Name: 神経生物学者だけど「感情」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-18T09:40:07.000Z
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I'm neuroscientist and psychologist Richard Davidson.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

At Polaro asks, Stress will shrink your brain?

Stress does have effects on the brain and it can shrink the brain and it shrinks the area that grows new brain cells, the hippocampus.

Wendy Stella 06 asks, Are women really more sensitive and emotional than men in general?

If you take thousands of men and thousands of women and you compare them, you will find these slight differences where women may be more sensitive to emotional cues than men.

In certain contexts, they may be more expressive of emotion than men, but the variation within gender far exceeds the variation between gender.

And so in my view, focusing on these gender differences is really a little bit misplaced.

At Riri Yuri, why do we even have feelings?

Feelings and emotions are found throughout evolutionary history.

In the case of an animal who may be confronted by a predator, the experience of fear will motivate the animal to run or to fight.

We have feelings to navigate important life decisions.

They are really critical in enabling us to make important decisions.

For example, should we be with a significant other?

Should we take one job versus another job?

Those are not decisions that we make based on a simple, cold, cognitive calculus.

We use our emotions, our feelings to decide.

At Alpaca Aurelius, holy crap, Botox impairs your ability to process other people's emotions because it prevents your face from mirroring someone's reaction.

Botox does effectively paralyze your facial muscles.

And one of the things that we've learned over the last 20 years in research on emotion is that not only does the brain control the face to produce emotional expressions, but emotional expressions feed back information to the brain to help the brain modulate its activity.

When we are interacting with another person, we often engage in contagious emotional expressions.

So we are simulating the emotions that another person may experience.

And if we can't do that because of Botox, we are literally deprived of a major mechanism through which we can make inferences about both our own emotion as well as another person's emotion.

At Adam Fair in 1996 says, chemical imbalance is a myth, but is it really?

Studies done have shown that a serotonin imbalance may not be the real cause of depression, but that's just one chemical.

So unless you've researched them all, you can't make that initial statement.

It is true that serotonin is just one chemical.

And even though drugs to treat depression primarily act on serotonin, it doesn't mean that serotonin is the cause, nor does it mean that it's the most important chemical involved in depression.

In fact, it's likely that the serotonin just triggers a whole chemical cascade unleashed by taking this drug.

And so the cause of the depression and the cause of the improvement in depression goes way beyond serotonin.

We are still discovering many new chemicals in the brain and the body.

We are living in this chemical soup that is highly complex.

The idea that there is gonna be a single molecule associated with a specific disease or a specific emotion is absolutely a myth.

Andrea Libuti MD asks, are autistic individuals hypersensitive to emotions?

It depends because autism is not a homogeneous category.

And there are some subgroups of autism that are hypersensitive in general.

This would include being hypersensitive to emotion.

One of the things that we see in a subgroup of autistic individuals is that they show gaze aversion.

They don't look directly at a person's face because they're so sensitive to emotion and it's so arousing for them to watch another person's face that they have to actually turn away.

And this gaze aversion starts very early in life.

It's one of the first symptoms of autism that expresses itself.

At no kizzy Kathleen, you ever get that sad feeling in your tummy?

Like you're okay, but your tummy is like, no, you're really not?

There are 200 million neurons in the gut.

Stuff that goes on in the brain is communicated to the tummy and stuff that goes on in the tummy is fed back to the brain.

So our gut feelings are real and there's information that occurs there that's gonna be modulating activity in the brain.

And this is all part of the mandala of emotion.

It's important that we consider emotions to be embodied and to involve all of these different bodily systems.

Pat Ariasaurus says, I need my brain chemistry literally altered.

Like, is there drugs that can be ingested so that our brain physically can't process emotions?

We know that there are medications available to change the brain.

These medications are used to treat people with various kinds of emotional disorders like depression and anxiety.

So there are these drugs which do affect brain chemistry and they are sometimes really important to use if they're used judiciously.

However, in my view, we are medicating people too readily in our society.

We have too low a threshold for administering these medications.

They often have lots of side effects and we know that there are ways to change the brain that don't require medication.

We can actually change our brains by intentionally cultivating our minds.

Meditation is one such way, but there are others.

For example, we know from hard-nosed scientific research that cognitive therapy can change the brain.

Cognitive therapy is an empirically well-validated strategy to treat depression and anxiety and it involves teaching people to think differently about their thoughts.

We should at least try these non-invasive methods first before we try the more invasive methods of medication.

Gray asked, does the internet make us more empathic and emotionally intelligent or less?

I would say that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the internet makes us less emotionally empathic, particularly for members of the out group because one of the things that we find in the internet is that we're fed information that is consistent with our ideology and with our beliefs.

And this is leading us to become more polarized.

And this may make us empathic for our in group, but it's certainly not making us more empathic for members of our out group.

When we interact with people virtually and are deprived of the immediate feedback of their physical presence, their facial expression, we often will be less inhibited, less constrained because we don't have that feedback.

So I think there is some danger in becoming overly expressive in perhaps inappropriate ways interacting with people online.

Cringe is an expression, a facial expression.

It may be a vocal expression and it probably has several different emotions that are melded together.

It may be a little bit of disgust, a little bit of contempt, a little bit of anger, a little bit of sadness.

It could be a conglomeration of these negative emotions.

We can think of it in that way, but the actual cringe itself is an expression displayed in response to someone, for example, making a terrible and inappropriate joke in the wrong setting.

At Paul Ekman, who's a very famous emotion scientist, a very dear friend of mine and a collaborator, asks how many emotions are there?

We have here a scheme developed by another well-known scientist of emotion, Robert Plutchik.

And Plutchik argues that there are a number of primary emotions such as joy, trust, fear, surprise, and their opposites that are sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation.

We have this circumplex, and the outer ring are emotions that are less arousing.

And as we get closer and closer to the center, the emotions are more arousing.

We begin with serenity, maybe thought of as a low-arousal positive emotion, then joy, and then ecstasy.

Ecstasy would be a higher-arousal positive emotion.

And similarly, we can go from apprehension, in this case, to fear, to terror.

According to this scheme, there are emotions that are opposite to one another.

For example, joy and sadness are opposite to one another.

According to other scientists, however, emotions may be less dichotomous in that way, less binary.

As someone who has spent quite a bit of time with the Dalai Lama in research that we've done, the Dalai Lama, I know, has expressed serenity along with sadness simultaneously.

And so the idea that these are always opposite in this way I think is a little too simplistic.

These are all Western conceptions of emotion.

In non-Western cultures, the framework for emotion is likely to be quite different, and so it's important that we not consider this a final say on how emotions should be parsed.

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神経生物学者だけど「感情」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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anxiety

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