely to develop a sense of attachment security however if you had cold and rejecting parents your might more likely to develop a sense of avoidance and if you had parents who are more in consistence of something that was there some of they're not and more intrusive so they're trying to force their way on you you're more like you develop a sense of attachment anxiety however the carrying or parenting style is not the whole story what we're showing in my lab is also that and it's it's some of it is is connect nurture but the other stuff is nature and it's more specifically a genetic predispositions now if you know anything about genetics you know the genes comes in all kinds of shapes and forms or genetic variations or what we call polymorphisms and and these variations in the genes are basically a shaping our behavior or attitudes or personality in our study we're trying to figure out whether there is a connection between one's attachment style and their genetic variations and to do that what we did we asked people to come to our laboratory and the University we asked them to complete a very simple self-report measure to assess their attachment start their level of anxiety and avoidance and also to spit into a tube I mean want to spit into a tube we take it to the FBI know once they spit into a tube we we analyze their their saliva and from that we realize what kind of genetic polymorphism they have and what we find in this study that their attachment cell is indeed associated with their genetic predispositions so in this case we see that attachment anxiety is associated with the dopamine receptor gene so it's kind of hard to see but maybe you can and number one is an anxious person you can see very different from number two which is avoidant number three which is secure and then four which is a control so there is a different pattern to their gene mapping and then attachment avoidance was associated with serotonin receptor so in other words part of what a or part over who you are or your attachment size is indeed coming from your parents or your parenting but the other part come from the genetics that they inherited and now what we're also trying to do in our stories is to understand the underlying mechanism of attachment to do that we use the NF MRI scanner when we bring people to the scanner she's right here in Kansas City and we ask them to go through all kinds of tests in this specific study where we looked at their brain activation we asked them to come to the scanner and think about five different scenarios and I'll ask you to be participants for a second and do it with me so the first scenario would be something kind of neutral just to think about driving you know for like an hour so let's say imagine you're driving from lorenz to Overland Park all right no big deal nothing very emotional the next scenario would be to think about something that you do with your partner so this is a relational kind of like scenario but something still neutral so maybe going shopping for grocery I know that some people find it very kind of like irritating or even you know dangerous but you know for most people it's kind of neutral and then the next three scenarios are all again relational but they're getting more and more aversive all right so the next one is to imagine having a fight with your partner or or an argument maybe about the garbage or the dishes or what-have-you that we had before the next one is to try and and and imagine something else so close your eyes for a second just go with me there close your eyes I'm gonna run and hide in the meantime now close your eyes and try to imagine coming back home tonight and finding your partner's standing in the middle of your living room holding a suitcase picking up his stuff or her stuff and saying we're done it's over I'm breaking up with you so think about it for two minutes well we don't have the time but it's what we asked him to do and and basically think about it for two minutes and then the last one if this one wasn't bad enough for you to think about the breakup was your partner is to imagine coming back home and seeing a police officer standing next to your doorstep and saying I'm sorry to let you know but your partner it was just killed in a car accident and fun right experiments are fun and so they think about it for a couple of minutes and then we ask them to actually stop thinking about it for two minutes so so now after I put all these things into your head now we need to push them out and keep listening to my talk right so you have to suppress it somehow and kind of hard um so we looked at that and then we looked at what happened when people were thinking about that and how how that affected their brain activation and what we're saying is that people that were high on a touch of anxiety had higher activation in brain related areas that were social with emotion right so they were more aroused when they were thinking about these issues than people that were not anxious and at the same time they also showed less activation or deactivations in brain areas are associated with control or with emotion regulation right so so if you're anxious on the one hand you're much more aroused from the same kind of topics that we all thought about and you have less control over this arousal and this is what kind of creating this the sense of being overwhelmed among anxious people now when we ask them to stop thinking about it we find something also very interesting they had very different ways to deal with it right so when we ask people and we also secure people why did you do when you stop thinking about it so an example would be I thought about my happy place right so they thought about maybe having a party or or you know going on vacation with their partner and so on avoiding people went back to something neutral so if one person would say I thought back to my shopping list right because we were just talking about chopping a second ago and anxious people still did what we asked them to do but they kept in the same this kind of cold and dark domain so one participant for example told us I thought about the death of my grandpa so she was doing what else did right she wasn't thinking about the jessa4 part but she was still thinking about death and she was still thinking about the death of someone close her grandpa right so you can see that even while we were asking her to push it aside even while we were asking her to suppress these things that she was still focusing on these kind negative memories and this is something that is very characteristic of anxious people now what we're seeing that over time these differences in brain activations are also affecting brain volume and what we're seeing among insecure people is that some part of their brain are getting smaller so what we found in in some of our studies we have evidence to show that people that are highly insecure have smaller hippocampus right this is the same area that is getting smaller for people that suffer from PTSD post traumatic stress disorder these are people that went through trauma maybe war maybe were prisoners of war maybe they were rape or abused and so we're saying they basically being insecure has similar consequences to going