A team of Spanish and Brazilian researchers has looked at how well—and how quickly—we can recognize the facial expressions of others. Correctly recognizing the emotions behind these expressions is important because they act as signals, and we make judgments and deductions about other people based on what we see. "These inferences can strongly influence election results or the sentences given in trials, and have been studied before in fields such as criminology and the pseudoscience of physiognomy, " explains University of Barcelona psychologist Jose Antonio Aznar Casanova, who worked on the study.
When the researchers gave a group of psychology students 0.1 seconds to look at a face, they found that they could detect happiness better and faster than sadness. "Positive expressions, or expressions of approach, are perceived more quickly and more precisely than negative, or withdrawal, ones," Aznar Casanova says. "So happiness and surprise are processed faster than sadness and fear."

Our mood really changes the way we see the world, according to a new study from a team at the University of Toronto. "Good and bad moods literally change the way our visual cortex operates," explains Adam Anderson, a psychologist who worked on the research. When we're in a good mood, "our visual cortex takes in more information," he says, "while negative moods result in tunnel vision."
The researchers showed volunteers a composite image (pictured here) that had a face in the center and a house in the background, and they focused the volunteers' attention on the face by asking them to identify the gender. Participants who were primed to be in a bad mood did fine on that task, but didn't process the surrounding image of the house. Those who were in a good mood took in more information and processed more of the picture—both the face and the background.
As Taylor Schmitz, a U of T graduate students and the study's lead author, notes:

Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world. The upside of this is that we can see things from a more global, or integrative perspective. The downside is that this can lead to distraction on critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery or airport screening of passenger baggage. Bad moods, on the other hand, may keep us more narrowly focused, preventing us from integrating information outside of our direct attentional focus.

Are you sociable and affectionate? Are you always trying to please people? It might be because you have more brain tissue in certain parts of your brain, according to a team of researchers from Cambridge University and the University of Oulu in Finland.
The scientists studied the link between brain structure and personality in a group of males by scanning their brains and having them answer questions that rated their "social reward dependence," a measure of their emotional warmth and sociability. Turns out, the more gray matter a man has in the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum regions of his brain, the higher his social reward dependence tends to be. And here's what's neat: Those same brain regions have previously been linked to the processing of simple rewards.
"It's interesting that the degree to which we find social interaction rewarding relates to the structure of our brains in regions that are important for very simple biological drives such as food, sweet liquids, and sex. Perhaps this gives us a clue to how complex features like sentimentality and affection evolved from structures that in lower animals originally were only important for basic biological survival processes," says Dr. Graham Murray, a psychiatrist who worked on the study.
But keep in mind, he says, that trying to understand why some people are warmer or more social than others is complex, and this study is only correlational—meaning that we know brain structure and personality are related, but "it cannot prove that brain structure determines personality. It could even be that your personality, through experience, helps in part to determine your brain structure."
The research appears in the European Journal of Neuroscience. —Heather Wax

Scientists can use brain scans to tell whether you've just heard words spoken in anger, joy, relief, or sadness, according to a new study led by Thomas Ethofer at the University of Geneva. The researchers discovered that different emotions in speech lead to distinct patterns of activity in a listener's auditory cortex, the area of the brain that processes sound and human voices. By looking at the overall pattern of activity in this brain region, they could identify which emotion had just been heard.
"Comprehension of emotional prosody is crucial for social functioning and compromised in various psychiatric disorders, including deficits for anger and sadness in schizophrenia, fear and surprise in bipolar affective disorder, and surprise in depression," the researchers write in the journal Current Biology. "Future research might apply a similar approach as ours to clarify whether these deficits are paralleled by activity changes blurring emotions at the level of auditory cortex, or are due to disrupted patterns within frontal regions reflecting biased interpretation of emotional signals."

A group of researchers at UCLA decided to take high-res brain scans of people who have meditated regularly for more than five years, and they found that certain parts of meditators' brains are larger than average. Their brains have a bigger hippocampus and more gray matter in the orbito-frontal cortex, thalamus, and inferior temporal lobe—all areas that are involved in processing and regulating emotions.
This doesn't surprise, given that research has long shown that people who regularly practice meditation can focus better and have greater control over their emotional response to stress. Finding the bigger brain regions might give scientists a clue as to why meditators have these special abilities, says Eileen Luders, a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging who led the study. Little is known about the link between meditation and brain structure.
For one thing, scientists still face a chicken-and-egg question:

Because this was not a longitudinal study—which would have tracked meditators from the time they began meditating onward—it's possible that the meditators already had more regional gray matter and volume in specific areas; that may have attracted them to meditation in the first place, Luders said.

However, she also noted that numerous previous studies have pointed to the brain's remarkable plasticity and how environmental enrichment has been shown to change brain structure.

