Mimicry, social belonging, and automatic behavior


Filed Under Relating to People | Aug 8, MDT 12:05 pm

Humans have a tendency of mimicking each other in subtle ways; put two people in a room together, and if one of them starts rubbing their nose, the other might end up doing the same thing without realizing it.

No one has provided a comprehensive answer as to why people behave this way, though there have been some interesting studies which have given us at least a partial understanding of why we mimic each other.

Recent experiments, for example, have shown that our sense of belonging has an impact on our mirroring habits:

In one experiment, participants played an online ball-tossing game with three other computer players, and were either excluded or included in the game. After reporting their enjoyment of the game and what they thought of the other players, participants were asked to describe a photograph to a female confederate who constantly moved her foot, but not enough so that it was consciously noticed by the participant. The researchers hypothesized that participants in the excluded condition would move their foot more to match the confederate.

In the next experiment, the procedure was kept mostly the same. This time, however, all of the participants were female. They were excluded from either a group of males or females during the ball-tossing game and interacted with either a male or female confederate during the photo description task. Participants were also questioned more thoroughly on how they felt after the game, such as how much they felt they belonged to the group. The researchers predicted that if the female participants were ostracized by females and later interacted with a female confederate, then they would mimic the confederate more than other participants.

The results, appearing in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, provided strong support for the researchers’ hypotheses. In the first experiment, participants who had been excluded from the game mimicked the confederate during the second task more than other participants. In the second experiment, participants excluded by members of their own sex mimicked a confederate of the same sex more than participants in other conditions. There was also an inverse relationship between feelings of belonging and nonconscious mimicry.

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Burning incense reduces anxiety, depression


Filed Under Beat Anxiety, Overcome Depression | Aug 7, MDT 12:36 pm

Incense helps reduce anxiety, depressionThis is an interesting study from a few months back; apparently, burning frankincense activates ion channels in the brain which help alleviate depression and anxiety.

Burning incense is a common religious practice in many parts of the world, and this study provides some insight into how the practice might actually rally our spirits in a physical sense. It also provides us with one more technique for improving the quality of our lives.

From the article comes this quote which is particularly revealing:

“We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior. Apparently, most present day worshipers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning.”

I think it’s safe to say that many religious rituals carry some kind of physical benefit to those who practice them. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s unlikely that people would continue behaving in certain ways, generation after generation, unless those behaviors conferred some kind of survival benefit on to those who did them.

There’s a fair amount of research which points towards the health benefits of certain religious rituals, such as prayer and meditation. Now we can add burning incense to the mix. For those of us of a more secular bent, we can still benefit from these practices without having to invest them with a specific ideology.

In time, scientists will develop a new class of drugs based on the properties of frankincense, but for now, burning regular incense remains an affordable and healthy way of raising spirits — one that doesn’t require a prescription.

Depression through the lens of evolutionary psychology


Filed Under Overcome Depression | Aug 6, MDT 12:29 pm

Humans have only just begun living in large groups.  This experiment, in which millions of people congregate in large, dehumanizing, and anonymous environments, is foreign to how the vast majority of our ancestors lived.

Now there’s a rising chorus of psychologists who claim that the root of so many of our mental conditions can be found in this disconnect between how we’re meant to live and how we’re actually living.

In one interesting article from the Toronto Star, evolutionary psychologist Dr. Stephen Ilardi talks about a form of therapy he’s developed to help people manage their depression. This treatment involves group therapy sessions and life-style changes that bring patients closer to living the kind of lives humans used to have before we became city-bound. That means better nutrition, better sleep,  more exercise, more light, more activity, less rumination, and more positive social interaction.

Read the results of his treatment for yourself:

The results of the 14-week regimen so far have been encouraging. In a continuing study of 79 patients, with two-thirds assigned to his therapy and the rest to a control group treated mainly with antidepressant medication or traditional psychotherapy, Ilardi reports a 74 per cent favourable response, compared with 16 per cent for the controls.

In other words, people were nearly five times more likely to respond favourably to his evolutionary inspired treatment than they were to medication and traditional psychotherapy.

Adjusting to a sick world won’t make us healthy; the only way to prosper in our society is by rejecting it’s demands and listening to those of our bodies.

Some people will prosper in a society such as ours; the people at the very, very top do incredibly well. And in terms of breeding , there does seem to be some real advantages to the way we live. However, in terms of quality of life, in terms of personal satisfaction, we have taken a remarkable step backwards in some respects. We don’t have to tolerate these retrograde arrangements, though changing them may prove difficult since some powerful sectors of our society benefit from the very things which make so many of us sick. This relationship, in which the few benefit from the suffering of the many, isn’t set in stone. It can be overcome.

Evolutionary psychology and the field of pharmacogenetics will make managing our mental states a much easier prospect, yet we shouldn’t use these sciences to help us cope with the negative mental conditions that our society creates, instead we should use the knowledge we gleam from these fields to help us make society more accommodating to the human condition.

