Theory and Practice of Contemporary Psychotherapies

Emotions Decisions and Behavior across the Life Span: Surprises from Social Psychology Video Transcript

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Elissa S. Epel: Thank you everyone for coming to our last session in our series here. You guys have been a great audience. Everyone has commented on what lively discussion and great questions. So we expect that tonight, our last night. We've waited a while and now we finally get to hear Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes speak tonight, who is the co-chair of this series. Wendy, it's really a pleasure to introduce her. She's been one of my kind of funnest and most inspiring colleagues in all my years. Wendy got her PhD in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara. Then we were lucky to have her here at UCSF as a postdoc. After that, she spent four years at Harvard in the psychology department and really knocked their socks off. Every year, she was nominated one of Harvard's best professors, and UCSF worked very hard to pull her back, and this is her first year back here.

She is the Sarlo/Eckman Endowed Chair in the study of human emotion. Her research line is very fascinating and broad, but also with a tremendous amount of depth. As you're going to hear about, you'll hear about one line of research, research on aging and decision making. The overall theme is embodiment, how emotions, thoughts, and intentions are experienced, both in the body and in the brain. How they affect nervous and the system and the hormonal system, and in turn, how these physiological changes work back to affect our thinking, our behavior.

She also just studies what makes us most human, how we respond to other people, particular people of other groups, stigmatized groups or groups of different social economic class, et cetera. So she's a true social psychologist at heart, and really studies the group process and the psychological processes that explain why we do the things we do. The surprising lessons from social psychology, which we'll hear about.

She's won many awards, early career awards, and just recently, the Spence transformative early career award. She's absolutely, besides being prolific in her papers, she's trained so many students who have gone on to do great things. She puts a tremendous amount of time in mentoring and in regulating what we read in the scientific journal. She is an editor on several journals. She's always reviewing at least one or more, usually probably many more papers at a time. So she's very devoted to service, and we all have a tremendous amount of respect for her. Thank you so much for speaking. Thanks.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Thank you, and thank you, Elissa, for that lovely introduction. I'm excited to be here on your last night, and all the other speakers have actually made it quite easy for me this evening, because a lot of the concepts that I'm going to talk about, you've heard other speakers talk about. But I will put a slightly different spin on it, because I'm a social psychologist.

So as Elissa described, one of my research themes, and the theme that I'll talk about tonight, looks at how emotion influences our behavior and decision making. We typically start with a fairly common model in psychology, and you see it up here, that we have some emotional response. This emotional response triggers a change in our brain, our bodies. This change in our brain and bodies triggers what we call an action tendency. Basically a motivational state that drives us towards something, or away something. Makes us freeze, or flee, or fight. That constellation or coordinated response of our brain and our body and this motivational state can then shape an influence our decisions and our behavior. So here's an example.

When we're disgusted, we crinkle these muscles around our nose called the levator labii. These nose crinkling actually helps contract the nasal passages with the idea being that contaminants are less likely than to get into our brain and our body. But it also triggers things like a decline in our gastrointestinal responses. That's that nausea feeling if something's really disgusting. Those physiological changes then tend to be associated with the distancing, we're disgusted, we want to move away. This can influence our behavior and our decision making.

What's interesting about disgust is we can have both physical disgust, something's disgusting, feces, body violations, but also things can be morally disgusting. What's interesting about moral disgust and physical disgust is they're experienced exactly the same way in the body. So our body often doesn't know the difference between physical disgust and moral disgust. I just start with that as a way to sort of frame the kind of work that I do, but here's the important feature that I'll talk about tonight.

This trajectory of responses, from the emotion, to the response in our body, to the behavior, can all be influenced and shaped by top-down processes like cognition, how we think about the emotion, context. That could be, where are we? We might be terrified of a snake in the jungle, and rightly so. But if we're at a wild animal park, all of a sudden the context is very different, even though it's exactly the same feature that we're seeing, still a snake in the grass. There are developmental factors. Early life, so babies and teenagers often have a very different trajectory, a coordinated response from an emotion to a behavior. So I'll not talk about this tonight, but I'll just give you a bottom line of this one response.

Most people when they're afraid, they withdraw, they see more risk in their environment. They're less risk-taking. I'll tell you the one group who doesn't do that. Teenage boys. Now, when they're afraid they do the exact opposite thing that everybody else seems to do, and that is they approach. They take much more risks. That's sort of fascinating. There's lots of reasons why that's the case, and again, like I said, I'm not going to talk about that tonight, but that's an example that this process does not work statically across our life course. There's some very interesting lessons that we learn in later life and with aging.

My talk is split really kind of in two halves, and they influence each other. This first half, I'm really going to just talk about some basic science associated with these mind body connections. Then in part two, I'm going to test these same models in older adults with some hypotheses about what we may or may not expect. So I want to talk a little bit about what it means to have a top-down influence in this trajectory from emotion to behavior. Here I'll thank Bob Levenson last week for really kind of contextualizing this idea of reappraisal.

So when we have an emotional response, we can … Let's think about something like fear. That seems so clear and obvious, "I'm afraid." But we can reappraise. We can rethink, "That snake isn't dangerous. I'm in a wild animal park." Or, "That tiger isn't scary. It's behind a cage." That seems really obvious, but we can do that with our own emotions. If I was thinking about my talk today, I could be really excited. Like, "This is going to be a lot of fun. You guys have been a great crowd." Or I could be thinking, "Gosh, they ask a lot of questions. What if I don't know the answer? They're going to throw eggs at me." I can sort of think of my way into getting more excited about the talk or more fearful. How we think about our emotions going into an event can dramatically influence our brain and body. I'm going to tell you about how we can study how cognition can shape those emotional states.

Context is also very interesting. I gave you the example of location, but I'm going to give you a different example tonight, and that is your body. Your body positioning. We think of it as so simple. I'm sure I would feel the same emotion if I were lying down than if I were sitting up, but I'm going to show you some data that shows just a manipulation of how we're sitting, standing, how our face is configured, can influence our emotional state.

I want to start with this idea. The distinction between good stress and bad stress. I think stress has gotten sort of a bad rep, especially among researchers. But Elissa, I think did a really nice job sort of setting this idea. Not all stress is bad. Actually, some stress is very good. It helps us activate. We want our body sort of flooded with catecholamines when it's time to perform, or it's time to think quickly. This distinction between good stress and bad stress ends up being critically important for both health and also our performance and behavior.

So here's an example of a good stress, bad stress distinction that I use a lot. Now imagine that you're a student and you sit down to take a test. Now, for some of you, this might be a few years ago, but remember back when you really wanted to do well, you studied really hard. They put the test in front of you and you just know that whole first page, right? That creates sort of this approach state. Your heart's still beating fast, but now more blood is going to get to your brain and out to your muscles, and you're actually going to perform better.

Or a talk. You have to get in front of a lot of people and talk. This response of your body of a strong heart rate, but your vasculature system, the system that carries the oxygenated blood out from your heart to your brain, but also to your hands and feet, dilates. It opens up almost like a hose. The more that dilates, the more blood can get out to the effector muscles and up to the brain. We call this stress state challenge. There's a way to identify this physiologically, and I'll talk about that quite a bit.