A couple of researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have put together what they say is the first review of the literature on the neurobiology of wisdom. But here's the catch: The researchers, Dr. Dilip Jeste and Dr. Thomas Meeks, could find no studies that used the word "wisdom" and also used the word "neurobiology," "neuroimaging," or "neurotransmitters."
So they looked for empirical studies on the traits that are most commonly thought to be components of wisdom—like empathy, compassion, emotional stability, self-understanding, pro-social attitudes, tolerance, and the ability to deal with uncertainty—and the brain circuits associated with these traits.
The doctors found that in the 1970s, there were only 20 peer-reviewed studies on wisdom, but since 2000, there have been more than 250 articles on the topic.
And the research, says Jeste, "suggests that there may be a basis in neurobiology for wisdom’s most universal traits.” Specifically, they looked at neuroimaging studies, which seem to show that many of the same brain areas are involved in the different attributes associated with wisdom. According to the researchers, it looks like the neurobiology of wisdom involves a balance between the limbic system (a primitive brain region) and the prefrontal cortex (a highly advanced brain region). "Understanding the neurobiology of wisdom," Jeste says, "may have considerable clinical significance, for example, in studying how certain disorders or traumatic brain injuries can affect traits related to wisdom."
The overview is published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. —Heather Wax

Does the structure of your brain reveal whether you're at high risk for depression? It might, according to an upcoming PNAS study conducted by Columbia University's Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Using MRI imaging, the researchers found that people with at high risk of developing depression (based on their family history) had a 28 percent thinning of the right cortex, the outermost surface of the brain. According to the scientists, this loss of brain matter is on par with the loss that's seen in patients with Alzheimer's disease or schizophernia.
The scientists believe this thinning might be a cause rather than a consequence of the development of depression—affecting a person's ability to interpret and pay attention to social and emotional cues from others; the less matter a person has in the right cortex, the worse this person performs on attention and memory tests. “Our findings suggest rather strongly that if you have thinning in the right hemisphere of the brain, you may be predisposed to depression and may also have some cognitive and inattention issues," says Dr. Bradley Peterson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia and the study's lead author. "The more thinning you have, the greater the cognitive problems. If you have additional thinning in the same region of the left hemisphere, that seems to tip you over from having a vulnerability to developing symptoms of an overt illness.” —Dan Messier

"Most religions endorse the idea of a soul (or spirit) that is distinct from the physical body. ... However, as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms underlying personality, love, morality, and spirituality, the idea of a ghost in the machine becomes strained. Brain imaging indicates that all of these traits have physical correlates in brain function. Furthermore, pharmacologic influences on these traits, as well as the effects of localized stimulation or damage, demonstrate that the brain processes in question are not mere correlates but are the physical bases of these central aspects of our personhood. If these aspects of the person are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all?" Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nancey Murphy of the Fuller Theological Seminary write in a recent issue of the journal Science.
"By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions. Predictably, then, some theologians and even neuroscientists are resisting the implications of modern cognitive and affective neuroscience. 'Nonmaterialist neuroscience' has joined 'intelligent design' as an alternative interpretation of scientific data.'"
Yet they point out that dualism is a relatively modern concept; the biblical view of human nature was definitely physicalist. Finally, they remind us that "just as Galileo's view of Earth in the heavens did not render our world any less precious or beautiful, neither does the physicalism of neuroscience detract from the value of meaning of human life."

According to a new brain-imaging study, it's possible to feel empathy for another person's pain even if you've never actually experienced that pain yourself. The study, led by Nicolas Danziger of the department of clinical neurophysiology and the Pain Center at the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris, focused on patients who have congenital insensitivity to pain, a disorder that prevents them from feeling pain themselves. Previously, Danziger showed that these patients tend to underestimate the pain of others when they don't have emotional cues—"unless the observer is endowed with sufficient emphatic abilities to fully acknowledge the suffering experience of others in spite of his own insensitivity."
In this study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the brain activity of these patients when they were asked to imagine the feelings of a person in photo that showed the person's body parts in painful situations or facial expression of pain. They showed less activity than control subjects did in their brains' visual regions—indicating reduced emotional arousal to seeing another's pain—but, unlike the control subjects, they showed activation of brain regions involved in emotion. While they can't rely on past experiences of feeling pain, they seem to rely on their empathetic abilities to imagine the pain of others.
"Our findings," the researchers write, "underline the major role of midline structures in emotional perspective taking and in the ability to understand someone else's feelings despite the lack of any previous personal experience of it—an empathetic challenge frequently raised during human social interactions." —Heather Wax

