Wray Herbert Blog: Feeling Anxious? Think Again

by Wray Herbert. author of 'On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits'

The number one fear is public speaking, hands down. Pollsters have reported time and again that the average person dreads public speaking more than disease or even death. These polls merely confirm what our sweaty palms and elevated heart beat make undeniable: Standing up and addressing an audience brings out our worst fears about performance and failure and the judgment of others.

We all experience some measure of social anxiety, but some people suffer much more than others, and not just with public speaking. Dates, job interviews, even idle cocktail chatter -- any kind of social encounter can be a source of unbearable dread for people with a social anxiety disorder, or SAD.

Millions are debilitated by the emotional and physical arousal associated with this most common of mental disorders.

Despite the prevalence of SAD, however, a lot remains unknown about the disorder. While the negative emotions are a hallmark of clinical anxiety disorder, there is conflicting evidence about the physiological symptoms. Do sufferers really have maladaptive bodily responses to social stress, or do they just perceive it that way? An answer to this basic question would be helpful in guiding clinical intervention.

A team of psychological scientists has been exploring the interplay of thinking, attention and physiology in SAD. Jeremy Jamieson of the University of Rochester, Matthew Nock of Harvard and Wendy Berry Mendes of UC -- San Francisco designed two studies to sort out these aspects of the disorder and, beyond that, to test a simple intervention that might diminish the unpleasant symptoms of social anxiety.

Here's the background that sparked the scientists' inquiry. It's a popular belief that stressful arousal -- heightened blood pressure, heart rate and so forth -- accumulates over time, leading to poor health and disease down the road. But this is not entirely true. Stress can indeed be deleterious to people's health, but only if they see the stressful situation as a threat -- something they lack the inner resources to cope with. By contrast, if people see a stressful situation as a challenge to meet, their physiological response is different -- and not as harmful to the body.

In the first study, the scientists wanted to see if they could clarify the psychological and physiological aspects of SAD. They recruited volunteers, some of whom met the clinical definition of SAD, and deliberately confronted them with their worst fear -- speaking in front of judgmental strangers. They used a well-established social stress test, in which volunteers are required to prepare a short speech about their personal strengths and weaknesses, deliver it to an audience of two judges, and then recover from the experience. The judges were trained to give subtle but negative non-verbal feedback during the speech; they didn't smile or nod or otherwise indicate any kind of affirmation of the speaker's performance. Half of the volunteers -- both with SAD and without -- went through this stressful experience, while the remaining volunteers, the controls, gave their speech in private, without a judgmental audience.

During this experiment, all the volunteers were hooked up to monitors, which recorded their physiological reactivity. The scientists also measured the volunteers' vigilance for signs of threat, their negative feelings, and their appraisal of their own stress -- whether they saw it as a challenge or a threat.

Then they crunched all the data together.

The most surprising finding was that there was no significant difference between SAD sufferers and healthy controls on measures of arousal. That is, when required to speak before a judgmental audience, both showed high vigilance and the harmful kind physical arousal, compared to those who did not have to speak in public. Those with SAD reported more subjective anxiety and negative feelings, but on objective measures they were no worse off than healthy people in a highly stressful social situation.

Since this finding was unexpected, the scientists wanted to double-check it, but they also wanted to capitalize on it. If SAD sufferers' biological arousal is indeed disconnected from subjective feelings of anxiety, would it be possible to ameliorate the disorder simply by thinking about physical symptoms constructively? Perhaps they could be thought of as a resource that enhances performance, rather than a liability. This is what the scientists explored in a second experiment.

It was basically the same experiment, except that this time some of the volunteers were urged to reappraise their symptoms in a more positive way. Specifically, they were told this just prior to the speaking task: "In stressful situations, like public speaking, our bodies react in very specific ways. The increase in arousal you may feel during stress is not harmful. Instead, these responses evolved to help our ancestors survive by delivering oxygen to where it is needed in the body." They were explicitly encouraged to reinterpret their arousal as an adaptive response. The idea was that changing perceptions of arousal might mitigate anxiety.

