Tag Archives: negative attitudes

Genetics and Emotions

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People who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration than others and report feeling "hurt" may be telling the truth.

People who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration than others and report feeling “hurt” may be telling the truth.

There are approximately three billion base pairs (connections) in a strand of DNA. That represents a virtually infinite number of possible combinations. The variation between each of us, although nearly infinitesimally small, is so significant that no two of us in the world population of nearly 7 billion humans is exactly identical. Even identical twins are different from each other.

It is that small variation in each of us that is the result of and contributes to the evolution of the specie. In a study by UCLA researchers, publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Markus Heilig, Faculty Member for F1000 Biology, and Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, MD, report that they have identified a genetic factor that causes some people to actually experience stronger physical sensations associated with emotions (in the study case, the emotion was rejection).

There is apparently a wide variation or spectrum associated with the feeling (physical sensations) of emotions. Therefore, some people who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration, for example, than others and report feeling emotionally “hurt” may be telling the literal truth.

Can these genetic factors be moderated through training or experience? What do you think? Are we “hard wired” – or can we significantly affect our emotional states in spite of genetic predisposition or genetic variations?

An abstract of the original paper, Variation in the micro-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is associated with dispositional and neural sensitivity to social rejection is online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/19706472?dopt=Abstract&holding=f1000,f1000m,isrctn.

What You Believe Matters

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Surprise! If you believe your disease will kill you, it will.

Surprise! If you believe your disease will kill you, it will.

Whaddya know, what you believe does matter. If you’ve read my previous posts, you know I love studies and this one is right down my placebo-loving alley. Published in the February 2012 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science,a study by Keith Petrie, of the University of Auckland, and John Weinman, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, reviewed the existing literature on patients’ perceptions of illness. Turns out, it matters! Who’d a-thunk it?

Not only does it matter that a patient believes he will get better with treatment (placebo effect), it matters what he believes about the specific disease or condition being treated.

 According to Petrie, “a doctor can make accurate diagnoses and have excellent treatments but if the therapy doesn’t fit with the patient’s view of their illness, they are unlikely to keep taking it.” – and ultimately fail or seriously lessen the likelihood of successful outcome.

Physicians and other health care professionals will definitely improve the quality of the care they provide by taking into account the patient’s beliefs and possible misconceptions about the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of their condition.

Healthcare staff can greatly improve outcomes using simple positive attitudes about patient treatment outcomes and by pointing out the likelihood of successful outcomes rather than focusing on likelihood of negative outcomes. Even when the odds are against them, most people believe deep in their hearts that they alone can beat the odds – so why not surf that belief and help them do it?

That’s the placebo effect – healing through belief. It’s far more powerful than many give credit.

(source: Association for Psychological Science. “Patients’ Perceptions Of Illness Make A Difference.”Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 30 Jan. 2012. Web.)

Real Success

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In the words of Anna Qundlen, “…if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. Remember the words of Lily Tomlin: If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” Alain de Botton puts this all into perspective with wit and wisdom. 17 minutes of pure platinum. Enjoy!

What Are You Afraid Of?

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Some years ago, my wife and I were invited to do a fire walk. We built a BIG fire – over 8 feet tall and 20 feet across we stacked the wood – then burned it down to a 15 foot round bed of hot coals. It was so hot in fact that we burned our faces from several feet back.

terror.gifSure it’s possible to walk on coals – lots of people have done it before and not gotten so much as an ouch of a burn. But I had not done it before – and even after the first person walked across – and even though we knew scientifically and spiritually that it was possible – the HEAT and FIRE coupled with our own past experiences with fire – I had been burned badly on my feet in a fire in the garage in our old house – confronted us with the real possibility of serious injury.

FIRE BURNS FLESH!!! My body knows it – which is why I don’t put my hand on the hot stove on purpose. My body knows about heat and knows how to react to it – mostly by AVOIDING IT.

I don’t care how much you believe you can do it – when you stand at the precipice and your face and arms are burning from the heat – you are face to face with one of the greatest inbred fears of animal-kind – the fear of fire – ala Frankenstein’s monster. All animals are afraid of fire – including humans. Fire is TERRIFYING.

What would it take to make me step from the cool grass onto the superheated hot coals?

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Don’t Stop?

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It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

Thinking, that is! A study out of Case Western Reserve University shows that it takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it. No wonder it’s so hard to stop smoking or stop berating yourself or stop that tune that got stuck in your head. It just takes too much energy!

Some years ago, I underwent a year of intensive thought transformation in which a group of us focused attention on catching each other or sometimes even catch ourselves saying the “wrong” things – things that detracted us from our goals. “Try” was on the taboo list of words for obvious reasons – it holds a built-in failure. So, each time we’d hear one of us say the word, “try”, we’d say, “Cancel that!” The process seemed horribly difficult as we were catching each other often over that year. In the end, however, the goal was attained and my speech cleared up so much.

I wonder if we were unintentionally making it harder on ourselves by canceling (stopping) our thoughts instead of reframing them – sort of like nudging an asteroid instead of hitting it head-on.

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