Regardless of cultural background or religion, our brains function in a certain, similar way during spiritual experiences, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Missouri's Center on Religion & the Professions. Specifically, the findings suggest that spiritual experiences associated with selflessness—like transcendence (feelings of universal unity)—are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe, an area in the back of the brain.
The research team, led by Brick Johnstone, a professor of health psychology and head of CORP's spirituality and health research team, found that people with injuries to the right parietal lobe of the brain reported higher levels of spiritual experiences. This means, the researchers say, that we can potentially teach ourselves to achieve selflessness and spiritual transcendence by learning to decrease activity in that part of the brain through meditation and prayer.
The study, published in the journal Zygon, "suggests that ‘selflessness’ is a neuropsychological foundation of spiritual experiences," says Johnstone, but it "does not in any way minimize the importance of religion or personal beliefs, nor does it suggest that spiritual experience are related only to neuropsychological activity in the brain. It is important to note that individuals experience their God or higher power in many different ways, but that all people from all religions and beliefs appear to experience these connections in a similar way.” —Heather Wax

Psychologist Richard Davidson, director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has received a 2.5 million dollar grant from the Fetzer Institute to study the neuroscience of compassion, love, and forgiveness, and how we might cultivate and nurture these virtues in our daily lives. “This is totally uncharted territory,” Davidson said in a news release. “This grant is really meant to launch a new field where the wisdom of the contemplative traditions can intersect with hard-nosed mainstream science to understand how the brain can be transformed, through certain exercises, to strengthen these kinds of positive qualities.”
Davidson will be a familiar name to those who have followed the development of positive psychology. For years, he's studied the brains and meditation practices of Tibetan monks, finding good evidence of "neuroplasticity," the idea that our brains can change in response to experience and mental training exercises throughout our lives. We may even be able to train our brains to be more compassionate and empathetic, according to a study he published in March in the journal PLoS ONE.
The new project, says Davidson, is part of a larger center in development at the Waisman Laboratory called the Center for Creating a Healthy Mind, which is scheduled to open in about a year. —Heather Wax

Harvard psychiatrist Dr. George Vaillant was on WBUR's "On Point" with guest host Jane Clayson yesterday, making the case that we're hard-wired for spirituality, which he defines in terms of positive emotions like trust, hope, love, and joy. These positive emotions—which are present in our hymns and songs, but not in psychiatric textbooks—are remarkably adaptive and housed in a different part of the brain (the limbic system) than the creeds and dogmas of our religious beliefs (which are housed in the neocortex), he says. Vaillant fleshes out this argument, looking at faith through neuroscience, in his new book Spiritual Evolution, which draws a strong distinction between spirituality and religion. "Like breathing, our spirituality is common to us all," he writes. "On the one hand, religion asks us to learn from the experience of our tribe; spirituality urges us to savor our own experience. On the other hand, religious helps us to mistrust the experience of other tribes; spirituality helps us to regard the experience of our foreigner as valuable too." The book, Vaillant says, is written for readers "seeking to have both their spiritual hearts and their scientific intellects taken seriously," and its goal is to "restore our faith in spirituality as an essential human striving." —Heather Wax

According to a new study, sexual orientation may be linked to the symmetry of your brain. Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström, researchers at the department of clinical neuroscience at the Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden, have brain scans that show that the brains of heterosexual men and homosexual women—in other words, people who are sexually attracted to women—have right hemispheres larger than the left. Heterosexual women and homosexual men, on the other hand, both have symmetrical brains. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online, is bolstering the idea that biological factors influence sexual orientation and expanding the idea of which brain regions might make a difference.
MRI and PET scans of 90 people, seen in the above image from PNAS, also showed similarities between straight men and gay women and similarities between straight women and gay men in the wiring of the amygdala, a region of the brain that's key for processing emotions and the fight-or-flight response. "The observations cannot be easily attributed to perception or behavior," the researchers write. "Whether they may relate to processes laid down during the fetal or postnatal development is an open question." —Heather Wax

Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written a piece for Natural History that explains what mirror neurons are and the role these brain cells play in empathy and social connections. In essence, explains Iacoboni, mirror neurons specialize in allowing us to understand the actions, feelings, and intentions of others by automatically simulating these actions and emotions in our own brains. "When we watch movie stars kiss onscreen, some of the cells firing in our brains are the same ones that fire when we kiss our lovers. And when we see someone else suffering or experiencing pain, mirror neurons help us to read her or his facial expression and make us viscerally feel the suffering or the pain of the other person," he writes. "Those moments, I will argue, are the foundation of empathy (and possibly of morality)."
Iacoboni, who heads the leading lab in human mirror neuron research, adapted the piece from his new book, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others. —Heather Wax

Dr. Solomon Snyder of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine offers his perspective on the new neuroscience of religion in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.