Misery and depression are adaptive responses; we’ve adapted them in order to help us survive in our current environment. If we want to get rid of them in a permanent manner, we need to get rid of the environmental factors that lead to their creation.

Exercise might not help with depression, anxiety


Filed Under Beat Anxiety, Overcome Depression | Aug 5, MDT 12:21 pm

A recent study from the Netherlands hints that voluntary exercise, long thought to alleviate the symptoms of depression and anxiety, may not in fact work as claimed.

Instead, genetic factors might better explain the relationship between the two.  When tracking genetically identical twins, scientists found that when one twin exercises, the other twin was less likely to show symptoms of depression and anxiety. This wasn’t true for fraternal twins, who aren’t as closely matched genetically.

This study was about voluntary exercise, which isn’t the same as being on a training program overseen by medical professionals. In other words, if you’ve never been a busy body and you’re depressed, a structured exercise program might help you.

As the press release mentions:

The results do not mean that exercise cannot benefit those with anxiety or depression, the authors note, only that additional trials would be needed to justify this type of therapy. “Only voluntary leisure-time exercise is influenced by genetic factors, whereas the other type of exercise [directed and monitored by someone else] is environment-driven. The absence of causal effects of voluntary exercise on symptoms of anxiety and depression does not imply that manipulation of exercise cannot be used to change such symptoms,” they write. “The antidepressant effects of exercise may only occur if the exercise is monitored and part of a therapeutic program.”

Two points to take from this study:

1.  It’s becoming increasingly apparent that genetics plays a strong role in determining the kind of mental states we’re likely to have.

2. Scientists are still mystified by this role, and are decades away from fully understanding it.

No matter what plan of action you take to manage your depression and anxiety, realize that part of the issue has to do with who you are on a genetic level. I still think, to a very large degree, that your environment, the society you are born into, will end up shaping the way your genes manifest themselves.  Depression has it’s environmental factors.

In future posts, we’ll cover the matter of epigenetics, which may account for why people who share similar genes don’t always share the same genetic conditions. Epigenetics undermines the fatalism that’s been a hallmark of genetics for the last few decades. It’s a very new field and, like pharmacogenetics, it will almost certainly alter the way we practice medicine.

Being Miserable Is A Good Thing


Filed Under Overcome Depression | Aug 4, MDT 4:41 pm

Being Miserable Is A Good ThingI’d like to keep a solid, predictable schedule for this site — daily posts, Monday through Friday, with the week-ends off.

The posts will cover issues concerning mental health in general, with a particular emphasis on depression, anxiety, and stress. I’m not tackling these issues from the usual perspective. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be depressed, anxious, or stressed out. Hell, even a little OCD can be a good thing. It’s only a problem when these states become debilitating, preventing people from engaging and participating in the world in ways which conform with their desires.

I’m not in favor of “curing” depression, anxiety, and stress. I want to manage them.  In a world as fucked up as ours, in a world as broken and bruised and bloody as ours, in a world full of inequity and injustice, being depressed is a healthy and normal response.

Society is sick, yet most professionals want you to adapt to it. That’s a terrible idea.  A better route would be to recognize that society is broken, and no matter how good you get, your mental health will always be constrained by your environment. If that environment isn’t healthy, you won’t be either.

What that means is that seemingly happy, functional citizens are often broken on some very deep levels. They’re ability to be happy is directly related to how alienated they are from the world around them. In order to believe everything is okay, they have to ignore everything that’s wrong.

This leaves people with a choice; they can be depressed yet aware, or they can be happy yet ignorant.  I’d like to argue that it’s better to be depressed and aware. Happiness that relies on ignorance is an illusion, and that illusion ends up distorting every aspect of it’s victims life.  Their relationships are shallow, their goals empty, and their lives built atop a foundation of sand. They’re only okay because they’re not paying attention, but once they fix their eyes on the world, everything comes tumbling down.

Depression, on the other hand, is what happens when your eyes are so close to the floor that you sometimes feel like you’re lying on it. It’s not pleasant, and it can be emotionally and physically crippling, but if people manage it properly… it can open up a pathway to a more satisfying and enriching life, a life that’s free from the rules, definitions, and limits of a broken world.

It’s no secret that the depressed have a more accurate understanding of the world and their place in it; they’re much more attuned to their limitations than other people. Limitations are, in fact, a weapon of great power in the hands of those who understand them. People who are aware of their limitations are more likely to pick their battles wisely than people who overestimate their skills and talents. The depressed can seize the world precisely because they aren’t deluded about how wonderful it is.  They know the rules and the facts better than happy folks, so they can break those rules and use those facts  in ways that others can’t.

The depressed are in a better position to live the lives they want to in the way they want to then are happy, and hence, deluded people. Why rid yourself of your depression if it means embracing delusions?

Nuts to that.  Focus on controlling that depression so that it never consumes you, then learn to channel it into a force for positive social change.

I plan on helping you accomplish this. I’ll be sharing the best psychological studies I can find while mapping out a comprehensive philosophy of positive misery.

Because at Mister Misery, we believe being miserable can be a good thing.