Behaviorally, a challenge state is associated with much better cognitive performance. People do better under a challenge state than a threat state. Not surprisingly, they do a lot better in physical performance as well. So athletes, now, so when you're doing aerobic exercise, it basically looks like challenge or activity. But I'm talking about challenge when you're doing something that's not metabolically demanding, not aerobic. Sitting down and taking a task, there's no reason that your muscles would need all that oxygenated blood, but they actually can benefit from it.

This is associated with all more approach behavior. I put fight and flight, it's sort of tricky, and I could talk about that distinction. But basically challenge can be associated with fighting if you have the resources to actually beat your opponent, but also fleeing, if that's sort of the best outcome. If the lion's chasing you, that deer's going to be a lot better off, or gazelle, what is that? I don't know what it is. But anyway, he's going to be a lot better off if more oxygenated blood gets out to the … I think it's a gazelle.

So compare that to a threat response. Same test, you studied, it's important. Somebody puts it down in front of you and you don't recognize any of the questions. This isn't at all what you studied. Or you have to give a talk and you're looking at faces and they're scowling and shaking their heads, and somebody's calling out, "That's BS." That's going to change your physiology and ultimately change your performance. We see much worse performance with threat, and I actually wanted to give you one of my favorite examples of how threat can affect your performance when a lot of people are looking, the lights are shining, and let's see what happens.

Speaker 4: Joining me now is Chase Sampson, a college junior in Nashville, Tennessee. I understand, Chase, that you flew in last night, you didn't get here till 3:00 in the morning, and you haven't slept a wink. Huh?

Chase Sampson: Yeah. I pretty much have coffee flowing through my veins right now.

Speaker 4: Do you really?

Chase Sampson: Yeah.

Speaker 4: But as a college student, I'm thinking maybe that's not so rare.

Chase Sampson: Yeah. I'm up pretty late mostly. I'm kind of insomniac, I guess.

Speaker 4: Okay. But you know where you are?

Chase Sampson: I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good.

Speaker 4: All right. Good, good. Well, as long as you're feeling good and you know the rules and the lifelines, and you're ready to play, we're going to play. Are you ready?

Chase Sampson: Ready?

Speaker 4: Okay. Then let's play. For $100, Chase. Homeowners buy surge protectors to protect their possessions from unexpected surges of what? Electric current. Water flow. Air pressure. Buyer's remorse.

Chase Sampson: I will say B, water flow. Final answer. What?

Speaker 4: Oh, Chase. No. It's electric current.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: His reaction.

Speaker 4: Oh. Chase, I'm so sorry. Darn.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: So, you could clearly get the idea that poor Chase, he didn't get any sleep, the lights are shining down on him. This is what he's been thinking about and dreaming about, and he basically had no more resources to cope, and it made him say the wrong answer when he clearly knew the right answer. Now, I will tell you, I did show this to all my undergraduates at Harvard right before, it was a midterm, to encourage them to sleep the night before. I don't know how effective it was, but I always reminded them of poor Chase Sampson. Something like five million people have watched this on YouTube now. Poor Chase.

So that's the idea, that our current acute stress response can influence what we actually know. So Bob Sapolsky, if you haven't read Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, he has this great example of having to meet his future in-laws. He goes over to their house and he's playing a game with his future mother-in-law and he really wants to make a good first impression, and he can't remember the word casserole. It's this kind of vague word, and it's sort of the idea that he had this flood of glucocorticoids and cortisol, and it's affecting his ability to actually think of something that would be easy to retrieve. So this is how stress can hurt us. But again, there's also a bright side that stress can actually make you perform better.

So, the first couple of studies that I'm going to talk about is how can we sort of think about, or re-praise, rethink our stress state to actually make it more beneficial, help us perform better and have a more positive physiological response. One of my favorite quotes by William James is, "The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." This is more than a-

Audience: [crosstalk 00:17:13].

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: One thought, sorry. One thought over another, thank you. Or one though over another. Yeah. One thought over another. With the idea being that rumination or sort of perseverating about something is a choice that you make to sort of think over and over, or to anticipate something scary and sort of keep thinking about it, rather than focusing your energy on what the task is at hand. So here's a study that we did. I'm actually going to talk about two studies, both with reappraisal and how you think about your emotional or stress state.

What we did in the first study is we introduced the idea of reappraisal to people about to complete a very stressful laboratory task. I'll tell you about that in a minute. We were interested in shifting people's threat state to a challenge state. In study two, we used the same reappraisal manipulation for students about to take a very important exam, specifically the graduate record exam, that determines if they get into graduate school. So here's the method.

We recruited, and again, this first part is all going to be relatively young subjects, and just to show you the phenomenon, and then I'll go up to later life. We bring in young subjects to the lab, around 22 years old, and we tell everybody, "We want you to do a mock job interview." So I think Melissa talked about this, it's called the Trier social stress task, evaluators come into the room and they stare at you as you respond to questions that they ask. First, you have to give an impromptu speech on your strengths and weaknesses. In fact, what's most upsetting about this kind of paradigm is they just look at you very stoically. In fact, if anything, they look a little bit negative. Now that tends to make people very, very stressed.

At the later part of this stress task, is then they have to do mental arithmetic. This could be in a variety of ways, but a common way is you start at a five digit number and you count backwards in steps of seven. The evaluators harass you a little bit, "Come on, faster. Faster. That's wrong. Start again." Again, it's a very stressful situation. But what we did is we randomly assign. So before they knew they had to do this stressful job talk or stressful interview, and we randomly assigned our participants to one of three conditions.

One condition was, we told a third of them about reappraisal. We basically taught them about challenge. We said, "When you feel your heart beating, and everybody's heart beats, and goes fast, and their blood pressure may even increase, just tell yourself that this arousal is functional. This means that more blood is getting ejected from the heart, more blood is getting up to your brain, and this will help you perform better." The other third, we gave another instruction to, but this was intended to be a control condition. We said to them, "Now, when you feel stressed, what we want you to do is just kind of ignore. Ignore the stress. Ignore the source of the stress. Ignore the stress. If anything, it's almost like a suppression manipulation, but don't pay attention to it." The other control condition was no information. So, they know they have to give a speech. We told a third of the participants different things about their stress and arousal, with one third of the group not hearing any instructions.

So what we measure in something like this is we ask people, how do they feel? What are their appraisals? How stressful does the situation feel? What are your resources that you bring to the task? What are your emotions that you feel? We also measure their cardiovascular reactivity. I'm going to tell you a little bit about this, the kind of measures that we collect. We also look at some cognitive processes, things like executive functioning and vigilance for danger. So let me tell you a little bit about the kind of measures that we collect, and I won't say too much. Some people often will think, "You collect heart rate."

We do much more than heart rate. We're specifically looking at the amount of blood that's being ejected from the heart on each beat, and how we can collect something like that is with this technique called impedance cardiograph. What this does is it puts out an external current into the body, you can't feel it, and we can determine the exact amount of blood being ejected on each heartbeat. That tells us a lot about the cardiovascular conditioning. We also measure things like respiration, electrocardiograph, and blood pressure.

