Our emotional brain

Sunday 6 May 2012 5:00PM

Pioneering neuroscientist Richard Davidson deepens our understanding of the mind-body connection. He’s identified six unique emotional styles and explains the brain chemistry underlying them. He explains that there are simple strategies and interventions which we can use to change our emotional styles. He believes one effective example is through mindfulness meditation, after studying the brain scans of people who practise it.

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Lynne Malcolm:  We’re getting all emotional today on All in the Mind—Lynne Malcolm with you.

My guest is a respected neuroscientist who got caught up in India in the 70s with a bunch of meditators. Later he went against the tide in his field at a time when emotions were not taken seriously by insisting that brain science be central to the study of feelings. And now, he says, our brain activity gives us each a unique emotional style. Recognise any of these approaches to life?

Speaker:  I hate Sundays, oh I just hate them.

Speaker:  We’re going to have roast chicken now, I love that.

Speaker:  Are you going to start that all over again, glad this, glad that, what is all this glad business you talk about.

Speaker:  Oh, just a game I play it helps sometimes.

Speaker:  Helps what?

Speaker:  When things aren’t going so well.

Speaker:  Do you know why I hate Sunday because it means the starting of another week.

Speaker:  That’s true.

Speaker:That’s when you can play the glad game.

Speaker:   Here it comes.

Lynne Malcolm:  Do you play the glad game with that sunny Pollyanna outlook, or do you tend to take the cautious pessimistic approach? After an argument with a friend do you bounce back quickly, or does that grudge linger just a little too long? These styles and more are all in the wiring of your brain, according to Professor Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin Madison. The idea dawned on him after 30 years of research.

Richard Davidson:  Most of the research that I’ve done in my career has focussed on how people are different in their emotional constitution. Why is it that some people are vulnerable to life’s slings and arrows and other people are resilient?  Those are the kinds of questions that have been central to virtually all the work that I’ve done in my career. And so I was naturally led to try to understand better the nature of these individual differences, differences among people in the mechanisms that govern how they respond to emotional events.

Lynne Malcolm:  He came up with six emotional styles and we’ll hear what they are in a minute, so get ready for a bit of self-reflection.

But first—the science. Richard Davidson’s early work challenged the understanding of what part of the brain was involved in controlling our emotions. He and his colleagues showed a distinction between activity in the right and left parts of the area of the brain known as the pre-frontal cortex.

Richard Davidson:  We measured the electrical activity in the right and left pre-frontal cortex and we were interested in changes in this part of the brain in response to different types of emotional stimuli that we can present in the laboratory. But one of the things we noticed very early on in this work is that the differences among different people were much greater than the differences within a person between two different emotional stimuli. And this was the first clue to me that there was a very important brain basis for understanding differences among people and their emotional style, because what we learned early on is that these differences in the extent to which the left or right pre-frontal cortex is activated is something that is relatively consistent within a person over time as an adult, and that they predict important features of their emotional style.

So to give you one very specific example, we did an experiment where we determined that those people that show more left pre-frontal activation at base line were quicker to recover from a negative event. And one of the styles that I talk about in the book is called the resilient style, and resilience refers to how slowly or quickly you recover from adversity. It turns out that people with greater activity in their left pre-frontal cortex are people who recover more quickly.

Lynne Malcolm:  So the pre-frontal cortex was usually associated with higher cognitive function and reason, not emotion at all.

Richard Davidson:  That’s right, this was one of the early kind of myths that the work that I was doing challenged, because at that time the pre-fontal cortex as you say was very much regarded as the pinnacle of human rational thought. And here we were suggesting that there are other functions of the pre-frontal cortex as well, including its role in the regulation of emotion. And of course it now turns out that there are thousands of studies which indicate and underscore the role of the pre-frontal cortex in emotion regulation, but when we began in the mid 1970s it was really a bit of a heresy to say that the pre-frontal cortex participated in emotion regulation.

Lynne Malcolm:  So it’s now understood that the pre-frontal cortex sends messages to the limbic system which includes the amygdala and the hippocampus the more of what we associate with emotion to calm that part of the brain down.

Richard Davidson: Yes, at least certain parts of the pre-frontal cortex so we know that there are bi-directional connections between the pre-frontal cortex and amygdala and the hippocampus, and through these connections one role of certain segments of the pre-frontal cortex is to modulate activity in these limbic structures, which is a mechanism through which emotion can be regulated.

Lynne Malcolm:  Richard Davidson describes six dimensions which are based on a specific brain circuit, and your emotional style is determined by where you fall along each of these dimensions.

Richard Davidson:  The first is resilience, which I’ve already mentioned, and that refers again to how quickly or slowly you recover from a stressful event. The second is outlook—it refers to the duration of time with which positive emotion persists, so some people when an enjoyable episode or event happens in their life it produces a positive glow which lasts quite a long time. For other people those positive feelings are very ephemeral and they last just for a very short amount of time. So that’s the outlook style.

