Does Cortisol Help Us To Regulate Our Emotions?

Low levels of the stress hormone cortisol could be linked to antisocial behaviour in adolescent boys, UK researchers say...

An increase in cortisol levels is thought to make people behave more cautiously, and help them to regulate their emotions, particularly their temper and violent impulses.

But (the) Cambridge university study found this did not happen in boys with a history of severe antisocial behaviour.

Read comments from lead researcher Dr. Graeme Fairchild on MedIndia.com here.

Free will in Scientific Psychology

Baumeister's new Perspectives on Psychological Science article on free will and how it relates to self-regulation and rationality:

ABSTRACT—Some actions are freer than others, and the difference is palpably important in terms of inner process, subjective perception, and social consequences. Psychology can study the difference between freer and less free actions without making dubious metaphysical commitments. Human evolution seems to have created a relatively new, more complex form of action control that corresponds to popular notions of free will. It is marked by self-control and rational choice, both of which are highly adaptive, especially for functioning within culture. The processes that create these forms of free will may be biologically costly and therefore are only used occasionally, so that people are likely to remain only incompletely self-disciplined, virtuous, and rational.

Free will is discussed within the 'limited resource' framework of willpower and decision-making, proposing that we are more or less free at different times and that clear individual differences exist.

Interestingly the belief in free will is also important, bringing a new perspective to the debate:


"Belief in free will does support socially desirable actions,
according to Vohs and Schooler (2008). They found that
participants who had been induced to disbelieve in free will
were subsequently more likely than a control group to cheat on a
test. Further studies by Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall
(2006) using the Vohs–Schooler methods found that inducing
participants to disbelieve in free will made them more aggressive
and less helpful toward others. If we combine the cheating,
aggression, and helping findings, it seems reasonable to suggest
that belief in free will is conducive to better, more harmonious
social behavior."

link..

Joining up trait measures and brain activation to predict response to cake

Two new studies in 'Psychophysiology' have pointed to greater left frontal than right frontal brain activation for approach and 'emotive' response tendencies. Together these studies show that the appetative response depends largely on left frontal activation relative to right and that this can be assessed by a trait measure of behavioural approach system (BAS) (r=.36). On the other hand there is a behavioural inhibition system (BIS) trait measure which does not correlate with behavioural approach (r=-.03) and is predictive of brain activation related to conflict monitoring (r=-.41).

"These findings extend previous models of BIS and BAS to suggest that BIS corresponds to an attentional system for monitoring response conflicts, whereas BAS corresponds to a motivational system for coordinating approach/avoidance responses."

for more:

(1) Neurocognitive components of the behavioral inhibition and activation systems: Implications for theories of self-regulation


(2) Relative left frontal activation to appetitive stimuli

Attention Control, Memory Updating, and Emotion Regulation Temporarily Reduce the Capacity for Self-Control

Abstract:
This research tested the hypothesis that initial efforts at executive control temporarily undermine subsequent efforts at executive control. Four experiments revealed that controlling the focus of visual attention (Experiment 1), inhibiting predominant writing tendencies (Experiment 2), taking a working memory test (Experiment 3), or exaggerating emotional expressions (Experiment 4) undermined performance on subsequent tests of working memory span, reverse digit span, and response inhibition, respectively. The results supported a limited resource model of executive control and cast doubt on competing accounts based on mood, motivation, or task difficulty. Prior efforts at executive control are a significant contextual determinant of the operation of executive processes.

There has been much discussion around a self-regulation model which claims that effortful control of attention diminishes the ability to perform future tasks. This point has implications for task/work performance across the course of the day, how you manage your behaviour to best conserve and utilise this resource and how one can go about protecting and renewing it. From a developmental perspective the emergence of traits such as the Big Five is likely to be largely determined by the ability to manage,monitor and over time manipulate ones natural levels of reactivity through self-regulation. This process has an analogue in the cognitive neuropsychology literature in the functioning of executive attention which is the overarching process managing a group of executive functions such as attention shifting, inhibition, planning, working memory etc. What this study shows is that exercising executive control- a process analagous to self-regulation- has knock on effects on essential capacities such as working memory and inhibition.

In the last post the relationship between inhibition on the Go-NoGo task and delay discounting was demonstrated. Following on from this and incorporating this finding we can say that engaging in self-regulation is likely to diminish our capacity to inhibit our behaviour on a subsequent task and that our current level of this resource is likely to impact on our judgements in regard to valuing the future. We are likely to become more myopic in the scenario where such resources are diminished. Loewenstein and O'Donoghue have been working for a number of years on a sophisticated model of behaviour which incorporates such insights.