So now I want to tell you a little bit about the executive functioning, but I have to ask a question first. Who hasn't, by a show of hands, who has never heard of a Stroop Task? Stroop. Stroop. Okay. Will you be my assistant? You can stay there. It's not scary. Okay. Stroop. What I'm going to do is I'm going to … Stroop. What I'm going to do is I'm going to advance the screen and there's going to be a word on the screen. All I want you to do is tell me the color of the font that the word is written in. Okay? The color. Okay. Ready? I'm going to be timing you down in the millisecond of how quickly you can do this. Color of the font. Ready?

Audience: Yep. Red.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Very good. You ready for another one?

Audience: Yeah.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Fast as you can.

Audience: Blue.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Good, good. Ready for another one?

Audience: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yellow.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. Right. What she just demonstrated is that we … The answer was yellow. It's very, very common of the error that she made. We have a pre-potent or automatic response to read, to do … And you should, right? Nobody thinks this is wrong, by the way. You did exactly what's supposed to happen. That automatic response has to be inhibited to do the task, which is you have to shut down your pre-potent response to read to then say the color of the font. Will you do just a couple of more for me?

Audience: Sure.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Okay. Again, color of the font.

Audience: Blue.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Good.

Audience: Yellow.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Green. It's okay. It's okay. It's green. It's green. This last one was deliberate, in terms of using the word embarrassed. Because in addition to a standard Stroop, which is just naming the colors, there's also what's called an emotional Stroop. The idea of an emotional Stroop is again, you're naming just colors, right? So down here it's red, green, blue, blue, red. But these on the left are what are called threat words.

Now, they're matched with neutral words in terms of their frequency in the English language, the length, and there's actually 100 threat words and 100 neutral words. But the idea is, and what's been shown with this task, is that people who are anxious, maybe are higher in anxiety disorders, or we make anxious in a laboratory, take longer to get through the threat words. Why? Because those words, embarrassed, discouraged, distress, they're pulling your attention, and it's taking longer to get through the threat words than the neutral words. This is what we did after that interview.

So, the interviewers came in, gave this very sort of stoic, stony silence to the participant. They do a speech, they do a math task, they leave, and then we make them do a regular Stroop and emotional Stroop. What we care about is the time to get through threat words compared to neutral words. Those are all counterbalanced, meaning some people see neutral words first, then threat words. Some people see threat words, then neutral words. So what happened.

The people who reappraised, who were told, "Arousal is functional. This is a good thing." What they showed physiologically is a much more efficient or positive physiological response. What this measure is, is your change in cardiac output. So just from sitting there to doing a task, more oxygenated blood is being pumped out. Now, everybody's heart rate is high, sometimes 25, 30 beats per minute increases. But what's important is, their heart rate's not just high, but it's also being more efficient. In addition, and maybe blood pressure is even easier to think about, their blood pressure for people who reappraised is lower. So they didn't have as much sort of threat or anxiety if they thought about their reappraisal, or they thought about their arousal as functional. Finally, their change in vascular resistance. So again, this is the hose that's either tighten or opening up.

In the control and the ignore condition, sort of your standard stressor, you see much more tightening of the vasculature. So this is why people's hands get cold during stress. The vasculature is tightening and less blood is getting out there and your hands get cold. There's always a big joke in my lab that I'm always trying to find my students right before they have to give a talk to feel their hands, to see how cold they are. They either try to warm them up right before I get to them, or they hide from me. But the idea is that if their hands are cold, they're threatened, and they're not going to do as good a job. I'm really a supportive mentor. I swear, but it's just this thing that cold hands tend to be associated with more threat.

So what happened with the emotional Stroop? What we found is, for both the control and the ignore condition, they had more interference. What that means is, just like it was hard for her to say yellow, and she said green, instead of the font color, the people in the controlled ignore condition took much longer to get through those threat words. Words like embarrassed and distress, it was harder for them to name the font colors because those words, the meaning of those words were pulling their attention more than the neutral words. You completely eliminate that effect in reappraisal. So the idea is that they were able to inhibit this sort of feelings of vigilance and anxiety if they were told that arousal was functional.

Now, what if we take that same paradigm and we apply it to something that matters? Test taking. Now, some students have a lot of test anxiety, others have less, but there is definitely some important tests that one has to take in their life, and they sort of build it up that it determines their future, and that doesn't always play out into a sort of good success if they put too much pressure on it. So we were interested in using a reappraisal strategy to combat test anxiety.

So in this study, we brought in 60 students who were all about to take the GRE. Again, this is the general record exam that students take trying to get into PhD programs. The truth is, it probably does determine which program you get into it. They weigh it very, very heavily. So students can study for months to take this test, and they certainly sort of build up to it. So all these students that came into the lab were planning to take the GRE within three months, and they arrived to the lab and they knew that they were coming in to take a practice GRE. Here's where we manipulated reappraisal versus control.

For half the subjects, we told them about challenge. We told them about real data. So this isn't even deception. We said, "There is data from 20 years, all the way to the present, that shows that the more sympathetically activated you are," and what that means, your sympathetic nervous system, your heart rate beating faster, "The more that that activates, the better you do on exams. The better your math performance, specifically, actually." There's some evidence that it can also improve verbal scores. We told them about this, versus a control condition where we basically reiterated instructions. We didn't give them any strategies.

We obtained saliva samples right before they hear about the instructions, and then right before they take the actual exam. We measure these, the saliva samples, we look at the amount of catecholamines, and that's related to your sort of sympathetic nervous system arousal. Then they take a practice GRE, and then they return to the lab within three months after taking the actual GRE and bringing their score reports. So we get to see how they actually did.

So what these are, these first pieces of data are … This is what we extracted from the saliva, and this is a measure of the sympathetic nervous system activation. You could see that in the reappraisal condition, our students had much higher increases, and this is relative to a baseline. So they heard that arousal was functional, "Arousal is good for you," and then right before the test, they had higher arousal. More importantly, it improved their performance on the math. What you see here, these are the reappraisal, here are control subjects. We didn't tell them anything. They got a better math score on this practice GRE than the control subjects. Now, we did everything to these analysis, means we controlled for their SAT scores, we controlled for their GPA, we controlled for their major. The effect remains.

Furthermore, during the GRE, we gave them scrap pieces of paper. If in the math condition, a lot of times what you're doing in the math is you're executing, right? You're doing the mathematical formulations. The people in the reappraisal condition, who were told that arousal is functional, that the changes in their body are good, had many, many more sheets and writing on their scrap paper than the people in the control condition. It activated them, and in that activation and the execution, it increased their test scores.

What was most remarkable to us is that this effect was still observed when they took the actual GRE. They came back to the lab with their actual test scores, and you can still see, if they were in the reappraisal condition. Now we never debriefed them, meaning we didn't send them off saying, "Hey, that thing that we told you isn't true," because it was true. They went in to the actual GRE with a different mindset or orientation that then benefited their math scores as well.

