| NEWS RELEASE: | |
|
FEELING GOOD AVOIDS BRAIN OVERLOAD | |
| Contact: Dick Jennings, PhD Phone: 1-412 246 6220 Email: JenningsJR@upmc.edu Embargoed until: March 9, 2005 |
|
|
Vancouver, BC, Canada - Feelings of excitement, interest, and enthusiasm relate to keeping things in memory with less brain work. Whether or not you felt distressed, irritable, or afraid didn't make any difference in brain work. Researchers at the meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society reported correlations between ratings of positive and negative affect and how active parts of the brain demanded blood flow during a simply memorization task. During memorization, which involved keeping track of just a few changing items, brain blood flow was measured with positron emission tomography. Two parts of the brain, prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex, increased their blood flow during this task. One part, which is located lower in the brain and which is frequently associated with emotion and with memory-the amygdala/hippocampus, decreased its blood flow during the task. Current feelings before and after a mental challenge and feelings over the last month were also measured in approximately 100 participants in the research study (aged 50 to 70). Regardless of when feelings were assessed, greater positive feelings were associated with less increase in blood flow during the memory task for the prefrontal and parietal areas, and greater decrease in the amygdala/hippocampal area. Ability to keep track of the memory items did not depend upon the participant's feelings, but the changes of blood flow in the posterior parietal area were related to memory performance. Positive feelings over the last month and after just completing a challenging task were completely unrelated to how well participants did on the memory task. There was a tendency for those with positive feelings just prior to a challenging task to do slightly worse than they, presumably, expected. The researchers at the University of Pittsburgh that did the study had a number of cautions to express. The lead investigator, J. Richard Jennings, noted that this was a new finding that they had not expected. It is always best to repeat a finding in a new group of participants before fully accepting it. A physician co-investigator, Matthew Muldoon, noted that the participants were studied because half of them had hypertension. The results might only apply to this middle to older aged group of people. Christopher Ryan, an expert in mental tests, noted that only one form of memory had been tested; while Carolyn Meltzer, a neuroradiologist, cautioned that we do not fully know whether blood flow increases to a region of the brain mean that the area is really doing the work of memory. All noted that correlations don't tell us whether positive feeling caused brain blood flow changes, changes caused feelings, or whether some other factor was creating the association. | |
|
Psychosomatic Medicine is the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Psychosomatic Society, published bimonthly. For information about the journal, contact Vicki White, Managing Editor for Manuscript Production,
|