The third style I call social intuition. Social intuition refers to how accurate a person is in detecting the non-verbal cues of emotion in another; their facial expressions, their tone of voice, their body posture. Some people seem so accurate in being able to pick up on these cues that they seem to know what emotion another person is feeling maybe even before they themselves can consciously label it. Whereas other people have a great deal of difficulty in discerning the emotional expressions of another and at the extreme, there’s a large group of people who are in the autism spectrum who have a particularly difficult time in detecting for example facial expressions of emotion.

A fourth emotional style I call self awareness, and self awareness refers to how accurate you are in detecting your own non-verbal cues of emotion, particularly the changes in your body. When emotions occur there are physiological signals in our bodies such as changes in our heart rate, changes in our muscle tension, and some people are acutely aware of those changes and other people have a difficult time figuring out what’s going on inside.

A fifth style I call context—how good you are in modulating your emotional responses based on the context in which you find yourself. So for example how you behave with your spouse is presumably going to be very different than how you talk to your boss. And individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder have a particularly difficult time in modulating their emotional responses based on context. The kind of bodily changes that a person with PTSD displays in response to a traumatic event may be very adaptive when the traumatic event is actually occurring, but if you then transplant that person, as happens for example among veterans in the United States who are coming back from Afghanistan and then go back to their communities, if they are walking on a street in their neighbourhood and an ambulance goes by and they hear a siren, that can trigger a major flooding of anxiety in a way which is not different from how they might respond when they’re in the battlefield. But now they are in a very safe context when they’re back home, and that is presumably very maladaptive.

And finally the sixth emotional style is attention. Attention is not normally thought of as an emotional style but some people are very focussed and other people are more scattered in their attention and this plays a very important role in regulating your emotion.

So those are the sixth emotional styles, and each of them is based upon a specific brain circuit that has been intensively investigated in modern neuro-scientific research, and the important thing is that each of these six are dimensions, and we all have each of these six but we vary in where along each of these six dimensions we fall.

Lynne Malcolm:  So there’s no ideal emotional style—it’s a sliding scale, isn’t it, and if you tend to end up on the extreme ends problems may arise?

Richard Davidson:  That’s right, there is no ideal style. And what is optimal for one person is not necessarily optimal for another person, because it depends upon what kind of environment the person is in. And societies could not function unless there was a diversity of emotional styles; we need people who would prefer not to interact with other people, who would prefer to interact with a machine. Our technological progress in the western world in part depends upon such people, and so we need a diversity of emotional styles. It’s important for a person to understand that his or her emotional style needs to best mesh with the environment in which they find themselves.

Lynne Malcolm:  But say you take self awareness, if you’re too self-aware you might be likely to experience, I don’t know, panic attacks, or hypochondria, those sorts of things. Or, if you’re too focussed, too much attention is paid on one specific thing—could it even be connected with something like autism?

Richard Davidson:  All those things are very true, those are excellent questions. It is absolutely the case that being on an extreme is not necessarily a good thing and individuals who are acutely self aware are more potentially prone to panic attacks, for example, because they notice every minute physiological change and can interpret that as something potentially problematic. And so it’s not necessarily adaptive to be so self-aware, and similarly for every other emotional style.

Lynne Malcolm:  You’re listening to All in the Mind, Lynne Malcolm with you on RN Radio Australia and online.

We’re getting all emotional today with neuroscientist Professor Richard Davidson. His extensive research emphasises that each one of us has a unique pattern of brain activity which determines what style of person we are and how we emotionally interact in the world around us.

He says there are also very strong two-way connections between our brains and our bodies. It’s the reason why physical exercise and particularly yoga seem to affect our whole being. He describes one fascinating example of how what happens to our body can directly influence our emotions, with some research he and his colleagues did on people who had Botox treatment for reducing wrinkles.

Richard Davidson:  The way Botox works is that it temporarily paralyses muscle, and we and others have conducted research to investigate what impact the paralysis of certain facial muscles might have on one’s emotional behaviour. Now it turns out that facial expressions are used for all kinds of things and not just for communicating emotions to others, but they actually play a role in our capacity to experience empathy because part of the experience of empathy is actually simulating the emotions of another person. When someone else is in pain we can, to some extent, feel their pain by simulating their pain and part of the simulation involves making facial expressions that mimic the facial expression of pain.

Now if a person has received the Botox injection the facial muscles which are important for empathic responding to negative emotion may be impaired and may not be able to contract. And in fact we found evidence that suggests that Botox injections into the corrugator muscle—which is a muscle very important for empathy related to negative affect—that capacity of those individuals to process certain emotional added information is impaired. This really I think is very important evidence because it should I think give people pause before they get Botox injections, because it’s not simply a cosmetic procedure but it literally alters mind/brain/body interaction.