When we asked them about how did they feel when they were actually taking the GRE, you also see some really nice differences between the people who heard about reappraisal and those that didn't hear anything. So, did arousal help performance? People in the reappraisal condition said, "Absolutely," much more than control. "Were you worried about feeling anxious?" Much more in control than reappraisal. "How unsure of your performance were you?" This is sort of how uncertain, you were much more unsure, uncertain in the control condition, or you were more certain in the reappraisal. So, we think this nicely showed that how we think about our stress responses can not only influence our physiology, and something like a tensional vigilance, but now in a very real world situation, they're test scores.

So now I want to move from sort of how we think about emotions, to how we assess emotions. How do we think about the emotions that we're experiencing there's actually really kind of nice and large literature on writing. We're disclosing emotions in sort of written form. This research has been going on for about the last 20 years. Jamie Pennebaker at UT Austin has written books about it. There's been meta-analysis, and what they show is that people who tend to disclose their emotions in journal style writing, tend to have better health. We sort of take this as sort of good evidence, but I think there's some important caveats. I think it's best demonstrated in this recent paper about people expressing their emotions after 9/11.

Now this study was really remarkable, because it's done by Roxy Silver, who's down at UC Irvine, and she basically has a panel of respondents from all over the US. They're already convened. Roxy Silver's interesting because she basically studies trauma after sort of important critical disasters. She is one of the psychologists waiting for something to happen so she can study how people respond. She had a panel of 14,000 respondents, who she had lots of data before 9/11 and then she continued to gather data from them immediately after. So she's able to track their mental health, their physical health, both before and after disasters occur.

What Roxy had just published a couple of years ago is some data where she looked at how mental and physical health was affected by people in her respondent panel who chose to express their emotions after 9/11 versus not. How that happened is within the week of 9/11, the respondents received an email and there was an open dialogue box that said, "If you would like to express some emotions about how you're feeling about 9/11, please do so here." Then people can either choose to write something or not.

Unlike this entire literature, that went on and on about how writing disclosure was good for you, what Roxy found is people who chose to write, and the more they wrote, predicted in now, it's two years, and then four years later, actually more distress, declines in mental health, and declines in physical health. That basically, in this, at least for her study, the expression of emotions, and also the intensity of the emotions expressed, was not associated with sort of these positive outcomes, but actually some negative outcomes. There's sort of lots of sort of speculations about why, who chooses to express. Also, this was an example of something for which you have no control, and sort of it's difficult to make meaning out of what happened.

So we were sort of inspired by this because what thinking about negative emotion does, it forces you to reflect. Sometimes reflection is good, but to the extent that it makes you ruminate and perseverate, we thought, "Actually, this could ultimately be a bad thing." So we wanted to study it in the lab. Here what we did is we wanted to look at people's responses when they were feeling one of two negative emotions. I'll tell you why we chose the negative emotions in a minute. We chose shame and anger. These are two very specific emotions that are manifested in the body very differently, anger is much more of an approach emotion. Shame is withdrawal, they have different physiological signatures. But importantly, anger tends to … Well, let me talk about shame. Shame requires some self-evaluation, some self-consciousness. To be ashamed, you have to know that somebody else saw something or knows something that you did. It's like embarrassment. In anger, you can be angry and you don't necessarily have to have self-reflection.

So we were interested in looking at how people experienced anger versus shame, combined with whether they assessed how they thought about anger versus shame. I'll explain that in a second. So we are assigning people to anger or shame, and they're either reporting on their emotions or not. Then we're measuring their cardiovascular activity and their performance. So let me tell you how we did this. So all participants are completing a very difficult math task. It's actually a couple of different math tasks.

Now, math tasks are great, because everyone does poorly. But why it's great is we can influence how they respond during the math task, this failure, by manipulating whether they blame their self and make it a shame response, right? "I'm bad at math. Gosh, I'm so terrible." And that's an internal attribution, or we can make people angry, make an external attribution. How do we do that? We make it the experimenter responsibility, that they are being incompetent, rude. They're setting these expectations, that nobody could possibly do this.

So how we do this is everyone's doing a difficult math task, and for anger, the experiment acts sort of incompetent, and right now they sing all the same words, so it's all their actions. In shame, the experimenter is pleasant, but condescending. Like, "Oh, gosh, everyone else seems to be able to do this. I'm not sure what's wrong." That's horrifying, let me tell you.

The emotion assessment manipulation is that for half of the subjects, they don't report on their emotions at all during the experiment. We ask them other things, but we never ask, "How do you feel?" With the report condition, they're constantly assessing their emotions. Do you feel angry? Do you feel ashamed? Do you feel sad? Do you feel anxious? So the question is, if I'm thinking about my emotions, does that change how I experience the emotion? Let me just show you, and we're uncertain of how loud this is going to be, if you can hear it, but I just wanted to give you a sense of the range for people who are in the anger condition versus the shame condition. So first, I'm going to show you anger. You might have to turn up the volume to hear this. No? It's not coming through. Okay. It's all right. I'll describe it. I can do this. Okay. Sorry.

So what you would have seen is in the anger condition, there's a lot of talking back. "I'm not done yet. Leave me … Gosh," and one woman rolls her eyes, mouths F' you, she really hates this experimenter. And the shame, there's tons of apologies. "I'm so sorry. I'm so bad at math. I'm so sorry." So the behavior of the shame versus anger is very, very clear. Again, we're manipulating this only with sort of like very subtle responses from the experimenter. So what happened?

Well, as we expected, with shame, no matter whether you report your emotions or not, because it's self-conscious, "I have to be, I have to know. I feel bad. I'm embarrassed. I'm sorry. I'm bad at math." The assessing versus not assessing, or reporting or not reporting emotions, doesn't change anything about the behavior, the way it's experienced in the body, or any of the outcomes. These are the physiological responses. Again, this is cardiac output and the resistance of the vasculature.

But what I highlighted and want to underscore is that when you're angry and you think about it, and you assess, you actually have a much worse response, you stay angry longer, your blood pressure is higher, your vascular resistance constricts, and you're less efficient in your heart rate. So if I ask you, "Are you angry?" And you are angry, that actually extends the process of being angry. In addition, it also hurt their performance. So, they were still angry, people are still mad. We just never asked them about it. So they didn't self-assess, and that's what you see here in the yellow bar. This is the number corrector in the math task. So they're doing much better if they're angry, but that they're not thinking about it. But when you had to report that you were angry, then you see an impairment in performance. Okay. There it's.

So the last thing that I wanted to talk about sort of in this basic part is I want to talk about some bottom-up influences. So I talked a lot about top-down, meaning how we think about the emotions, how we label the emotions, and how that influences our body and our behavior. But things can emanate from bottom-up. Here's actually a really old study about manipulating features of the face and how that influences if we think something's funny or not. So this is actually 1980 study, where they had subjects either hold a pen with their teeth, activating the zygomaticus major muscles, these are your smiling muscles, or holding the pen with your lips, which doesn't activate your zygomaticus major.

Holding the pen with your teeth and then rating cartoons, these cartoons were rated much funnier. A series of cartoons are rated funnier when you're holding a pen in your teeth. With the idea being that you've potentiated by activating these muscles, you've potentiated the feeling of funny and humor. So we were interested in sort of extending this to body position. While we were running the study, we were actually scooped by a good friend of mine in Texas, who did the same study almost, with neural activation. What he did is he had people recline or sit upright. Then they were insulted by another participant, who was a Confederate, and he measured neural activation while this was happening.