Several posts have pointed to glucose regulation as a process which may be the physiological concomitant of this 'ego' or regulatory resource depletion. Oxygen and other chemicals have been proposed to fluctuate in time with this metaphorical willpower resource but evidence demonstrating this is not yet available, and preliminary analyses (PhD work) would indicate oxygen is not promising in this regard. However, what this study provides is an integration of the work on self-regulation aforemention and what is an obvious observation to anyone who has given participants a battery of neuropsychological tests in that the tests must be counterbalanced to remove the effect of a gradient of decreased performance across the tasks as they progress. These task ordering and also time on task effects are accounted for using the self-regulatory resource model which is useful as it provides a frame within which individual baseline differences and factors which promote resilience or vulnerability of this resource can be examined. The current model suggests that it acts 'as a muscle' and becomes more efficitent over time. The idea that our daily work and also our ability to regulate moods and present ourselves well is dependent on a resource which can be manipulated in various ways also opens the possibility for a lot of crosstalk between economics and psychology.

Schmeichel et al. (2007)

Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation

Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participants to conditions to confirm these findings. This article shows that a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body–mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training. The training method comes from traditional Chinese medicine and incorporates aspects of other meditation and mindfulness training. Compared with the control group, the experimental group of 40 undergraduate Chinese students given 5 days of 20-min integrative training showed greater improvement in conflict scores on the Attention Network Test, lower anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale, a significant decrease in stress-related cortisol, and an increase in
immunoreactivity. These results provide a convenient method for studying the influence of meditation training by using experimental and control methods similar to those used to test drugs or other interventions.

PNAS October 23rd 2007

Intelligence means greater capacity to use self-regulatory resources rather than greater self-regulatory capacity per se

This is the distinction put forward by Shamosh et al. (2007) in a recent article in cognition and emotion. The authors surprisingly found that those higher in fluid intelligence used more self-regulatory resources on an emotional suppression task. This is somewhat surprising as theoretically fluid intelligence and self-regulatory ability should both rely on executive functioning. However, the authors propose that better performance on Raven's progressive matrices, a good indicator of fluid intelligence, relates only to the ability to utilise self-regulatory resources rather than ones overall level of resources in general.

The authors relate their findings back to a study by Baumeister and colleagues from earlier in the year which found that self-regulatory delpletion has physiological correlates in terms of glucose levels. Specifically, the propose that those higher on fluid intelligence recruit a greater number of neural susbstrates during self-regulation and they also use less efficient processes. An alternative explanation which the authors do not discuss directly is the possibility that those high in fluid intelligence are more responsive to sad scences from films and need to use more self-regulatory resources to suppress their emotional response to the scene (In this case a clip from 'Terms of Endearment' which I haven't seen but has been described as "a manipulative, soap-operatic melodramatic tearjerker").

In general I am finding it hard to make sense of this finding. Theories around thought and emotional suppression would all claim that a higher level of self-regulatory resources should be associated with an improved ability to suppress and better post suppression performance. One would think that being higher in fluid intelligence, which typically means better working memory and the ability to sustain and shift attention, would mean a better a higher capacity for self-regulation. However, the finding discussed may be a way of explaining another counterintuitive finding that those high in conscientiousness are likely to be lower in fluid intelligence and vice versa. Perhaps, fluid intelligence thus has its benefits and disadvantages, mainly being able to burn up your self-regulatory resources over a short-time period but then being unable to do anything else for the rest of the day! I can think of a few people who work in this manner so this may be the reason..


The relation between fluid intelligence and
self-regulatory depletion

Temporal Self-regulation Theory and Health Psychology Review

The Theory of Planned Behaviour which posits that beliefs and attitude valence and the approval of others determine intentions which in turn determine behaviour is good for explaining the fairly obvious. So we can explain why it is people intend to do what they do which is of course very useful. However, being able to construct knowledge which explains why people engage in 'maladaptive' behaviour that they do not intend to engage in and to understand fluctuating intentions and their relation to circumstance is more impressive. Time preference and self-regulation theory are relevant to both behavioural economics and health behaviour and combining key insights from both would be an excellent advance. This is exactly what Hall and Fong (2007) have done in their article entitled "Temporal self-regulation theory: A model for individual health behaviour".

Health Psychology Review is a new biannual journal as of this year and one to look out for. The other two articles in March's version are also worth a read: Health benefits: Meta-analytically determining the impact of well-being on objective health outcomes and Health and goal-directed behavior: The nonconscious regulation and motivation of goals and their pursuit.