Bruce Hood - The Domesticated Brain - A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

The answer is both. In some situations, the need to respond as fast as possible trumps the need to think (the sudden bear attack), whereas in others we need to consider the situation and respond accordingly (blushing in public). However, in both situations, experience and expectations play a role. If we know that the bear is actually stuffed, then we are less likely to be frightened. If we are among family when we burp, we do not feel so socially awkward.

As these different examples reveal, there are fast and slow pathways to emotion that depend on the circumstances and how we interpret the situation. 32Our emotions are also largely influenced by others. In a classic study of the importance of social context, 33naïve subjects were given an injection of adrenaline and told they were receiving vitamins that would boost performance on a visual test. This was all a sham to get at the real purpose of the study – how do those around us influence emotional experiences? Some of the participants were correctly informed that the injection would make their hands tremble, give them a flushed face and increase their heart rate. Others were told incorrect symptoms of a mild headache and itching skin.

While the participants sat around in the waiting room, they were asked to fill out mood questionnaires. Seated among them was an experimenter who acted in one of two ways. This confederate had not been injected with adrenaline but behaved either negatively, complaining about the study, or positively, by saying how much they were enjoying the experience and acting up playfully.

Meanwhile, in the real participants, the adrenaline triggered their HPA axis and produced the bodily symptoms associated with the fight-or-flight response. Suddenly they had these sensations, but what did they make of them? Those who had been warned correctly about the effects of adrenaline interpreted their sensations correctly (‘I’m feeling a little revved up because of the shot’). But those who did not expect the increased heart rate and tremors were in a state of ignorance and needed to make sense of the signals their bodies were sending them. This is where others play a critical role. The emotions experienced by the naïve participants depended on the influence of the stooge in the room. Those seated with the playful experimenter rated their mood much more positive compared to those seated with the irritated experimenter. They were using the social context of others to interpret their own bodily sensations. Whether we are enjoying a rock concert, a football game or a day at the funfair, our emotional experience depends heavily on how others respond.

The importance of interpretation explains why some of us feel anxious and some of us feel excited. We learn to interpret situations based on experiences that we accumulate over our lifetime. This is why children raised in an environment where there is excessive conflict come to expect this as normal. If there is one thing that is predictable in conflict households, it is anger. When there is anger, violence soon follows, which is why abused children tend to see anger earlier in faces and interpret faces as being angrier whereas they show no higher sensitivity for other emotional expressions. Having a bias for interpreting anger means that children can be prepared for fight-or-flight.

Knowing this enables us to change the way troubled teenagers behave. Colleagues in my department at Bristol produced a series of computer-generated faces made up from morphed real faces that varied on a continuum from happy through neutral to anger. 34The teenagers, most already with criminal convictions and attending a programme for high-risk repeat offenders, saw the ambiguous faces as more aggressive. However, in a clever twist, half of the teenagers were given false feedback on a task where they had to judge the expression, which eventually shifted their bias away from angry faces. In other words, after training, they were much more likely to see ambiguous faces as happy and happy faces as even happier.

The psychologists were able to shift the teenagers’ perception to a more positive interpretation. More remarkably, the effect was long lasting and altered their behaviour in general. The teenagers kept diaries and were evaluated by staff who were unaware of which condition each teenager had been in. After only two weeks, those teenagers who had their anger bias shifted were happier, less aggressive and involved in less conflict incidents as rated by the staff.

Domestic violence

We all need someone from the very start. This imperative to have someone in your life explains the paradox of children’s attachment to abusive parents and why domestic violence can persist. According to the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children statistics published in 2012, one in four young adults were severely maltreated as children. You would think that we have evolved brains that learn to avoid danger, yet when social workers, doctors, or police officers attempt to rescue these victims from an abusive situation, the child will often lie to protect the parents. Harry Harlow also demonstrated similar phenomena in his rearing studies, when frightened infant rhesus monkeys would cling to a surrogate mother made of wire, cloth and a plastic head. Even when they were punished for this attachment with an aversive puff of air, they would still hang on for dear life. How can we understand such strange love?

Regina Sullivan, a neuroscientist who studies the neurobiological basis of attachment, believes an answer might be found by looking at rat pups. 35Rats are smart and can quickly learn what is painful. They can learn to associate an odour with a painful shock. Surprisingly, the brain area responsible for fear and avoidance learning is turned off by the presence of the mother. Even though rat pups can associate a smell with a painful shock, they do not avoid the odour when the mother is present and will in fact approach the smell associated with punishment. Somehow the presence of the mother switches avoidance into approach behaviour in painful situations. The explanation for this masochistic behaviour is that learning about painful situations requires the activity of the rat’s equivalent of the stress hormone, corticosterone, but the presence of the mother turns this off in the young pups in the nest.

Outside the nest, when they are older, exploratory rats will avoid potential dangers but they do this by returning to the nest for comfort and safety. 36This response is social buffering and we see it in humans faced with stressful situations where the presence of a loved one makes the experience more bearable. Even having the photograph of a loved one is sufficient to alleviate pain. 37The problem arises when that loved one is also the source of pain and danger. When rats return to their nest, their corticosterone mechanisms are switched off and they forget what a monster their mother can be. So unpredictable environments are stressful but less stressful than consistently abusive situations. For some, uncertainty of the future is worse than the predictability of the current situation, albeit abusive, which is the origin of the saying ‘Better the devil you know’.

Clearly early domestic violence can leave a lasting impression, but not everyone responds to adversity in the same way and not everyone develops stress-related illness. Not everyone stays in an abusive situation. Given our understanding of stress as a biological phenomenon, how is it that individuals can respond to it so differently?

Two peas in a pod

I have a collection of rare postcards from the sideshow era that I described in the opening to this chapter. They fascinate me since they are a reminder of how social history and attitudes can change so dramatically. One of the cards is a rare photograph of Daisy and Violet Hilton as babies. Daisy and Violet were Siamese twins – two identical sisters conjoined at the hips. They were born in 1908 in Brighton and immediately rejected by their unmarried mother, who thought they were a curse from God for being born out of wedlock. Daisy and Violet were adopted by their midwife and raised to be talented musicians who went on to achieve fame and even appeared in the movies, most notably Tod Browning’s infamous production of Freaks in 1932.