Now, what you need to know is that in anger, typically there's a shift in frontal cortical asymmetry, or the electrical activity in the brain. There's more of a shift left. In withdrawal states, there's more of a shift right. When people were reclining and insulted, they did not shift left. When they were sitting upright, they did. Another way to say that is if you are fighting with your spouse, stay laying down, because what's our propensity, right? I mean, think about, you're laying in bed with your loved one, and you get in an argument, you want to sit up, right? Because anger is this approach state. If you lay down, you're going to dampen that anger response.

So, we did the same thing. We wanted to look at that in both anger and shame, could the body position potentiate an emotion experience. So if I'm leaning forward, I'm pitched forward, will that make me angrier? Or more importantly, if I'm pitched back, will I dampen my anger response? Similarly, if I'm ashamed and I'm pitched forward, can I dampen a shame response? That's what we wanted to do.

So we brought in our subjects and we induced anger or shame in the same way that I just described. So an experimenter, he's either very pleasant but condescending, "Well, you're failing during this difficult math task," or they're incompetent and rude, and you get angry at them. The other thing we manipulated is whether we're people who were pitched back, straight up, or pitched forward. And again, we're measuring cardiovascular activity, and here's a little fun thing that we added, a response to a moral judgment question.

Now, moral decision making in psychology has grown over the last few years, barring a lot from philosophy. There's lots of little moral dilemmas that we use, but this is the one particular one that we used in this study. It's a standard lifeboat questionnaire. You're on a cruise, there's a fire on board. There's a lifeboat. You get into the lifeboat, but too many people get into the lifeboat. The whole scenario is written in the first person, and it's basically the lifeboat is going to go down, unless you get a person off this lifeboat.

You see a guy leaning over the side, we ask two questions. Is it morally acceptable to push the guy into the water, saving the lives of the remaining people? It's the only way these remaining people are going to live. And we just ask yes or no. This is a utilitarian moral judgment. And how morally acceptable is it to do this? Again, these are standard questions. They've been answered by thousands of people. I'll even tell you some sort of basic statistics on these. But we were interested in how your emotion, but also your body position, can influence these answers to these questions. Morals are always interesting to study in the context of emotion, because we think of our moral judgements as immutable. The law is blind to the emotion, but we show over and over again, tiny little changes in posture and emotion influence something that we think of as sacred as a moral judgment.

So here's what happens, and I'll just kind of give you the bottom line on these. So what happens to our body, when we're experiencing an emotion and we're either in an incongruent body position, right? Laying down when you're angry, or pitched forward when you're ashamed. What to notice here is this is during anger, this is your sympathetic activation. What you see is that when you're in the pitch back or the avoid position, you have a much lower sympathetic response. So I would say that leaning away dampens physiology associated with anger. That's the idea. If you lay down when you're angry, you're not going to be as angry.

Similarly, if you are in the shame condition and you're pitched forward, your body doesn't respond like a typical shame response. Instead, you have more this physiology that's associated with approach or challenge. So we dampen shame when you are in approach oriented position. Of course, here's what's fun. Were you more likely to say it's morally acceptable, depending on your emotion and body position? The answer is they both mattered.

When people were in the anger condition and approach, more than 70% said, "It's fine to push the guy into the water." None of the other conditions showed that effect. Now in general, like I said, tens of thousands of people have answered this lifeboat questionnaire, and something between 30% and 40% of people are likely to say, "It's morally acceptable." So this over 70%. So we basically potentiated this moral decision based on what people see as completely irrelevant to what they think their moral decisions are based on. It wasn't just anger. It was anger and the positioning.

So I had a summary in my slides, but I actually think Charles Schulz in 1960 did a better job summarizing it. Charlie Brown says, "This is my depressed stance. When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you could do is straightened up and hold your head high, because then you start feeling better. If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you got to stand like this." Nothing like getting scooped by Charles Schulz, 50 years, before you ever did the study. So that's my initial summary on this first part.

I think what we're trying to show is that both top-down and bottom-up influences can shape physiological responses associated with emotions, and can affect behavior. But as I said in the beginning, these effects can be limited. People have individual differences in interoception. Interoception is the ability to sense your internal states. There's personality factors. Some people ruminate more, some people sort of anticipate stress more. They think about it more before it happens, but also developmental factors like aging. This is where I want to switch now, talking a little bit about the lifespan and how lifespan influences these mind, body connections.

So, when we think about embodiment, and I thank Elissa for doing such a nice job, introducing how we approach research in my lab. We're thinking about how our thoughts influence our body, but also how our body influences our thoughts. And when you start piecing together, mind and body effects, you kind of hit three critical pieces of the puzzle. Interoception, which again, Bob talked about, sensing the internal states. So you guys are all sitting here. I want you just to actually close your eyes and see without using your hands if you can sense your heart beating, just for a second.

Now, I'm going to be totally honest. I can't do it. I can't feel my heartbeat. Some people are wildly good at this. I'm not going to tell you too many sex differences tonight, but I have a little bit of news for you. Women are worse than men. Men are better at this interoception. Now, in a standard study, we could do lots of things to increase your interoception. One of the things that we can do is we could give you a trace of your ECG so you could see every time your heart beats. When you start watching that feedback, I mean, this is basically what biofeedback was, and still is, does that help you sort of now sense your heart rate.

Another way that you can do it is sort of get up and we make people do jumping jacks, or run on the treadmill. Now you can feel your heartbeat a little bit more. This interoception affects our ability to report on emotions and differentiate emotions. People with very good interoception are more likely to experience differentiated emotions. So people with poor interoception, if you ask, "What's wrong?" They're more likely to say, "I just feel bad. I don't know what it is. I feel bad." But with very precise or keen interoception, they're more likely to say, "I'm really sad." Or. "I'm sad, and then I was angry." So they show more granularity in their emotion report.

Another way to think of mind and body is proprioception. Now that's the awareness of your body in space. This is, again, what Bob was talking about, what dancers are very good at. This means static or dynamically, if you close your eyes and I sort of position your arms like a clock, could you tell me precisely how your arms are positioned? Now that also can affect your experience of emotion in interesting ways. Finally, there's the intensity and the specificity of your physiological response. So some people have a very large reaction to different emotions or different features in the environment. Some people have less intense responses.

What's interesting about all of these, all of these factors, is that they decline with age. Interoception declines quite a bit. Here's the latest study, but there's lots of data supporting this, and I'll explain what this number means in a second, but that heartbeat detection task, and there's actually a whole standard protocol where you start getting your heartbeat going, you're doing jumping jacks, you get the feedback, we do all these things to get you to increase your ability to detect your heart rate. Then we start removing those features, like the visual feature, not putting your hand, can you do it? As we age, we're not as good at detecting our internal states. What this correlation means is as the older you get, the worse you are at those tasks.

