Mindfulness makes it easier to forget your fears
January 6, 2020
Science Daily/University of Southern Denmark Faculty of Health Sciences
Mindfulness has previously been shown to help people handle negative emotions and is used as a treatment for anxiety related psychological disorders, but the underlying biological mechanisms are not fully understood. In a new study, researchers show that brief daily mindfulness training delivered through the HEADSPACE mindfulness app makes it easier to achieve lasting extinction of fear reactions.
Mindfulness has been shown to reduce negative emotions in both healthy individuals as well as patients with psychological problems. Studies have also shown that mindfulness is effective for treating clinical emotional problems like anxiety, depression, stress and trauma related disorders. The biological mechanisms that underlie these positive effects on emotional functioning are not sufficiently understood but brain imaging studies have shown that mindfulness training is associated with changes in regions of the brain previously known to be involved in extinction learning, making extinction a likely candidate. However, an actual effect of mindfulness training on extinction learning has never been demonstrated.
In a new study, researchers at University of Southern Denmark, Uppsala University, Lund University, Peking University and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, can now show that mindfulness training facilitates extinction of conditioned fear reactions, producing lasting reductions in threat related arousal responses.
In this study, healthy subjects were randomly assigned to receive either 4 weeks of daily mindfulness training delivered through the Headspace mindfulness app, or were assigned to a wait list control condition. Subsequently, the participants underwent psychological experiments on two consecutive days in which conditioned fear reactions were established on day 1 and then immediately extinguished.
On day 2, the subjects returned and the lasting effects of extinction were evaluated.
Conditioned fear reactions were established by showing the participants neutral images on a computer screen and then some of the images were directly followed by an uncomfortable electric shock to the hand.
After a number of such pairings, the subjects showed elevated autonomic arousal responses just when viewing the pictures, demonstrating that conditioned fear reactions had been learnt.
Fear reactions were measured using skin conductance, an index for how much the subject is sweating, which is a corollary for the fight-or-flight response in humans.
Then, the researchers extinguished these reactions by repeatedly showing the images again but this time omitting the shocks.
In this way, the participants learnt that the images that previously signaled an upcoming uncomfortable shock no longer did so, and consequently subjects showed a substantial decrease in autonomic arousal when viewing the images.
After 24 hours, in order to test the retention of extinction learning, the participants returned to the lab, were hooked up to the shock apparatus and again shown the images they had viewed on the previous day, although no shocks were delivered.
This was the critical test of the study since extinction learning is normally unstable, and fear reactions typically return after a delay even when the subject has gone through successful extinction. In line with the researchers' hypotheses, the group that had been doing mindfulness training now showed lower fear reactions compared to the control group.
The fear reactions in the mindfulness group remained at the same low level they had been by the end of extinction the previous day indicating an improved ability to form and retain extinction memories, whereas the control group showed a substantial increase in fear reactions compared to extinction the previous day.
When comparing the groups reactions during conditioning and extinction on day 1, no differences could be observed, showing that the two groups learned and extinguished the conditioned fear reactions to a similar extent, and the authors conclude that mindfulness appears to have a specific effect on extinction retention.
According to the study's first author Johannes Björkstrand, the findings are interesting for a number of reasons.
"We can show that mindfulness does not only have an effect on subjective experiences of negative emotions, as has been shown previously, but that you can actual see clear effects on autonomic arousal responses, even with a limited amount of training. It is also interesting that the intervention appears to have a specific effect on extinction retention, which is in line with previous brain imaging studies on mindfulness, and also has some implications for how these types of interventions could be used to treat anxiety related problems in a clinical context.
"Anxiety and trauma related disorders are often treated using exposure therapy, a psychological treatment that is based on extinction learning, but not everyone responds to these treatments. One possible explanation is that individuals with these disorders have been shown to have difficulties in forming lasting extinction memories when compared to healthy individuals, which could represent an underlying vulnerability that increases the risk of developing these types of problems to begin with and constitutes an impediment to successful treatment.
"Our results suggest, that if you combine mindfulness training with exposure therapy, maybe you can achieve larger and longer lasting treatment effects. In this way you could get at an underlying vulnerability factor and more people would respond to these treatments, but studies in clinical populations and actual treatment studies are needed before we can draw any firm conclusions in this matter," says Johannes Björkstrand.
The researchers now want to move forward and investigate the underlying neurobiological mechanisms that are involved.
