On Aug 29, 2008, at 10:13 AM, Peter wrote:
Very interesting find, Vaj. BPD patients can be emotionally
draining to work with. Its as if they are emotionally stuck a 3
years of age in interpersonal relationships.
What was always fascinating to me was how "stuck" someone could be in
black-white thinking and how once one fell into the "black" or
negatively perceived side of the BPD persons perception, they were
automatically devalued and distrusted, often completely missing the
gut feeling that would "fill in" the "gray" area that makes up most
of human experience. Couple that with the fact that the emotional
areas of the brain regulate, indeed often override the brains
intellectual circuitry by emotionally appealing to perceived
fairness. Thus one who has damage to the ant. insula is stuck relying
on mere intellect and can't tie into their innate moral reasoning,
thus it becomes "yes" or "no", black or white. A sense of moral
disgust forces one into what they believe is a moral necessity while
blocking out overriding emotional appeals that fill in the
counterbalancing and perspective-giving "gray" (or color).
Here's another interesting study on this phenomenon:
Are humans hardwired for fairness?
Is fairness simply a ruse, something we adopt only when we secretly
see an
advantage in it for ourselves" Many psychologists have in recent
years moved
away from this purely utilitarian view, dismissing it as too
simplistic. Recent
advances in both cognitive science and neuroscience now allow
psychologists to
approach this question in some different ways, and they are getting some
intriguing results.
UCLA psychologist Golnaz Tabibnia, and colleagues Ajay Satpute and
Matthew
Lieberman, used a psychological test called the "ultimatum game" to
explore
fairness and self-interest in the laboratory. In this particular
version of the
test, Person A has a pot of money, say $23, which they can divide in
any way
they want with Person B. All Person B can do is look at the offer and
accept or
reject it; there is no negotiation. If Person B rejects the offer,
neither of
them gets any money.
Whatever Person A offers to Person B is an unearned windfall, even if
it's a
miserly $5 out of $23, so a strict utilitarian would take the money
and run. But
that's not exactly what happens in the laboratory. The UCLA
scientists ran the
experiment so sometimes $5 was stingy and other times fair, say $5
out of a
total stake of $10. The idea was to make sure the subjects were
responding to
the fairness of the offer, not to the amount of the windfall.
When they did this, and asked the subjects to rate themselves on
scales of
happiness and contempt, they had some interesting findings: Even when
they stood
to gain exactly the same dollar amount of free money, the subjects
were much
happier with the fair offers and much more disdainful of deals that were
lopsided and self-centered.
The psychologists wanted to know if there is something inherently
rewarding
about being treated decently. So, they scanned several parts of the
participants' brains while they were in the act of weighing both fair
and
miserly offers. Consistent with previous results, the researchers
found that a
region previously associated with negative emotions such as moral
disgust (the
anterior insula) was activated during unfair treatment. However,
interestingly,
they also found that regions associated with reward (including the
ventral
striatum) were activated during fair treatment even though there was no
additional money to be gained.
As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science,
a journal
of the Association for Psychological Science, the brain finds self-
serving
behavior emotionally unpleasant, but a different bundle of neurons
also finds
genuine fairness uplifting. What's more, these emotional firings
occur in brain
structures that are fast and automatic, so it appears that the
emotional brain
is overruling the more deliberate, rational mind. Faced with a
conflict, the
brain's default position is to demand a fair deal.
Furthermore, when the scientists scanned the brains of those who were
"swallowing their pride" for the sake of cash, the brain showed a
distinctive
pattern of neuronal activity. It appears that the unconscious mind can
temporarily damp down the brain's contempt response, in effect
allowing the
rational, utilitarian brain to rule, at least momentarily.
Source: Association for Psychological Science