Proprioception, or the awareness of your body, also declines for both static and dynamic movement. We've actually known this for a lot of years, and there's such a large literature you could do a meta-analysis, meaning you try to put all the data together. Again, that declines in older age. The last thing is this intensity and specificity of physiological responses. I'm sure all of you have been on a treadmill, or a little recumbent bike recently, and you look down. What's the first thing you're reminded of? That as you get older, for every decade, your target heart rate goes down. So this is your body has more difficulty sort of responding. We bring 18-year-old men into the lab. We get their heart rate up to 180. They respond quickly, really fast. As you age, well, for lots of reasons, you don't want to go up to 180, but it's just harder to get that kind of sharp increase, and also a sharp decline. So there's lots of flexibility. That's lost as we age.

I do want to sort of underscore now, and I'll say it a couple of times, exercisers, especially in later life, you really start seeing these effects. So they maintain their interoception. They maintain their proprioception, and they maintain more flexibility in their physiology. Their reactions to psychological stress also as we age declines.

So, take these kind of ideas of embodiment and contrast that to what's been an explosion in embodiment studies. Here's one of my favorite ones. It actually appeared in Science, by John Bargh, who's a social psychologist. What these studies did, and these are by social psychologists who always are doing something clever and subtle, they had participants come to the lab and the experimenter met them outside and they had to go up an elevator to the lab. As the experimenter and participant are in the elevator, the experimenter starts fumbling with some papers and has a drink. They say to the participant, "Could you hold this for me?" As they're fumbling. So the participant holds this drink for all the way up to the top of the elevator, and then the experimenter gets their drink back, and the subject does a couple of different things. But the target questions are, "Did you like your experimenter. At the end of the experiment, did you like them? Were they nice? Were they warm?"

If they were handed a hot cup of coffee versus a cold iced coffee, the subjects rated the experimenter as warmer. The association, the subtle association of a warm when you first meet somebody, influenced their judgements of them. That's remarkable, right? Because you have no … They were never able to sort of piece that together, that that influenced them.

In that same article. They talked about another study. This was subjects came to the lab for a consumer product test, and they opened up this envelope and there was, Icy Hot patches. In this envelope said, either activate icy or activate hot. "We want you to touch it and feel it and rate it. Is this a good product? Would you buy it? Did you like it?" Then right after that, they said, "Congratulations, you won a prize because you're our 20th subject. You can either take the prize for yourself, or you could give it to your friend. You just have to figure out and tell us which one you want to do, because there was a reason you needed the name." If they had randomly been assigned to do the hot, and felt the hot, they were more pro-social. They were more likely to give that prize to their friend than take it for themselves. With the idea being that warmth activated these pro-social tendencies.

Same author, John Bargh, who's at Yale and is without question a creative guy. He had people randomly assigned to sit in a hard firm chair or the soft cushy chair. Then they had to negotiate, in a simulated negotiation, the price of a car. People who sat in this firm chair held stronger to their price than people in the comfy chair. Now, this is all predated actually from years of embodiment studies with one of my favorites, this was probably 30 years ago, where they brought in subjects and they put headphones on the subjects. They said, "These are brand new headphones. To optimize the sound, you need to nod your head up and down when you're listening." So people sat there listening and nodding their head up and down. Or, they were told, "These are new headphones. To optimize the sound. You need to shake your head back and forth." So you have half the people nodding and half the people shaking their head.

After they listened to some music, then, over the headphones, they heard a persuasive argument. This persuasive argument was presented to students and it was all about raising tuition. Usually students don't want to raise tuition, but if they were randomly assigned to be sitting there nodding their heads, they were more likely to say, "Yes, I'm persuaded by your arguments to raise tuition." Okay.

So these are all just kind of really fun examples of how these subtle changes in our body, these bottom-up processes, can influence our judgments. But remember, I just prefaced it with all of these declines in mind body associations as we age. So we actually started a series of studies where we wanted to know, would you see embodiment effects decline in older adults, and that was sort of our first goal. Then the second goal was a little bit deeper, which is, would there be compensatory strategies? Right? If you stop relying on your body as much to make decisions, do you then look externally and use external information. That was our working hypothesis, with some important caveats, which should be that exercise protects from these effects, and that younger subjects who have similar sort of declines in mind and body because of neuropathy or nerve damage, like for example, people with type I diabetes, should show similar effects of older age. So let me tell you how we got to that.

We had been studying how stress affects cognitive performance in younger adults for years. NIA approached me about doing some of this work in older adults. So we had run a study where we brought in young and old adults, so defined young adults were 25 to 40, older adults were 65 to 80. Again, we exposed everyone to this very stressful task. It wasn't a job interview though, because that wouldn't have made sense. Instead, we asked some sort of current event questions, and that were fairly relevant. Like what do you think of the cost of prescription medication? What are your opinions on social security reform? So things that were relevant and important.

But during this interview, the same kind of interview, our evaluators either gave kind of the stony face, negative feedback, or during the conversation, the evaluators kind of loosened up and smiled and leaned forward. Now, you can imagine a stressful task when somebody's staring at you and all of a sudden they're like nodding and giving you feedback, right? You feel better, and typically that's when people get challenged. Or there was a control condition where there were no evaluators. Here what we're looking at is we're looking at this subjective experience and memory, and we're going to contrast that with some hormones that are related to age.

So we're collecting saliva samples that we're assaying for this hormone called dehydroepiandrosterone. I'll tell you a little bit about this. So DHEA is actually the most abundant hormone in your body. You have tons of it when you're 20, you hit your kind of life peak. Then for each decade you lose some more. When you hit 80, you're at about 10% of your peak DHEA. Now, you could go to GNC and buy it over the counter, it's synthetic, and here are just some fun things that I searched on Google for DHEA. Here are the images. These are the promises of the people who sell DHEA of what it'll do for you.

It promises to give you bigger muscles, lean you out, give you energy, increase your bone growth, make you more fertile, give you glowing skin. This is the most common, that it'll boost your cognitive perform. And my favorite, that it'll increase your sex drive. So you can go to GNC and get this, or you actually can try to increase it by exercising more. Also calorie restriction might increase DHEA. But we were interested in looking, and everybody differs in their levels of DHEA, so we were interested in looking at people's level of DHEA and how it may predict who's more vulnerable than others who might have higher DHEA.

So here's a quick study timeline. I just want to … So people arrive and they get a saliva baseline, and they get to rest. Then after their stress period, we tell them a story. This is a memory test. This story is something like, "Anna Thompson from South Boston was robbed $56 on her way home from work the other night. She has two kids she needs to feed. The police officers were so touched by this story that they had a donation to help her through the holidays," something like that, but basically a paragraph story with lots of some specific details. Then we ask participants to go ahead and tell us that story back, and they did. So now we get sort of initial memory. Then they get to find out that they do the stress task. They meet the evaluators, the evaluators come in, and then we manipulate negative or positive feedback during the stressful task. Then we ask about their positive and negative emotions.

So here's just some quick data. First of all, as you age, and as I told you, there's actually quite a bit of a decline in dehydroepiandrosterone, and this isn't surprising. So much lower levels of DHEA among our older subjects. I thought this was quite remarkable. There was no memory effects for the initial memory. So, we told subjects the story of Anna Thompson from South Boston, and they were able, regardless of age, to tell us the story back. So there were no initial memory effects. I'm sorry, I should have mentioned, then right after that stress task, we have a surprise memory test. That's 35 minutes after the initial one. Okay. That's what we're looking at here.

