How Happy Brains Respond to Negative Things

You drop a glass while making your morning coffee. You get stuck in traffic on your way to work. Your boss yells at you for being late. Congratulations! You're having a bad morning. It happens to everyone, once in a while. But how we react to life's bad moments says a lot about our brains.

It may seem unnecessary to say, but people with more optimistic dispositions are better able to regulate their emotions than people with darker personalities, who are more likely to be knocked down by unpleasant events. Why does this happen?

There are several possibilities. One is that happier people wear metaphorical “rose-colored glasses” that let them focus on positive things and filter out the negative. Another possibility is that happier people are better at savoring good things and letting them lift their mood, while still seeing the bad.

Why does this question matter? Because of what it means for how you see your life. Is it better to ignore the negative points and setbacks, or to strengthen your ability to zero in on the good without overlooking the bad?

One way to test these hypotheses is to look at activity in the amygdala, a small almond-shaped region of the brain, in people with different emotional styles. For years, neuroscientists thought of it as the brain's primitive “fear center,” always on the lookout for potential threats. In some people, increased amygdala activity has been linked to depression and anxiety. Yet little is known about how the amygdala responds to positive stimuli, and how that activity might relate to experiencing positive emotions.

That's what psychologists William Cunningham at the University of Toronto and Alexander Todorov at Princeton University are exploring with their colleagues. In a series of recent studies funded by the John Templeton Foundation (which also supports the work of the Greater Good Science Center), they've discovered a whole new amygdala, one involved in human connection, compassion, and happiness. According to the research so far, happier people don't ignore threats. They may just be better at seeing the good.

What is the amygdala for?

A wild zebra must constantly watch for lions and other predators, even when pursuing a goal like finding water or a mate. Scientists have traditionally linked this monitoring function to the amygdala. Yet recent research suggests the amygdala is also active when people are trying to reach what are called “appetitive goals,” like our zebra's interest in drinking, eating, and mating.

Since threatening situations can have deadly consequences, it makes sense that the amygdala is tuned to react to all frightening stimuli. But does the amygdala respond to all positive stimuli too? Would our zebra's amygdala be activated every time it saw a water source, even though that's a good thing, not a bad one?

Cunningham and his colleagues took on these questions in a study published last year in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. They showed a series of images side-by-side to study participants, 15 people total, while recording amygdala activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The images varied in their emotional content (positive, negative, or neutral) and in how intense the emotion they evoked was.

From the fMRI data, Cunningham and his colleagues found that negative images triggered amygdala activity, as expected. Positive images did too, but only when participants were explicitly told to focus on them.

Humans have a negativity bias, a tendency to focus on threats. But this research suggests people can consciously compensate by trying to focus more on the positive. As the authors put it in their paper, “while people automatically attend to negative stimuli, given adequate ability and motivation, they can show the same sensitivity to positive stimuli.”

Another study by a team that included Cunningham and Todorov, to be published this year in the book Positive Neuroscience, found that the amygdala “may also be at the heart of compassion.” The researchers examined participants' brains while they viewed photos of people who could be helpful in pursuing a goal, or who needed help. The team found that amygdala activity increased when participants perceived people in need. Not surprisingly, this was especially true for participants who had high levels of empathy.

As the authors note, other research has linked the ability to connect with and help others to personal well-being. Together, these studies suggest that humans possess an unconscious “compassionate instinct,” a desire to help people that exists even in parts of the brain sometimes called “primitive” or “reptilian.” The paper concludes: “Happy people are cheerful, but balanced.”

The upshot of this research is that our amygdala can no longer be seen simply as the brain's fear center. Instead, it seems that even at a very deep and instinctive level, we are wired to see people in need and help one another, and this may help us be happy.

Originally published at Mindful