Lynne Malcolm:  Fascinating isn’t it. So Richard Davidson confirms that there is a mechanism between emotional style and physical health. And there’s quite a bit of solid scientific evidence that indicates that happier people are healthier. He and his colleagues have been investigating some of the brain mechanisms involved.

Richard Davidson:  Happier people likely have a more resilient emotional style and we’ve conducted research which indicates that people who are able to exert pre-frontal regulation of their amygdala which allows them to recover quickly have differences in their endocrine systems, so that they actually have a more adaptive profile of cortisol which is an important stress hormone, and they are able to shut down cortisol in the evening, which is something very, very important for our health.

We’ve also found that people who have the neural profile, the more resilient emotional style, when we give them the flu vaccine the people who have the more resilient brain profile actually have a more robust response to the flu vaccine. So even though everyone’s getting the identical vaccine, some people respond with a stronger response to the vaccine compared to others. So those are some mechanisms that we’re beginning to learn about that suggest that the neural networks involved in a happier emotional style are ones that modulate peripheral biology, that is biology below the neck in ways that are health promoting.

Lynne Malcolm:  According to Richard Davidson, particular emotional styles can come with distinct advantages. So what if we are not happy with our own emotional style, are we stuck with it, or is there room to move?

Richard Davidson: One of the greatest contributions I would say of modern neuroscience has been to underscore the value and importance of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity simply refers to the idea that the brain is capable of changing in response to experience and in response to training. And so given that each of these six emotional styles are based upon known brain circuits, each of these brain circuits has the capacity to change with the proper kind of environmental conditions and with training. We really shouldn’t think of wellbeing and happiness any differently than we think about playing the violin or learning to play golf. They are skills that can be cultivated through training.

Lynne Malcolm:  Early in his life Richard Davidson developed an interest in the practise of meditation and headed off to India in the mid 1970s to learn more about it, much to the puzzlement of his colleagues in neuroscience I’m sure.

He returned with a strong conviction that these meditation methods were very important for modern neuroscience because they had the potential of producing real change that may be important for our mental and physical health. 

He met up with the Dalai Lama to discuss how mindfulness meditation and neuroscience might be relevant to each other. Here’s the Dalai Lama speaking at a neuroscience conference in Zurich in 2005.

Dalai Lama:  It is very useful to learn from the scientific sort of finding that internal matter like emotion or mind I think the Buddhist sort of experience quite advanced. So the modern scientist it could be useful to learn from the Buddhist explanation and at least the Buddhist explanation gives them new ways to look at the subject. So therefore it is something that’s mutually beneficial.

Lynne Malcolm:  Reinforced by the Dalai Lama’s interest in bringing science and meditation together, Richard Davidson went on to conduct brain scans on people who meditate, beginning with a group of  Buddhist monks who had spent more than 34,000 hours throughout their lives practising mindfulness.

Richard Davidson: What we can say is that their brains function differently in ways that can be reliably and quite easily measured, and so their meditation practice is inducing enduring changes in their brain function. And those changes are found at baseline when they’re not formally meditating and they are also seen to an even greater extent when they engage in a formal meditation practice.

Lynne Malcolm:  But what about those of us who don’t choose to spend many, many, many hours of time practising mindfulness meditation? How much meditation do you need to do?

Richard Davidson:  Great question, and we’ve wondered about that ourselves, and that has led us to do many studies now with ordinary people who are just learning to meditate for the first time. And in our recent work we find as little as two weeks of practice for 30 minutes a day is sufficient to produce a discernable change in the brain that can be measured. And recent findings in the scientific literature indicate that eight weeks of meditation practice, of mindfulness meditation, can actually produce a structural change in the brain, a change in the physical structure that can be measured with an MRI scan. So the answer is that relatively short amounts of practice can produce discernable changes in the brain.

Lynne Malcolm:  Teaching mindfulness to people who experience depression, anxiety and self-harming behaviour I believe is beginning to be tried, and some are finding it a really useful addition to therapy. Could this sort of therapy make way for effective treatment of conditions, for other conditions like autism, or ADHD without the use of drugs?

Richard Davidson:   That’s a very important question and the honest answer is that the scientific evidence for the application of mindfulness based treatments to disorders beyond depression and anxiety disorders is just beginning now, so there’s precious little hard-nosed scientific evidence. There’s a little bit of evidence to suggest that individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may benefit from this kind of practice. But this work is still in the very, very early stages. With respect to autism I don’t really think we know at this point in time, but the evidence in depression is now quite substantial in showing that these methods can be enormously helpful, particularly in minimising the likelihood of relapse among patients who have had major depression.

Lynne Malcolm:  So even if you don’t choose to spend thousands of hours meditating, Richard Davidson says that there are simple ways to train your brain in order to change your emotional style, to shift it along one of the dimensions which may be troublesome to you.