What were the memory effects after stress. What you see here, so here's our younger adults, the higher the number, the more you remembered, 35 minutes. Also remember, you have this intervening stress task. Now, not surprisingly, even for younger subjects, compared to the control condition, you remember less after a stress task. Cortisol is higher, you remember less. Cortisol directly affects the hippocampus, memory is impaired. But look at the bigger difference for our older subjects. So stress had more of an effect, and specifically the negative stress, that negative feedback, where most people are threatened, impaired memory more. But memory basically stayed just like the younger subjects in the control condition, where there was no stress, and even remarkably in this positive stress condition.

So, the takeaway there is that it was only when it was especially distressful or negative situation that we saw more of these memory declines by age. But what was most remarkable is when we looked at individuals level of DHEAS. Now, what you see here on this axis, this just means these are people with low levels of DHEA, and these are high. These are all older subjects. So this means, among people who have low DHEA anyway, because they're older, those who for their age group had much higher, were able to retain their memory. So here the negative stress did not impair their memory at the same levels of people with low levels of DHEA. So if you come in with lower levels of DHEA, then you're more vulnerable to this negative stress manipulation.

When we asked about emotions, just like Laura Carstensen, who was your first speaker, and I think did such a beautiful job kind of setting up this whole series, we found sort of the same effects she finds, which is our older subjects reported lots of positive emotions. Even after this negative feedback, they still loved it and they thought everybody was charming. So there wasn't sort of this response that they felt bad, but that seemed hard to imagine, right? Because we could look at their behavior, we could look at their risk taking, for example. We saw all these other changes, but at least at a self-report level, they didn't look like our younger subjects. Then we looked at the relationship, these correlations. Basically the more their body responded, how is that associated with what they said? Okay.

So for younger subjects, something like cortisol, a stress hormone, the higher that stress hormone, the more they said, "This is threatening." The more they self-reported that this was a stressful situation, or the more cortisol increase they had, the more negative emotions, right? Because these are all positive numbers, and that's all what a correlation means. But now look at these numbers. These are basically close to zero.

For older subjects, there was not a relationship between their body changes and what they said. Now, and this is sort of what got us thinking about, how do these relationships change over time and how does our thinking change our body? So now let's go back to our embodiment from the face. So we ran this very classic study with young and old subjects. We brought in 122 participants, young and old. The oldest one in this case was 82. We randomly assigned our young and old participants to put the pen in their teeth versus the pen in their mouth. They read and rated five cartoons on how funny they were.

Now, what we expected is that the pen in the teeth versus pen in the mouth would not have any influence on older subjects. And that's what we found. So maybe because the loss of elasticity in the face, but what you see here is for young subjects, they put the pen in their teeth and all of a sudden the cartoons are very funny, versus the pen in the mouth, no effect for older subjects.

Similarly, we ran the same proprioception experiment. We pitched older subjects forward versus back, compared them to younger subjects. And again, the prediction is that this body influence is not going to affect our older subjects. We brought in 280 participants, we exposed them to anger or shame, we had them manipulated the body position. Here's some nicer data, just showing much lower sympathetic activation. This is sort of how hard or fast the heart is beating, much lower for older subjects, but here's where it becomes interesting. So when our younger subjects are angry and in approach, they have a more efficient cardiac profile than if they're in the avoid position, but no difference for our older subjects. It didn't matter.

Similarly, with the vascular response, the tightening of the vasculature, these changes, depending on how our younger subjects were sitting, older subjects, not so much. Then we asked how do they feel? So for younger subjects, they feel much angrier when they're in the approach position than when they're in avoid position, we make them angry, older subjects, no difference. Shame. We get our younger subjects will say they're ashamed when they're in the avoidance position, that dampens in the younger position. No difference for our older subjects.

So maybe our older subjects just think this is all really silly. They're just not telling us what they really think. We measure things like risk taking. So when people are angry, they take more risks. Now there, we do see the older subjects respond with more risk when they're angry. So they take more risk, but their body position doesn't matter, right? Whether they were pitched forward, or pitched back, or sitting upright, if they were angry, they took more risks. If they were ashamed, or in another study where we made them afraid, they took less risks. So it's not that there's no effect. It's not like they're just able to say, "This is a dumb experiment. Yeah. I've had a lifetime of experience. What the hell are you guys doing?" It's that their body, in this case, wasn't providing additional information about how they should respond. So in isolation, one interpretation is that these data might be that older subjects are simply less influenced by subtle manipulations. But remember, we had a second goal.

The second goal was that if you can't rely on your body as much for information, that you would rely more on external signals. So for me in my lab, that meant, "Let's put people's feet in a foot bath." This is what we did. What we did is … Well, I don't know why it's doing that. We manipulated the appearance of a foot bath, where we put the exact same temperature of water in everybody's foot bath. So 85 degrees. But we manipulated whether the foot bath appeared to have cold water or hot water. The cold water manipulation was it had blue lights, and in the pilot study, we actually put fake ice cubes, but we ended up not putting it in, because some people didn't want to put their feet in if they saw ice cubes. So it's just blue lights. Then for some reason, my hot isn't working, but what it is is red lights. But more importantly, we had a smoke machine where it looked like steam was coming out.

So we put this foot bath in front of our participants, and we said, "We want you to put your feet in here, and then you're just going to do some consumer product ratings. Do you like the foot bath? How warm is it? How cold is it? Do you enjoy it? Are you having a good time with your feet in the foot bath?" With the prediction being that the external cues would guide the ratings of our older subjects, but these external cues would not influence the rating of our younger subjects. Okay.

So we brought in 127 subjects to do this. They randomly assigned a test, either the hot or cold foot bath. Foot bath's always 85 degrees. While their feet are in the foot bath, they evaluated it for how comfortable it is or warm. So here's just some of the data. Now, this is a huge effect. Meaning the effect is wildly large. If our older subjects just saw and put their feet in a foot bath that had red lights and what looked like steam, they said it was much warmer. They also said it was more comfortable and that they enjoyed it more. But if the lights were blue, they thought it was colder. If anything, our younger subjects saw a flip. And I think it's because they expected, the hot, it should be hot. And then they put their feet in, it's not as hot as they expected. But again, this is a rather large effect. The external cues drove the decisions, but they weren't relying on the information from their body.

My last study that I'll talk about uses some false information to fool people into thinking they're having more of a physiological response, and it uses what's called a false heart rate paradigm. In this study, we show participants, these kind of interesting landscape pictures. All subjects have an ECG sensor on them. So we're measuring their heart rate. While they're rating these pictures, and how they rate these pictures, they have the slide box. If they like the picture, they move the slide box over. If they don't like the picture, they move it to the left. So they're looking at pictures and they're rating how much they like it versus not, and everybody's hearing sounds. But for half the subjects, we say, "The sounds that you're hearing is your heart rate." So you can hear your heart rate as you're rating these pictures.