And that's just what they found, and detail in a forthcoming article in the journal Clinical Psychological Science. Both socially anxious and healthy volunteers, when encouraged to see their bodily arousal as functional, improved on a number of measures. They still saw public speaking as stressful and personally demanding, but they saw themselves as more resourceful -- better able to cope with the social stress of speaking. What's more, their physiological response actually improved as well; it came to resemble the more adaptive, healthier kind of arousal. Finally, they were not so preoccupied with threatening cues in the world. This shift in attention, away from negativity, could be protective, diminishing the likelihood of reacting to new social threats in the future.

Wray Herbert's blogs -- "Full Frontal Psychology" and "We're Only Human" -- appear regularly in The Huffington Post.

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.

Terror Management Theory

I'm enjoying Wray Herbert's On Second Thought, which explores the many "mental shortcuts" used by the "down and dirty," "low road," "quick processing" system of our "parallel processor" brains. From Wikipedia, "Heuristic ( /hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; or heuristics; Greek: "Εὑρίσκω", "find" or "discover") refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Where an exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, or common sense."

In Chapter 19 Herbert explores the "Grim Reaper Heuristic," about how our mind copes and keeps at bay the existential pain that humans experience because of mortality salience (we're aware of our own mortality). In this chapter he mentions "Terror Management Theory."

Again, from Wikipedia, "Terror Management Theory (TMT), in social psychology, states that human behavior is mostly motivated by the fear of mortality. According to TMT theorists, symbols that create cultural worldviews are fiercely protected as representations of actual life. The Terror Management Theory posits that when people are reminded of their own deaths, they more readily enforce these symbols, often leading to punitive actions, violence, and war. Experiments have been performed to lend evidence to TMT, primarily carried out by Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, and Jeff Greenberg, seeking to provide proof that mortality salience, or the awareness of one's own death, affects the decision-making of individuals and groups of people.

The theory purports to help explain human activity both at the individual and societal level. It is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues all human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound -- albeit subconscious -- anxiety in people (called cognitive dissonance) that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, how well someone adheres to a cultural worldview is the same concept as self-esteem; people measure their own worth based on how well they live up to their culture's expectations."

On Second Thought: Heuristics and Framing

Once again, the pioneering research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky serves as the foundation for this breezey Malcolm Gladwell-type book, On Second Thought, by Wray Herbert. I never tire of reading about heuristics and Prospect Theory. Check out the subtle visual pun on the cover design.

From the almighty Amazon, "Our lives are composed of millions of choices, ranging from trivial to life-changing and momentous. Luckily, our brains have evolved a number of mental shortcuts, biases, and tricks that allow us to quickly negotiate this endless array of decisions. We don’t want to rationally deliberate every choice we make, and thanks to these cognitive rules of thumb, we don’t need to. 


Yet these hard-wired shortcuts, mental wonders though they may be, can also be perilous. They can distort our thinking in ways that are often invisible to us, leading us to make poor decisions, to be easy targets for manipulators…and they can even cost us our lives. 


The truth is, despite all the buzz about the power of gut-instinct decision-making in recent years, sometimes it’s better to stop and say, “On second thought . . .”


The trick, of course, lies in knowing when to trust that instant response, and when to question it. In On Second Thought, acclaimed science writer Wray Herbert provides the first guide to achieving that balance. Drawing on real-world examples and cutting-edge research, he takes us on a fascinating, wide-ranging journey through our innate cognitive traps and tools, exposing the hidden dangers lurking in familiarity and consistency; the obstacles that keep us from accurately evaluating risk and value; the delusions that make it hard for us to accurately predict the future; the perils of the human yearning for order and simplicity; the ways our fears can color our very perceptions , and much more. 


Along the way, Herbert reveals the often-bizarre cross-connections these shortcuts have secretly ingrained in our brains, answering such questions as why jury decisions may be shaped by our ancient need for cleanliness; what the state of your desk has to do with your political preferences; why loneliness can literally make us shiver; how drawing two dots on a piece of paper can desensitize us to violence, and how the very typeface on this page is affecting your decision about whether or not to buy this book.   


Ultimately, On Second Thought is both a captivating exploration of the workings of the mind and an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to learn how to make smarter, better judgments every day."