Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings. Claudia Hammond

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ more extreme suggestion is proposed by Anthony Stevens and John Price in their book Evolutionary Psychiatry. This is the idea that in hunter-gatherer communities depression was a useful protective mechanism. A person who stopped contributing to the community could be cast out and at that time ostracisation could well result in death. Instead people who feared they were of no use to their community would become depressed. They would then be considered ill and cared for rather than thrown out. In many societies today this is not quite so successful because the community might not rally round, leaving a person isolated. The problem with this theory is that it fails to explain why a person’s view of themselves becomes so negative in the first place. Many people become depressed despite knowing they are valued by those around them.

      An alternative approach to the purpose of sadness is to view it as an effective signal to others that you are in need of help. However, once again there are contradictions. At the very time they might benefit from the care of others, unhappy people often turn inwards, eschewing company. Moreover there isn’t a universal response to another person’s sadness. There’s no guarantee that telling someone that you feel sad will bring you help. It will depend on both the individual and the culture. Anthropologists have attempted to look at attitudes towards sadness around the world, but once the word ‘sadness’ is translated into another language it might not have precisely the same meaning. One clever study overcame the translation problem through the use of photographs of facial expressions. People were asked to label the expressions in their own language and these were then translated into English by a native speaker. Through this method it was found that there are five types of sadness in the Greek language and six in Japanese. Therefore elements of sadness might be universal, but it might not be a single, basic emotion in all cultures. In some societies sadness is viewed as an acceptable emotion only for women or children. This happens to an extent in Western societies, where unhappy women are more likely to experience symptoms of depression, while men are more likely to express their misery through violence. If the purpose of sadness is to attract help, then it’s a system lacking in efficiency because help is not always forthcoming. Many would prefer to spend an evening with somebody cheerful than listen to the woes of another.

      So, we cannot be certain of the evolutionary purpose of sadness. It could involve elements of all these theories – an emotion which slows us down, gives us time to reflect and if necessary change plans, whilst signalling to others that we need them and thus strengthening those bonds. Certainly our faces are remarkably good at conveying our feelings when it comes to sadness.

      the sad face

      If sadness is to serve any communicative purpose, it needs to be obvious. When Darwin spent time studying the way the face expresses misery he noted that in many different cultures pulling down the corners of the mouth indicated sadness, hence the phrase ‘down in the mouth’. What intrigues me about the facial expression of sadness is that it’s usually more fleeting than the experience of sadness. You might feel sad for days, but only look sad some of the time. Concealing your feelings is possible, if tiring. As I discussed in the last chapter, fake smiles can be detected due to the lack of involvement of the muscles around the eyes. Darwin describes sitting opposite a woman in a railway carriage who looked perfectly content, but for the fact that the corners of her mouth were turned down. This revealed her true feelings. Even a slight turning down of the corners of the mouth conveys sadness. I’ve suffered from this myself. When my mouth is closed and not moving, there’s a slight tendency for the corners to turn down and people often ask me whether I’m miserable when in fact I’m just concentrating. A few months ago I was standing waiting to meet a friend in Chinatown in London, feeling perfectly contented, when a policeman approached me to ask whether I was all right. He and his colleagues had seen me on the closed circuit camera screens in their van and thought I looked so sad and anxious that they wondered whether I was being followed. The same sort of thing used to happen to my grandfather, whose mouth was also wont to turn down.

      In Tierra del Fuego local people tried to explain to Darwin that the captain of the boat was feeling sad by pulling down their cheeks with both hands to make the face as long as possible. Darwin went to great lengths to explain another feature of the expression of sadness which he called ‘obliquity of the eyebrows’. The ends of the eyebrows nearest the nose are raised, causing the brow to furrow slightly. He calls this the grief muscle and notes that although it is contracted when we feel sad, only some people can move it voluntarily, an ability which seems to be inherited. The world-renowned expert on facial expressions, Paul Ekman, has studied identical twins who were raised apart and discovered that if one twin is able to flex this muscle, so can the other.

      

      Along with general posture and tone of voice, facial expressions help us to spot emotions in others, but while some people are excellent at reading these signals and working out how another person is feeling, others won’t even notice. In fact the emotions we are best at observing in others are the same emotions we are experiencing ourselves. Therefore, although one might expect a depressed person to be too unhappy and concerned with their own misery to notice how someone else is feeling, in fact it’s the reverse. Depressed people are the fastest to spot depression in others, while happy people are best at noticing the emotions of other happy people. It’s almost as though the feelings we are currently experiencing ourselves are so strong in our consciousness that we find ourselves drawn to that feeling in others.

      the sad mind and the sad body

      Three years ago Julia wheeled her trolley past an empty customs desk. Her trip to Vietnam had been fantastic and as usual when she was tanned and rested, she felt great. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone had come to meet her? To her surprise she saw that someone had. Her sister’s boyfriend was leaning grimly on the barrier, but it wasn’t nice at all. Why was he here? What had gone wrong? Had her mother’s cancer come back? No, it wasn’t that. He told her that everyone was safe, but that her parents’ thatched cottage in Suffolk had burnt down. Julia was devastated. ‘It was a 400-year-old cottage and my dad had lived there since he was ten. When I got back to my sister’s house she showed me the front page of the local paper and there was a picture of my dad who’s an artist, holding one of his pictures with the headline, “Artist Loses Life’s Work” and he was crying. It felt as though I were looking at a newspaper that had been used as a prop in a film. I kept thinking that my kids will never see the house where I grew up. I think when sadness is at its worst you wake up and for five seconds you think everything’s OK and then you have this sudden shock that something’s happened. It’s almost like someone’s pressing an iron bar down on your chest. True sadness to me is like a physical pain. My heart actually hurt for weeks and weeks.’

      It is true that sadness has physical effects on the body. Skin conductance, associated with sweating, increases and even intestinal processes can change. A patient called Tom, from a case study in 1943, had a stomach which became pale whenever he was depressed and, back in the 1920s, it was found during other research that depressed patients secreted less gastric acid into their stomachs than usual. There are also hormonal differences between the depressed and the non-depressed. About half of those with depression seem to have abnormally high blood levels of the hormone Cortisol which is released during times of stress under the control of a brain system called the HPA axis. This causes a cascade of chemical reactions. A small area of the brain called the hypothalamus (H) organises activities such as sex-drive and the control of body temperature. It releases a hormone which affects the pituitary gland (P) which in turn causes the adrenal glands (A) above the kidneys, to produce the stress hormone Cortisol, hence the name HPA axis. Crucially, for some people this control system doesn’t seem to work, resulting in an excess of Cortisol.

      Naturally the main organ affected by sadness is the brain. There are changes in the levels of neurotransmitters or chemical messengers which communicate between the millions of neurons in the brain in a kind of relay race. One of the most important is serotonin which is ejected in a burst every millisecond and seems to have an involvement СКАЧАТЬ