The book "Emotional life of the brain"

Hello! We recently released a novelty from Richard Davidson - one of the leading modern brain researchers, and his approach to psycho-types and human emotions is truly innovative. Each person is a unique composition of six basic emotional "styles" in special proportions, so the person's psycho-type is as individual as his fingerprints. Each emotional style is associated with certain chemical processes in the brain, and thanks to this fact we can control our brain and develop it, controlling one or another emotional style. With this technique you can not only develop as a person, but also to treat depression, autism and other mental illnesses. In Davidson and Begley, they describe their approach in a detailed and accessible manner, so that you can use it yourself.

How does the emotional type develop

When I first discovered the neurobiological basis for the six aspects of the emotional type, I assumed that they are innate and permanent, being established as soon as the child enters this world. Like other scientists (as well as the newly minted parent of Amelie’s daughter, born in 1981, and Seth’s son, born in 1987), I noted and was surprised that the newborn is a separate person (this is noticeable if you have more than one child ). Some babies are curious and at ease, others are fussy and anxious. Amelie was born joyful and friendly, she started talking early and chatted with pleasure: she provided us with a report about the world from her carriage, and by the time she was eight, she preferred to sit apart from me and my wife when we flew on an airplane. By the end of the flight, she knew the whole story of her neighbor’s life. Seth, unlike her, looked cute and charming, but at the same time he was inclined to test the ground first and not dive into the situation immediately.

Emotional DNA

In short, the children seem to be coming into the world with a temperament and an emotional type. It is assumed that this may be determined by genes that they inherit from their parents. In the end, newborns have not yet received any life experience that could affect their emotional type, which leaves only genes as the intended determinants. Indeed, studies comparing identical (identical) twins to dizygotic (non-identical) provide strong evidence that genes are pushing us to be shy or insolent, risk-averse or cautious, happy or unhappy, anxious or calm, focused or scattered. These studies come from the fact that identical twins arise from a single fertilized egg and therefore have identical gene sequences - these are tapes of chemical "letters" labeled A, T, C and G, which decipher what each gene does (or, more precisely, which protein gene encodes). Non-identical twins come from two different eggs, fertilized by two different spermatozoa, and therefore have the same degree of genetic kinship as half-brothers and sisters who are not twins, sharing about half of the genes in different forms. (Many human genes are represented only in one form, so it does not matter to what degree two people are related to each other - they have identical copies of these genes.) Identical twins are thus twice as genetically more similar than half-brothers or non-twin sisters, in which case they should be two times closer than non-identical twins, for any traits that have a genetic component. In other words, when the similarity between identical twins for a particular trait is greater than that between non-identical ones, this is a strong indication that the trait has a genetic basis.

Therefore, twin studies were a gold mine for thinking about the genetic basis of temperament, personality, and emotional type. Among features that are more similar in identical twins than in non-identical (and therefore have a deeper genetic basis) are shyness, sociability, emotionality, a tendency to feel unhappy, ability to adapt, impulsivity, and a balance of positive and negative emotions. While this may seem like a strange set, I chose these traits, because each of them reflects one of the aspects of the emotional type.
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• Shyness and sociability are related to where you are in the aspect of social intuition.
• Emotion refers to sustainability and prediction.
• The tendency to feel unhappy refers to sustainability.
• The ability to adapt reflects sensitivity to the situation.
• Impulsiveness is related to where you are in the aspect of mindfulness (if you are unfocused, it makes you more impulsive).

In most cases, positive and negative emotions are the product of sustainability and prediction aspects.

For all these traits, the genetic contribution varies from twenty to sixty percent, that is, the difference between one person and another, as far as these traits are concerned, ranges from about one-fifth to three-fifths. Whether this seems high or low depends on your point of view. A convinced genetic determinist will view everything below a hundred percent as a suspiciously low level, and those who think that we come into the world as a clean slate may think that even twenty percent is an incredible amount. To give you some guidelines, let me give you an example: sickle-cell anemia is inherited a hundred percent of the time, while hereditary affiliation with any religion is close to zero.

