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New research suggests diverse forms of music tend to trigger different autobiographical memories.
Investigators discovered happy memories spring to mind much faster than sad, scary or peaceful ones. Moreover, listening to happy or peaceful music is associated with the recall of positive memories.
However, if you listen to emotionally scary or sad music, you may recall largely negative memories from your past.
Those are two of the findings from an experiment in which study participants accessed autobiographical memories after listening to unknown pieces of music varying in intensity or emotional content.
The study was led by Dr. Signy Sheldon and Julia Donahue, B.A., of McGill University in Canada, and appears in the journal Memory & Cognition.
The experiment tested how musical retrieval cues that differ on two dimensions of emotion — valence (positive and negative) and arousal (high and low) — influence the way that people recall autobiographical memories.
A total of 48 participants had 30 seconds to listen to 32 newly composed piano pieces not known to them. The pieces were grouped into four retrieval cues of music: happy (positive, high arousal), peaceful (positive, low arousal), scary (negative, high arousal) and sad (negative, low arousal).
Participants had to recall events in which they were personally involved, that were specific in place and time, and that lasted less than a day.
As soon as a memory came to mind, participants pressed a computer key and typed in their accessed memory.
Researchers documented how long it took participants to access a memory, how vivid it was, and the emotions associated with it. The type of event coming to mind was also considered, and whether for instance it was quite unique or connected with an energetic or social setting.
Memories were found to be accessed most quickly based on musical cues that were highly arousing and positive in emotion, and could therefore be classified as happy.
A relationship between the type of musical cue and whether it triggered the remembrance of a positive or a negative memory was also noted. The nature of the event recalled was influenced by whether the cue was positive or negative and whether it was high or low in arousal.
“High cue arousal led to lower memory vividness and uniqueness ratings, but both high arousal and positive cues were associated with memories rated as more social and energetic,” explains Sheldon.
During the experiment, the piano pieces were played to one half of the participants in no particular order, while for the rest the music was grouped together based on whether these were peaceful, happy, sad or scary pieces.
This led to the finding that the way in which cues are presented influences how quickly and specifically memories are accessed. Cue valence also affects the vividness of a memory.
More specifically, the researchers found that a greater proportion of clear memories were recalled when highly arousing positive cues were played in a blocked fashion.
Positive cues also elicited more vivid memories than negative cues. In the randomized condition, negative cues were associated more vividly than positive cues.
“It is possible that when cues were presented in a random fashion, the emotional content of the cue directed retrieval to a similar memory via shared emotional information,” said Donahue.
Source: Springer
There are many types of yoga, of course — from the more aerobic power yoga to a meditative gentle yoga. Hatha yoga, the most studied, combines physical postures (asanas) and controlled breathing with short periods of deep relaxation. I have found the most benefit from Bikram yoga, or hot yoga, a sequence of 26 Hatha yoga positions and two breathing exercises designed by Bikram Choudhury to engage and heal all of the systems of your body.
According to Sara Curry, Bikram yoga instructor and creator of the Sober Yogis program in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, medical miracles can happen when a person commits to a regular practice. In her TEDx talk, she tells the story of David, one of her yoga students who had a pacemaker surgically implanted in his chest. Six weeks after surgery, he began to practice with her six days a week. After only four weeks of yoga, David returned for a checkup with his cardiologist, and the doctor took him off three of his six medications and cut the remaining dosage of the other three in half.
“Our bodies can recover from tremendous amounts of trauma and chronic abuse,” Curry explains in her talk.
Curry and a team of counselors work with addicts on using Bikram yoga, group therapy, and meditation to help them stay clean. According to her exploratory study, hot yoga appears to decrease the length and intensity of symptoms of post-acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS). These protracted withdrawal symptoms that include depression, anxiety, irritability, and sleeplessness can last up to two years after a person gets clean, and are the primary reason for relapse. Participants reported significant reductions in PAWS symptoms that negatively correlated to the number of classes taken a week.
I’m fascinated by the science of yoga — what specifically is happening in our bodies that makes these changes in us. Why is yoga more beneficial in relieving depression and anxiety, and controlling addiction, than, say, CrossFit? What about hot yoga, in particular, is so transforming?