For the other people, we're saying, "Those sounds are just to drown out the noise. Just ignore those sounds." If you think it's your heart rate, what we did is we speed up that noise. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, as you're looking at three target random pictures. Okay. Everybody, so this has been used before, if they think that's their heart rate, they use that information to say that they'd like the picture more. Okay? We predicted that older subjects especially would be influenced by that noise. That's what you see. When you just think that boom, boom, boom is noise and not your heart rate, you don't like the pictures that have the speed up noise, more than other pictures. But if you think that's your heart rate, you like the pictures more if you're younger, but look at that huge increase if you're older.

Now you're using that information, "This must mean I really like the picture," with the idea that it's hard to sort of judge your own changes and it's easier to be influenced by these external signals. So I wanted just to mention the caveats before we end. I mentioned that almost all these effects disappear when we look at exercise. Exercise doesn't have to be dramatic. Exercise could just be people who walk almost every day, but you don't see nearly these effects. I mean, especially the foot bath. Foot bath, if you just look at the older subjects who exercise, we don't see these same kind of huge effects. So even moderate exercise can really sort of help blunt these effects of loss of embodiment.

Younger subjects, interestingly, when they report more somatization, so tingling arms or tingling hands and feet, numbness in their periphery, they basically look like 70-year-olds. So it's not so much an age effect, but what happens to our bodies, whether, for some people it's because they have type I diabetes, or they lose nerve damage, or they stop exercising. But it seems to be an effect that's more associated with the changes in the body that can occur with age.

With that, I will close and then take your questions. A couple of people asked me over the weeks to give you the information. Now this is in your packet of all the speakers who you heard from, and their lab contacts, if any of you are interested in participating in anything. With that, I thank you for your attention.

I was going to go a different way. That's a good question. Where I was going to go is there are some advantages of a threat state compared to a challenge state with things like … So if participants are threatened, they're quicker at seeing an angry face in a crowd of positive faces. But your question was a little bit different. So can positive feedback actually distract you from your task? We don't see that. I mean, typically people do have a more positive response and things like decision making tends to be improved with positive feedback, but it's a good point. Yeah.

So the question was when the students came back to the lab within three months with the actual GRE scores, do we interview them and see what they had actually remembered and gleaned? And we did. In some of it, you saw the data because we asked how do they remember it? It was interesting though, because some students say … Because then we really debriefed them. At the very, very end, we said, "What we were doing in this study," because part of what science is supposed to do is educating people too, we said, "There was this control condition where we didn't say anything, and a reappraisal condition, that's the condition you were in, if that were the case." Lots of students said, "I didn't remember that." But they would then still … Yeah, this is what my life was like as a professor. "You said that? I don't remember that. I didn't remember that you said that," or the control people.

So one of the things that we did is we said, we told people, either we just reiterated the instructions, or we told them about reappraisal. "Do you remember which condition you were in?" Sometimes they would say the wrong one. So it's not so much a head-scratcher because that is what a … Students and subjects sometimes don't remember the details, but we think that's part of sort of the insidious nature of some of this information, is that it then just becomes part of how you see the world and not so much. If we said, "Look, we think this is going to improve your GRE scores." Could that have backfired? A lot of time in social psychology, these very subtle manipulations, you need to be very careful, because if people know or sort of aware, they're not as effective. Yeah.

I'll respond to both. So the first comment/question is the extent to which those GRE results still persisted after three months, which I agree is remarkable, and why, and how did that happen? I'll mention there is a recent science paper that showed a 30-minute brief belongingness intervention, which basically brought minority students into a lab, and right when they were freshmen, and sort of talked about how the university cares about minority students, four years later, predicted GPA. So that brief belonging versus a control condition where they just came in and kind of learned about the history, predicted better grades all the way through college and even through four years. It appeared in Science by Greg Walton, who's also a professor at Stanford.

Now, I just saw Greg on Monday. Why do these little interventions, because we do huge interventions in the lab and we can't move anything around, right? It's crazy. And these brief ones do. And I think it goes back to that question that I was responding to a little bit. When something's more subtle, why is that sticky? People resist when they feel like they're being persuaded, but these subtle manipulations seem to have these longer-lasting effects. And we think it's because they're just stickier. People don't resist them. It's not that you're telling me to do this, so I really did feel like this. The extent to which those brief belonging interventions shaped how they perceived all the information from the university, that's sort of the idea. Did they see the university as just more inclusive every time they went to an introductory class? I mean, is that how it's doing it? I think it's a really good question, and we're not 100% sure of how we're going to nail down that mechanism. Then the second question was-

Audience: Kitty and the [inaudible 01:23:44].

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Kitty, yeah, yeah, which is a great question. The question is, do either these classic findings of sort of this bystander intervention effect that people are less likely to intervene if they think more people are going to? And with age, do you actually see a reverse sort of personal responsibility? I don't know anybody who does that. Morgan, I think it's a great question. I can actually imagine coming up with a reasonable theory to test of why you would expect age to be associated with more personal responsibility, and not the expectation that somebody else is going to come and help. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. So the question is how are we able with this, telling them to think about their physiology.

Audience: I just [inaudible 01:24:33], because you got it for the second time. I'm curious.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Yeah, and that study's been replicated. What we think is happening, so we're telling people that arousal is good for you. What we think we're doing is we're sort of allowing them and liberating sort of this response that you then don't want to shut down. If you were just told that that arousal's good for you, then when you start feeling your heartbeat, you're not going to do the strategies that one can do to lower their heart rate. You're going to just let that sort of feel comfortable in it. That's why we think we're getting larger sympathetic activation when we tell people, "Look, this is a good response," that then people aren't trying to downregulate. As you saw from Bob's talk, people can downregulate their responses, and we think that's what people might naturally do if they think those responses are going to hurt them. We think we're basically liberating them from that constraint.

Audience: Can I ask you one really quick 9/11?

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Yeah.

Audience: That instance. You were saying that people who wanted to articulate early on, react sooner, it was predicted in the future that they would, in a sense, be having more problematic responses. What are you thinking about that result?

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Yeah, the question was on the results of 9/11 from Roxy Silver's study, if people initially responded and then responded a lot, why is that predictive of later problems? I think she did a very nice job sort of speculating on why that was. I mean, what is it doing? It's kind of picking up sort of early signs of distress. Maybe, and it wasn't my project, I read the paper, but I also read that and thought, I wondered to the extent that I didn't need to respond to this respondent panel. I wanted to go talk to my family about it. I mean, maybe it was too anonymous, and maybe what that was getting at the people who didn't have the social networks to then go talk about it.

So I think to the extent that, and then again, the more people wrote, the worse health outcomes they had. So somebody writing this big diary on the internet, rather than going and talking about it with a loved one, and is that more likely to pick up people who might be lonely, or don't have somebody to talk about? So I think there are other reasons.

Audience: There are lots of possibilities.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Lots of possibilities, but what was important about it is that it wasn't just expression is good. Right? Sometimes expression could mean that it's diagnostic of other sort of limitations.

Elissa S. Epel: I think we're out of time.

Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes: Okay. With that, thank you all so much. I hope you have wonderful holidays, and you were a great audience.