"We are currently repeating the experiment with twice the number of participants, and the whole thing is carried out inside an fMRI-scanner equipped with an extra strong electromagnetic field so that we can measure their brain activity to a high degree of precision throughout all parts of the experiment. We hope to show that the effect is robust and that we can replicate the current findings, and also say what processes in the brain are involved in producing these effects. We just finished data-collection but we still have a rather large amount of analysis work to do before we arrive at any results," says senior author, associate professor Ulrich Kirk.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200106123431.htm
Anger more harmful to health of older adults than sadness
Associated with increased inflammation, which can lead to chronic disease
May 9, 2019
Science Daily/American Psychological Association
Anger may be more harmful to an older person's physical health than sadness, potentially increasing inflammation, which is associated with such chronic illnesses as heart disease, arthritis and cancer, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
"As most people age, they simply cannot do the activities they once did, or they may experience the loss of a spouse or a decline in their physical mobility and they can become angry," said Meaghan A. Barlow, MA, of Concordia University, lead author of the study, which was published in Psychology and Aging. "Our study showed that anger can lead to the development of chronic illnesses, whereas sadness did not."
Barlow and her co-authors examined whether anger and sadness contributed to inflammation, an immune response by the body to perceived threats, such as infection or tissue damage. While inflammation in general helps protect the body and assists in healing, long-lasting inflammation can lead to chronic illnesses in old age, according to the authors.
The researchers collected and analyzed data from 226 older adults ages 59 to 93 from Montreal. They grouped participants as being in early old age, 59 to 79 years old, or advanced old age, 80 years old and older.
Over one week, participants completed short questionnaires about how angry or sad they felt. The authors also measured inflammation from blood samples and asked participants if they had any age-related chronic illnesses.
"We found that experiencing anger daily was related to higher levels of inflammation and chronic illness for people 80 years old and older, but not for younger seniors," said study co-author Carsten Wrosch, PhD, also of Concordia University. "Sadness, on the other hand, was not related to inflammation or chronic illness."
Sadness may help older seniors adjust to challenges such as age-related physical and cognitive declines because it can help them disengage from goals that are no longer attainable, said Barlow.
This study showed that not all negative emotions are inherently bad and can be beneficial under certain circumstances, she explained.
"Anger is an energizing emotion that can help motivate people to pursue life goals," said Barlow. "Younger seniors may be able to use that anger as fuel to overcome life's challenges and emerging age-related losses and that can keep them healthier. Anger becomes problematic for adults once they reach 80 years old, however, because that is when many experience irreversible losses and some of life's pleasures fall out of reach."
The authors suggested that education and therapy may help older adults reduce anger by regulating their emotions or by offering better coping strategies to manage the inevitable changes that accompany aging.
"If we better understand which negative emotions are harmful, not harmful or even beneficial to older people, we can teach them how to cope with loss in a healthy way," said Barlow. "This may help them let go of their anger."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190509092729.htm
Lingering negative responses to stress linked with health a decade later
April 9, 2018
Science Daily/Association for Psychological Science
People whose negative emotional responses to stress carry over to the following day are more likely to report health problems and physical limitations later in life compared with peers who are able to 'let it go.'
"Our research shows that negative emotions that linger after even minor, daily stressors have important implications for our long-term physical health," says psychological scientist Kate Leger of the University of California, Irvine.
"When most people think of the types of stressors that impact health, they think of the big things, major life events that severely impact their lives, such as the death of a loved one or getting divorced," Leger says. "But accumulating findings suggest that it's not just the big events, but minor, everyday stressors that can impact our health as well."
Evidence from previous studies suggests a clear association between same-day responses to stress and long-term well-being, but the impact of lingering emotional responses remained unclear. That is, does it make a difference if a stressor -- such as a flat tire, a bad grade, or an argument -- leads to negative emotions that spill over into the following day?
To find out, Leger and colleagues Susan T. Charles and David M. Almeida analyzed data from the Midlife in the United States Survey, a nationally representative, longitudinal study of adults.
As part of the study, participants completed an 8-day survey of negative emotion; each day, they reported how much of the time over the previous 24 hours they had felt a variety of emotions (e.g., lonely, afraid, irritable, and angry). They also reported the stressors that they experienced each day.
In a subsequent part of the study that took place 10 years later, the participants completed surveys that assessed their chronic illnesses and functional limitations. Participants reported the degree to which they were able to carry out basic and everyday tasks, such as dressing themselves, climbing a flight of stairs, carrying groceries, and walking several blocks.
As expected, people tended to report higher negative emotion if they had experienced a stressor the previous day compared with if they hadn't experienced any stressor the day before.
Critically, analyses revealed that lingering negative emotions in response to a stressor were associated with a greater number of health problems, including chronic illnesses, functional impairments, and difficulties with everyday tasks, a decade later.
These associations emerged independently of participants' gender, education, and baseline health and they held even after the researchers took participants' same-day emotional responses and average number of stressors into account.
"This means that health outcomes don't just reflect how people react to daily stressors, or the number of stressors they are exposed to -- there is something unique about how negative they feel the next day that has important consequences for physical health," explains Leger.
Leger and colleagues hypothesize that this link could play out through activation of stress-related systems or through health behaviors, two potential mechanisms that offer avenues for future research.
"Stress is common in our everyday lives. It happens at work, it happens at school, it happens at home and in our relationships," says Leger. "Our research shows that the strategy to 'just let it go' could be beneficial to our long term physical health."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180409161315.htm