“Ninety-five percent of all disease is a result of nutritional deficiency or toxicity,” explains Steven J. Saltzman, MD, an anesthesiologist with an interest in integrative medicine who practices Bikram yoga himself, in a question-and-answer session about the medical benefits of hot yoga that I recently attended. Most of our toxins are stored in fat cells just beneath the skin, so we release them by sweating the way we do in a 105-degree room.
Yoga redistributes blood flow, increasing oxygen delivery and improving the circulatory system. All of the postures in the Bikram sequence work to increase the flow of fresh, oxygenated blood to every part of the body. Bikram calls it extension and compression. In all of the postures, we are creating a tourniquet effect — cutting off the blood supply to different organs and glands. Then, after 20 seconds holding the posture, the blood’s volume and pressure have reached maximum capacity and the newly oxygenated blood rushes in and floods our system. According to Bikram, “no other form of exercise can create this volume and force.” Until listening to Dr. Saltzman, I was unaware that the recovery phase of yoga or any interval training program is as important as the maximum performance phase. The built-in Savasana in yoga trains and establishes our heart-rate variability, a predictor of heart health and of general health.
Learning how to breathe is a critical component of the yoga practice. If we stay on our mat and don’t lift a leg, but can maintain calm, stable breathing in the hot room, we are still receiving medical benefits from the class, a yoga teacher told me recently. Why is the breathing so important?
“By voluntarily changing the rate, depth, and pattern of breathing, we can change the messages being sent from the body’s respiratory system to the brain,” explain Richard P. Brown, MD, and Patricia L. Gerbarg, MD, in their book, The Healing Power of the Breath. “In this way, breathing techniques provide a portal to the autonomic communication network through which we can, by changing our breathing patterns, send specific messages to the brain using the language of the body — a language the brain understands and to which it responds.”
Bikram designed a breathing exercise, pranayama, to introduce each class because he believes that “improving the function of the lungs is almost always the first repair that needs doing.” Properly functioning lungs send fresh oxygen throughout the body, purifying our blood.
Unlike some aerobic activity that increases cortisol levels, yoga tames the stress response by priming the parasympathetic nervous system. “It is established science that yoga destroys and metabolizes stress hormones,” explains Dr. Saltzman There is a meditative element of yoga that promotes mindfulness (helping us to stay in the present moment) that is effective therapy for depression and anxiety. Yoga moderates our stress response systems which, in turn, decreases physiological arousal — like reducing heart rate and lowering blood pressure. As mentioned above, yoga also increases heart rate variability, which can be an indicator of the body’s ability to respond to stress and an overall gauge for emotional resilience.
“The yoga community is one of the most supportive communities of compassionate individuals you’ll ever meet,” explains Sara in her TEDx talk. “We all struggle, thrive, fail, and persevere on the mat together. That’s how to learn what we say in yoga, Namaste, ‘the light within me acknowledges the light within you.’”
I have found this to be the case with my own group of yogis. There is a group of us that show up at 9 a.m. almost every day to fight together. Many of us are battling some kind of chronic illness, and all of us are trying to clear the mental clutter from our brains to make room for more positive and peaceful emotions. It’s extraordinarily encouraging to me to have them beside me as I meet my demons on the mat.
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Originally posted on Sanity Break at Everyday Health.
If you look at the research literature on self-serving biases, it’s little surprise that critical thinking – much needed in today’s world – is such a challenge. Consider three human biases that you may already have heard of: most of us think we’re better than average at most things (also known as illusory superiority or the Lake Wobegon Effect); we’re also prone to “confirmation bias”, which is favouring evidence that supports our existing views; and we’re also susceptible to the “endowment effect” which describes the extra value we place on things, just as soon as they are ours.
A new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology by Aiden Gregg and his colleagues at the University of Southampton extends the list of known biases by documenting a new one that combines elements of the better-than-average effect, confirmation bias and the endowment effect. Gregg’s team have shown that simply asking participants to imagine that a theory is their own biases them to believe in the truth of that theory – a phenomenon that the researchers have called the Spontaneous Preference For Own Theories (SPOT) Effect.