through a trauma and this is what we can see from from these imaging studies now maybe you're asking yourself at this point so are we stuck with our attachment sorry these are these are very negative things in a way you're saying that if I'm secure and loved and feel the love I have all these advantages of mental health and physical health and if I'm if I don't have it I'm kind of doomed so are we doomed well the answers that you'll be happy to know is no and we can actually change people's sense of attachment security and insecurity so we can actually made them kind of change their mindset or their working models as we call them and there are different ways to do it and so for example all right we can enhance security through therapy as you'll hear in some of the other talks and you can go to therapy and work with your therapist about your sense of security and insecurity and try to figure out your attachment injuries and and these things that are stopping you and holding you back another way that if you're lucky and you might find the right partner like your prince charming who happens to also to be someone who's secure and can fulfill all your attachment needs right but what I'm interested in is more of what we do in the lab and these are lab manipulations right this is when we expose people to all kinds of things like images or words that would increase the accessibility of their sense of attachment security so like this picture here which if you remember showed you at the beginning so this is like Quebec ran right in this case it's a picture of a mother holding a baby encompassing a baby very warm and loving and in this case it's my wife and child right so I basically had many many years ago but I basically exposed you to a security Prime right which makes me feel more secure and hopefully makes you feel more secure so that's one way to do it and we can do it either when people actually see it right like you're seeing it here or we can do it subliminally so they're exposed very quickly and to these images another way to do it is to expose them to words so for example in this task we asked people to tell us how similar are two pieces of furniture to each other and we show them this alright anyone called the word in-between love right let's do it again so you can see one more time all right so we're sneaking a word in between there we're doing subliminal priming there obviously it's much faster in the real study and when we do that we see that people have different brain activation so when you prime people with security Prime we actually see there is more activation in positive Africa and reward related areas there is more activation in control and emotion regulation right area so if you remember insecure people had less activation there if we prime people securely get more activation there and we see more activations in areas that are socials behavioral tendencies so what does it mean having these activations in the areas of behavioral tendencies let me give you one example of what we think is going on with that so this is an example of another study where we brought people to the lab and we asked them to look at another participant doing a bunch of aversive tasks right so for example looking at gory pictures and where you have someone playing with a fire a fireworks and and and still holding it White's going boom in your hand all kinds of nice stuff right and then they get to this task where they're asked to pet a tarantula now if you've never seen a tarantula this big hairy scary spider you need to put your hand in there and here you go to write so so actually go ahead and do that this is the point where the other participant said no way I'm not doing that and so we would stop this study and you tell the participant that was watching said there is no way you can continue unless you take her place you you step in there and you do this task and then there is another task for you - like cockroaches crawl on your head and one more when you need to put your hand into a black sack that you don't know what's in there it's fear fact you're gonna and now some of the participants were praying with security and others were praying with other primes and what we're seeing is that people that were Prime with security are more than twice as likely to go and help the other participant as opposed to people that are exposed to the and neutral primes right so in a way this is what I mean by the dis tendencies there is a pro-social and pro relational tendency of people when they're Prime with security to go and help someone else and now this is just one example I have a bunch of other examples from our lab for example when Prime people is security you see a higher positive mood and self-esteem eternity for authenticity and honesty more tolerance of their partners transgressions a preference for long-term mating strategies over short-term ones so they are less likely to engage in a one-night stand and more pro-social behaviors of volunteering and and generosity and we also see a bunch of things going down so they're less likely to show biases less likely to show prejudice and stereotypes and less likely to show non compassion a breakup strategy so if you think about breakup there are different ways to do it you can do it you know face to face you can do it on the phone you can text you can change your facebook status from in a relationship to single and some of these ways are more competitive than others and when we prime people with security we get them to go with the more compassionate ones and there is a lower tendency to feel regret and one of the most exciting findings that is more recent here is that when we prime people with security over time there is a decline in their depression symptoms now what can you do at home to do with that you don't have a lab you don't have a scanner and so and so forth you can do small things consistently and for example be more tolerant to people be more forgiving rights but your partner forgive and forget your relationship partners and be more grateful maybe have a gratitude diary every night before you go to bed write about if you think that you're grateful for it help others even if you fake it at first right so fake it until you make it be kind to others and reach out for help and learn to trust people let let go of your defensiveness and hatred especially these days let go of the hatred and and when you do that try to find the one thing or the few things that are working for you like we do in the lab try to isolate that one thing and then repeat it repeatedly like we do it with the primes in the lab so to sum it up and love and relationships chlorine ships are super important for mental health and our physical well-being and and we can actually help people feel more secure and loved in in connect simple ways and once we do that we get a bunch of beneficial outcomes not just to the individual but to society in general and if you have any more questions you can read all about it in my book and thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 88,650

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Brain, Happiness, Relationships

Id: PgIQv-rTGgA

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2017