Richard Davidson:  There are simple interventions, simple things that we can do in our daily life based upon what we know about the brain to help us to shift one of our emotional styles if we find that where our current set point is for that style may not be optimal. You can actually vary where you are on each of these dimensions depending upon the task at hand, and just to take one example for the attention style, there are certain times in a very focussed attentional style would be appropriate and other times when a less focussed style may be appropriate. And so being able to flexibly modulate where you are on a particular dimension might also be a helpful quality in certain life situations.

For example, for the resilient emotional style one of the practices is simple mindfulness meditation that can improve a person’s ability to recover more quickly from adversity. And the reason why we think mindfulness meditation might work is because when you practise mindfulness, which is defined by some people as paying attention on purpose non-judgementally, the non-judgemental piece is particularly important because when we judge how we feel it often leads to a separation of our negative feelings. So if we have an initial response which may not be optimal and then we get angry at ourselves for having that response, that’s an example of a judgement and that’s the kind of thing that can be potentially attenuated with mindfulness meditation.

I’ll take another emotional style and suggest very different kinds of practices. For social intuition, something that may be very difficult for individuals on the autism spectrum, in order to become more accurate at encoding the social signals of another person we need to pay attention to those social signals, and actually in the case of facial expressions explicitly look at the face, particularly look at features on the face which may be important in conveying emotional information. And one of the most important features of the face is the eye region of the face. And so the instruction to more explicitly pay attention to the eye region of the face can actually remarkably improve a person’s accuracy in decoding certain kinds of facial expressions of emotion. And some people may not realise that they can engage in that kind of strategy and specifically focus, at least for short periods of time, on the eye region of another person’s face and through that acquire important information about their experience of emotion.

So those are just a few simple exercises that potentially might be helpful.

Our brains are constantly being shaped, most of the impact of our environment on our brain we’re not aware of and the reality of neuroplasticity invites the possibility that we can actually take more responsibility for our own brain by intentionally engaging in certain practices to cope with the healthier and more positive habits of mind, and also arranging our environment to bring out the best—instead of being pawns of our environment to actually create environments that nurture more positive places on these dimensions of emotional style.

Lynne Malcolm:  Richard Davidson, he’s professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Madison and he’s also author of The Emotional Life of your Brain published by Hodder and Stoughton.

Check our website for details at abc.net.au/radionational and choose All in the Mind in the program list. From there you can listen to the programs again, find transcripts, arrange to podcast the show and of course add your comments. I’d really like to hear what you think about this idea of emotional style, or share your thoughts on the All in the Mind Facebook site. And follow @allinthemind on twitter as well.

Thanks today to sound engineer Phil McKellar—I’m Lynne Malcolm, till next week, bye for now.



Dr Richard Davidson
Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry
Director, Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience
Director, Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging & Behaviour
University of Wisconsin-Madison


The Emotional Life of your Brain
Richard J. Davidson with Sharon Begley
Hodder and Staughton


Lynne Malcolm

Comments (4)

Add your comment

  • Gwynne Jones :

    06 May 2012 10:27:29pm

    As a yoga teacher and long time practioner of yoga, I was over joyed to hear this program tonight, shedding scientific light upon the wisdom of mindfulness, yoga and its direct relationship with our entire well being.
    Thank you, Namaste

  • William :

    10 May 2012 7:20:18pm

    Dr Maryanne Demasi interviewed Dr Richard Davidson in 2008 for a Catalyst presentation titled 'The Science of Happiness'. The following link is to the Catalyst presentation which is closely related to Dr Davidson's radio commentary;


    Emotions, Emotional wellbeing & the associated brain activity is such a fascinating subject to talk about & discuss. It can make you happy just thinking about it!!


    Kind regards,

  • Denise Shull :

    11 May 2012 12:23:59pm

    I don't doubt for a second that mindfulness meditation is helpful in many circumstances.

    On the other hand, six emotional styles I believe is subject to much debate. Lisa Feldman Barrett and The Affective Science Institute based at Northeastern have shown how the interpretation of the experience any emotion is subject to the contexts of culture and language. Maybe there are six styles even with culture and language but given the number of the aforementioned and the differing view of emotion in say the USA vs. Japan, it is hard to believe.

  • maria :

    17 Jul 2012 12:55:36am

    What a terrific program thank you.
    I have asperger's and have also practiced on and off for many years mindfulness, telling my brain it's happy when it may not be, and also meditation. I practice meditation daily now and for the past four years.
    The benefits are phenomenal and I have now incorporated intuitive building, limbic self-healing, tarot and also shapeshifting into my hyper-plasticity repertoire.
    Great to have all this confirmed scientifically through original, creative, free thinking scientific inquiry and process.
    Brilliant program, again thank you so very much