Across three studies, the researchers asked hundreds of participants to imagine a fictional planet in a distant solar system, inhabited by various creatures some of which are predators and others prey. Focusing on two of the creatures on the planet – Niffites and Luppites – the participants were either told to imagine that they (that is, the participant himself or herself) had a theory that the Niffites were the predators and the Luppites were their prey, or that somebody called Alex had this theory. This background scenarios was chosen to be neutral and unconnected to existing beliefs, and the hypothetical “ownership” of the theory by some of the participants was intended to be as superficial and inconsequential as possible.
Next, the researchers presented the participants with a series of seven facts relevant to the theory. The first few were mildly supportive of the theory (e.g. Niffites are bigger), but the last few provided strong evidence against (e.g. Luppites have been observed eating the dead bodies of Niffites). After each piece of evidence, the participants were asked to rate how likely it was that the theory was true or not.
The way the participants interpreted the theory in the light of the evidence was influenced by the simple fact of whether they’d been asked to imagine the theory was theirs or someone else’s. When it was their own theory, they more stubbornly persisted in believing in its truth, even in the face of increasing counter-evidence.
This spontaneous bias toward one’s own theory was found across the studies: when different names were used for the creatures (Dassites and Fommites); whether testing happened online or in groups in a lecture room; regardless of age and gender; and also when an additional control condition stated that the theory was no one’s in particular, as opposed to being Alex’s. The last detail helps clarify that the bias is in favour of one’s own theory rather than against someone else’s. Surprisingly perhaps, the bias wasn’t found to be stronger in participants who scored higher for other forms of self-serving bias such as narcissism or claiming to be familiar with non-existent words.
In statistical terms, the size of the bias that participants showed toward their “own” theory was modest, meaning that the practical implications of these new findings are probably limited (though the basic principle – that we’re biased towards our own theories – certainly seems relevant to understanding the wrangles over facts and truth going on in the media these days). Gregg and his colleagues said that the more important point was the theoretical implications of their results. The fact it was so easy to induce this bias in the participants, even based on such minimal personal connection to the theory, “only underlines how exquisitely sensitive to self-enhancing biases the human mind actually is,” they said.
—The SPOT effect: People spontaneously prefer their own theories
Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest
Eating disorders are very complex conditions that can affect someone emotionally, physically and socially. Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses; anorexia, binge-eating disorder and bulimia. In the UK, more than 700,000 people are affected by an eating disorder.
Developing an abnormal attitude towards food typically leads people to make unhealthy choices, which can have devastating consequences. The symptoms can affect everyday life and, in extreme cases, can also be life-threatening. Eating disorders can be extremely distressing, not only for the person consumed by the disorder but also for their friends and family.
Often, sufferers of eating disorders will fail to recognise that they have a problem, making it difficult to receive support. This makes it especially important for loved ones to encourage the sufferer to talk about their eating and to seek professional help.
If you have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, your doctor will recommend treatments tailored to your individual needs.
Once an eating disorder has been diagnosed, treatment can begin. Treatments tend to involve monitoring the sufferer’s physical health while helping them deal with the psychological aspects. For many, a multi-pronged approach is best when treating eating disorders, which means trying a variety of therapies. So, alongside talking therapies and medical support, you may benefit from other forms of therapy, such as hypnotherapy.
How can hypnotherapy aid recovery from an eating disorder?
Hypnotherapy aims to use the power of suggestion to change habits and thoughts surrounding certain things. For example, hypnotherapy for eating disorders would look to facilitate a change in thinking when it comes to eating.
Regression techniques can be useful for recovery, by helping to understand the root cause of eating disorders. These tap into your subconscious to reveal an event or situation that may have contributed to the development of your eating disorder.
Hypnotherapy for eating disorders may also involve Neuro Linguistic programming (NLP). This can be used in various ways. One way may be to help you remember how you coped with distressing emotions before you developed an eating disorder.
Using positive suggestions under hypnosis can help you change the way you think about yourself – addressing issues like low self-esteem and low self-confidence and teaching you techniques to help you cope with unhelpful thinking. Learning to love yourself again is an important part of the recovery process. You can also learn new ways of thinking about eating, gradually improving your relationship with food. This can be especially beneficial to ensure you stay healthy after recovery.
If you think you’re at risk of relapsing, be sure to seek support. Recovering from an eating disorder can be a long process, but there are professionals available to support your continued recovery.
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