Wray Herbert Blog: Is Depression an "Emotional Mush?"

I have a vivid memory of dropping my oldest son off at college, the first day of his freshman year, many years ago. He stood outside his dorm, waving as I drove away, and I was overcome by a complex mix of emotions. I was unquestionably sad -- the tears testified to that -- but I wasn't morose or agitated, and I kind of knew that this sadness would pass. In fact, I was in the same moment keenly aware of a range of powerful and positive emotions -- pride that my son had earned his way into a fine university, relief that he seemed well-adjusted and untroubled and had solid friends. He seemed to be landing OK, and the moment was bittersweet.

Bittersweet. It seems like a contradiction, but in truth our emotional states are rarely simple or tidy. We don't feel good this moment, bad the next. More discrete feelings like pride and excitement and frustration and shame spill over one another and mix, and it's up to us to differentiate the nuances. What I was doing in those minutes as I drove away from campus -- sorting out my welter of feelings and making sense of them -- is what most people do in some way every day.

If they're lucky, that is. Research has shown that people vary greatly in their ability to do this fine-grain emotional sorting, and the inability to do such emotional calibration may take a toll. Emotions are information to the human mind, and when we experience a discrete emotion like sadness, we try to process that emotion and conceptualize it in a meaningful way. In that way we can explain the feeling to ourselves in a reasonable way, and act appropriately. If on the other hand we experience an undifferentiated emotional mush, we're likely to misconstrue the causes, and act in ways that don't make sense and may indeed be harmful.

At least that's the theory, which has been pieced together in several labs over many years. It's also the departure point for new work by Emre Demiralp of the University of Michigan, who with several colleagues decided to investigate whether people who suffer from serious depression might experience a disability in this kind of emotional parsing. The idea makes sense theoretically, because depression has long been associated with impoverished perception and memory and thinking. The scientists wanted to see if depressed people's emotional states are also less rich and textured.

The problem with studying emotions is that they are very difficult to tap and measure. Feelings are subjective, so scientists can't simply ask people what they are feeling and expect an accurate and meaningful answer. To circumvent this problem, the scientists used what's called "experience sampling." They recruited a group of volunteers -- half healthy, half clinically depressed -- and gave them Palm Pilots to carry with them for a week. Over this time, the scientists beeped the volunteers at random times, and asked them to stop what they were doing and rate how much -- on a scale of zero to four -- they were experiencing eleven different emotions at the moment -- anxiety, disgust, guilt, alertness, happiness and so forth.

Demiralp and his colleagues wanted to assess the richness of the volunteers' emotional lives, and to do this they looked for patterns of correlation. For example, if a volunteer experienced fluctuations in anger over the week, and those fluctuations correspond closely with that volunteer's fluctuations in sadness, this would suggest that this person does not differentiate much between anger and sadness. They are linked together into a vague sense of feeling bad. The scientists predicted that the depressed volunteers would show such a pattern, while the healthy volunteers' emotions would not correlate closely. What's more, because depressed people have a bias toward negativity, the scientists expected that depressed volunteers would parse their positive emotions just as finely as healthy volunteers.

And that's exactly what they found. As reported in-line in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers suffering from serious depression tended -- much more than healthy controls -- to lump all their bad feelings together; shame and frustration and sadness were all parts of a vague sense of feeling bad. They did not do this with positive feelings. Importantly, this inability to parse negative emotion works independently of emotional intensity or instability. In other words, it's a fundamental characteristic of the depressed mind.

The scientists believe that finely discriminated emotions are more adaptive for mental health, because they are less likely to be attributed to the wrong cause. People suffering from clinical depression often have distorted thinking, blaming themselves for situations they can't control, and it could be that mushy emotional states contribute to that harmful thinking. A vague undifferentiated unpleasantness is much harder to explain, and therefore much harder to regulate.

Wray Herbert: Having Heart Can We Rethink Life's Stresses?

Eustress is the "good stress."

