Summary: New study reveals that mingled thoughts, like feeling both happy and sad, are processed in different areas of the brain. Advanced cerebral areas integrate positive and negative emotions into difficult, coexisting experiences while brain regions linked to quick emotional responses do so separately.
This study sheds light on how we manage conflicting thoughts, such as during major career moves. Understanding this method might be beneficial for better managing emotionally charged conditions.
Important Information:
- Various mind areas are activated by mingled emotions as opposed to just one.
- Sophisticated emotions are integrated into the front frontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
- Children do n’t fully grasp mixed emotions until later stages of brain development.
Source: The Talk
Uncountless parents across the nation just dropped their children off for the first time at college. The grief of parting, anguish over a completely altered family dynamic, uncertainty about what lies ahead, and the joy of seeing your child advance toward independence can all be suffocated by this transition. Some may describe the good as melancholy, or claim that they’re feeling mixed feelings.
What would you do if I asked you to charge your feelings on a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being the most unfavorable and 9 being the most beneficial? How should you charge this blending of bad and good? This question seems weird given the circumstances. However, this scale is frequently used by psychology researchers to assess feelings in medical research, determining whether an emotion is positive or negative but not both.
I’m a neuroscientist , who studies how mingled emotions are represented in the head. Does anyone ever experience both positive and negative emotions simultaneously? Or would we simply exchange information immediately?
What benefits do sentiments have for you?
Scientists often define sensations as , state of the brain and body that drive you , toward or away from points. They are generally perceived as either positive or negative.
Your heart rate and breathing ratchet up as you walk in the woods, which will probably help you make a decision that keeps you alive. Some experts may classify that response as the state of “fear.”
Also, warm feelings around loved ones make you want to be around them and cultivate those relationships, helping improve your social networking and assistance system.
This approach-and-avoid perspective of feelings helps explain why thoughts evolved and how they affect decision-making.  , Researchers have used it , as a guiding process when , trying to figure out , the biology , behind thoughts.
But mingled emotions do not meet into this model. If opposite biological systems inhibit each other, and if emotions are biological, you ca n’t experience opposites in the same moment.
This argument may require that you must flip back and forth between two opposing emotions at again. This is how mingled emotions have been conceptualized since scientists have proposed the first ideas on the natural foundations of feelings.
Untangling the science of mixed feelings
Positive and negative feelings are still seen as opposing sides of a band by traditional methods for measuring feelings. However, scientists discover that study respondents frequently report having mixed feelings.
For example, people across nations experience some emotions, such as , nostalgia , and , wonder, as instantly positive and negative.
One study group discovered that volunteers ‘ biological responses, such as heart level and skin conductance, exhibit special patterns , when they experience both ugly and amusing, as opposed to each category individually. This suggests that both appalled and pleased reactions are actually happening at the same time to produce something fresh.
In a seemingly contradictory finding, study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study  , mental responses to disgusting humor , did not find a pattern of brain activity that was different from ordinary disgust. People who reported being both amused and disgusted appeared to have only been expressing disgust, which is not a peculiar pattern for a new mixed emotion.
However, the majority of fMRI studies rely on comparing brain activity across time and people. What the brain does over time is at the heart of the problem: experiencing truly mixed emotions versus shifting between positive and negative states.
By examining the average brain activity over time, scientists may come up with a pattern that resembles one emotion, such as disgust, but are missing important details about how activity changes or stays the same in real time.
Mixed emotions in the brain
To investigate whether a , a distinctive brain state that endured over time, was related to mixed emotions.
While in the MRI machine, participants watched a bittersweet animated short film about a young girl’s lifelong pursuit, with her father’s support, to become an astronaut. Spoiler alert: Her dad dies. After scanning, those same subjects rewatched the video and labeled the exact times they had felt positive, negative and mixed emotions.
My coworkers and I discovered that mixed emotions did n’t exhibit unique, consistent patterns in deeper brain regions like the amygdala, which is crucial for quick responses to emotionally significant items.
Strikingly, the insular cortex, a part of the brain that connects deeper brain regions with the cortex, had consistent and unique patterns for both positive and negative emotions, but not for mixed ones. We assumed that the amygdala and the insular cortex were processing both positive and negative emotions as mutually exclusive.
But we did see unique, consistent patterns in cortical regions such as the anterior cingulate, which plays an important role in , processing conflict and uncertainty, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is important for , self-regulation and complex thinking.
These more advanced brain regions in the cortex appear to represent much more complex states, making it possible for someone to experience a mix of emotions. Important for being able to form a mixed emotion, brain regions like the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrate numerous sources of information.
Our findings are in line with what scientists currently know about brain and emotional development. Interestingly, kids do not begin to , understand or report mixed emotions until later in childhood. This timeline matches up with what researchers know about how , development of these brain regions leads , to more advanced emotional regulation and understanding.
What happens next
There is still much more to learn about how complex feelings are in the brain, despite what this study has revealed.
Mixed emotions are so interesting, in part, because of their potential role during important life events. Sometimes, mixed emotions help you cope with big changes and turn into cherished memories.
When your friends throw a big party before you move to another city to find your dream job, you might experience both positive and negative emotions.
Other times, mixed emotions are an ongoing source of distress. Even if you are aware that you should end your romantic relationship with someone, that does n’t mean all of your feelings about them will vanish completely or that splitting up wo n’t cause any pain.
What leads to this difference in outcome? These variations might have to do with how the brain processes these varying emotional states over time.
A better understanding of mixed emotions might be able to help people ensure that these kinds of strong emotions do n’t turn into painful goodbyes that they ca n’t get over. Instead, they could make sure these kinds of strong feelings become treasured memories that help them develop.
About this information on psychology and emotions research
Author: Anthony Gianni Vaccaro
Source: The Conversation
Contact: Anthony Gianni Vaccaro – The Conversation
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