In our time - the age of development of genetics - many people began to believe that every characteristic feature is a product of inherited DNA, which is clearly not true. Take schizophrenia. This disease contains a strong genetic component: when one of the identical twins develops schizophrenia, the likelihood that the same will happen with the second, fifty-fifty (therefore, about identical twins and say they are fifty percent "matched" in schizophrenia). Depression has a more modest genetic component, and it seems to depend on gender: women inherit depression in about forty percent of cases, while men inherit depression at about thirty. Interestingly, how quickly a child can be reassured seems to have practically no genetic component, and my own twin studies show that anxiety disorders have a much smaller genetic component than depression. Even in those features that have some kind of genetic component, genes are not the most important thing. Genetic predisposition can guide a child along a path that leads to a particular emotional type, but certain experiences and environments can help the child to wind off.

Born shy?

The pioneer in studying the innate foundations of temperament was Jerry Kagan of Harvard, whom I met during my first year in graduate school. An unsurpassed scientist, Kagan was (and still is) fascinated with the study of how a child’s temperament develops. Whenever I or my fellow aspirants passed by him in the classrooms of the psychology department, he could slyly ask: “Has nature opened today a curtain of secrecy in front of you?” To encourage us to discover what a child turns out to be. Those were the days when we could smoke in our office, and Jerry left a smoking pipe with an unmistakable, fragrant signature in his office. Kagan is a pioneer in the field of behavioral inhibition, which is essentially a form of anxiety.

This term refers to the tendency to block in response to something unusual or unfamiliar, which was discussed in the context of the research of monkeys in Chapter 4. On a daily basis, this in many ways looks like shyness. Kagan was the first scientist who systematically investigated the correlation of behavioral and biological individual differences in young children with the characteristics of their temperament.

The main conclusion he made after many years of studying many children. Their behavioral inhibition was assessed when they were small, and was classified as either inhibition of behavior or looseness. Then the same was evaluated when the subjects reached the age of twenty. Kagan asked parents to describe their children and evaluate them on a scale of inhibition of behavior; observed the children himself, and also did a functional MRI of their brain. The latter showed that young people, who were ranked as strongly closed, showed an increased activity of the amygdala when they were little ones (unlike those who were a relaxed child). Amygdala plays a key role in feelings of fear and anxiety, appearing in response to threatening events in the environment. The increased activity of the amygdala reflects an important characteristic of behavioral inhibition in both children and adults: they are extremely alert, constantly searching for potential threats and sources of danger. They may shudder at the slightest noise that other people consider to be harmless. The conclusions of Kagan were as follows: inhibition of behavior is a surprisingly stable character trait. A shy nine-year-old becomes a shy sixteen-year-old who turns into a shy adult. Since Kagan discovered what appeared to be the cause of this phenomenon — increasing the activity of the amygdala — and since at the time this work was done (80–90s), most scientists believed that the inherited genes form the structure and functions of the brain , the persistence of behavioral inhibition has become part of pop culture. A typical headline: "Born Shy Shy Forever."

A few years ago, when it was said that there was a genetic basis for the emotional type (and in general for any trait, psychological or physical), something else was implied: this trait is with us for life, this is the inheritance with which we will go to the grave . In the end, the genetically determined shape of our nose or the color of our eyes does not change (if you do not take into account the injuries and interventions of a plastic surgeon). Also, genetically determined psychological traits, such as the emotional type, will not change (according to popular opinion).

But then the wave of revolution swept over genetics, and the dogma “genetic means unchanged” was overthrown as thoroughly and dramatically as the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Scientists have made two striking discoveries related to each other: a genetic trait will manifest itself or not manifest itself depending on the environment in which the child grows, and the acting gene — a double helix that hovers through each of our cells — can be turned on or off depending from the experience we have. Popularly speaking, this means that there is no single factor, either genetic or empirical, that is responsible for the types of emotional type. But this is as obvious and undeniable as the fact that the sun is hotter. Something much more interesting is happening. Contrary to popular belief that if something is genetically determined, then it is with us for life (after all, how can we change our DNA?), Hereditary characteristics can be significantly changed by the resulting education, training and experience.

»More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.

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