From Wray Herbert's blog
Author, 'On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits'

Imagine that you are at the top of a ski slope, about to make a run. It's a challenging slope, black diamond--steep and narrow, lots of trees. Plus it's windy, and there's that treacherous drop-off on the right. You're an inexperienced skier, not a novice but not at all confident that you belong in such extreme terrain. Your heart is pounding and your gut is tight.

Now imagine that you're on top of the very same slope, but you are a skilled downhill racer, an Olympic contender. You're sure you know how to attack this slope--you've done it many times before--but even so, your heart is pounding and butterflies are fluttering in your gut.

Both of these hypothetical skiers are under stress, and feeling the arousal that comes with stress. But one is experiencing good stress, the other bad stress. They are both looking at the same slope, but one sees it as a threat, the other as a challenge. The expert knows that his skills are more than sufficient for the situation. The nervous learner has no such confidence.

Psychological scientists are interested in this contrast, as are health professionals. We tend to think of stress as negative, and arousal as harmful, and indeed we spend lots of time and money--on vacations, fitness clubs, bar tabs--trying to minimize stress. But is it possible that stress is not all that bad, that in fact it may be tonic at times?

The key is how we think about stress and arousal. Those two skiers are in fact experiencing different bodily changes. Though both are feeling activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the fearful skier is feeling constriction of the vessels, which makes the heart work harder. The expert is actually experiencing more sympathetic arousal as he contemplates the challenge ahead, but the blood vessels are dilating, increasing cardiac efficiency. But they don't know or care what's going on inside them. They both simply feel edgy and aroused.

What if the learner's fear could be construed as a positive challenge? What a skier--or anyone--could be made to believe that the pounding and fluttering were actually a resource, tools for enhanced performance? That's the question that University of Rochester scientist Jeremy Jamieson wanted to explore in the laboratory. Working with UCSF's Wendy Berry Mendes and Harvard's Matthew Nock, he has run a series of experiments to see if bad stress can be transformed into good stress in the mind.

Here's an example. The researchers took physiological measurements on a group of volunteers, who were told that they would have to make a public speech--a stressful prospect for most people. Just prior to this event, some were instructed about the value of human stress response in high-level performance. They were encouraged to interpret any signs of arousal as a positive thing, a tool that would aid them in making a confident speech. The others were told to ignore their stress arousal, or they were told nothing at all.

The findings were clear. During the speech, those instructed in reappraisal were much more like the Olympian skier, showing what Jamieson calls "physiological toughness": They experienced less blood vessel constriction and more cardiac output, as if they were attacking the slope. What's more, immediately after the speech, these volunteers were less vigilant. In other words, they felt confident, not threatened.

Think about this. It wasn't an elaborate intervention. They were merely encouraged to reappraise their gut feelings. The scientists decided to test this simple idea again, in the context a high-stress real-life event: a high-stakes examination. They recruited students who were already preparing to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), guaranteeing that their performance was genuinely important to them. The students came into the lab to take a practice version of the exam. As before, only some were told that their nervous stomachs and pumping hearts were known to improve, not worsen, performance. Right before the test, all the students gave saliva samples for analysis.

Those who were taught to reappraise their arousal--to see it as a benefit--had higher levels of alpha amylase, an indicator of nervous system arousal, and they performed better on the practice GRE. But here's the really interesting part: One to three months later, when they took the actual GRE under regular testing conditions, these students had higher math scores than the controls. And they also reported that their test-day arousal had helped them with the exam. This brief and simple intervention had sustained effects on both stress appraisal and test performance.

These are just a couple examples on ongoing research that the Jamieson and his colleagues will describe in a forthcoming issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The findings may change the way that clinicians think about acute, everyday stress and a variety of ills. Much valuable work has shown that we can regulate our emotions and mitigate our stress arousal--through mindfulness mediation, for example. But there are many times when it's impossible, or inadvisable, to dampen the body's arousal signals. Reappraisal may offer an additional tool to cope with bodily stress in an adaptive way.