get balanced

Why do people keep happiness away (and to the left) from them?
Or do they?

In the latest issue of Neuropsychology, a group led by my boss's mentor Kenneth Heilman reported an emotional influence on spatial attention. Essentially, this is a topic that has interested me since I learned the mutually inhibitory interaction between left and right cerebral hemispheres, and inhibitory regulation from anterior toward posterior brain areas. You know, our brain likes balance, and left right anterior posterior all work together to keep the balance. Om.

Basically, the right hemisphere (RH) is associated with attentional allocation in the left hemispace in the world relative to the viewer. That is, you allocate or orient or place or shed attention (whatever verbs that you like to play around for the metaphor) toward your left side of your body via functional networks in your right brain. Conversely, the left hemisphere (LH) is associated with attentional allocation in the right hemispace.

Kenneth Heilman and other researchers have also found that not only left and right but also proximal and distal space are differently associated with different cerebral hemispheres. Overall, studies have agreed that RH has a distal, left attentional bias, and that LH has a proximal, right bias.
And this spatial attention orienting network is more on the posterior part, than the anterior part, of the brain.

I know less about emotion and never officially did formal research on it but always like to read about it. And somehow most job seekers gave talks on emotion when I was a graduate student in Penn State. And somehow I liked to attend to job talks. I am always supportive to job talks. Job seekers are young researchers who are nervous and want attention and are afraid that no one else in the world cares about what they are doing.

What I have learned from the job talks, which were professional and full of up-to-date scientific knowledge, is that positive emotions are associated with LH and negative emotions are associated with RH. For example, a happy scene activates more frontal areas in LH than in RH. Frontal areas are anterior regions of the brain.

Therefore, it is like that there are two seesaws in the brain. One in the anterior part, and the other one in the posterior part. RH and LH are the players on the seesaws. And keep in mind that anterior inhibits posterior.

OK, let's play. Just play with the logic, nothing psychology or neuroscience. Ready?

If RH anterior is more activated, RH posterior will be inhibited more. And at the same time, because RH anterior is more activated (more weight on the seesaw), LH anterior will be less activated. The result of a less-activated LH anterior is a less-inhibited LH posterior. Also the result of a more-inhibited RH posterior (less weight on the seesaw) is a more-activated LH posterior. In summary, if RH anterior is more activated than LH anterior, LH posterior will be more activated than RH posterior.
Fun?
Let's add emotion and attention in.

The research team that I mentioned above (Foster et al., 2008) hypothesized that activating emotionally associated RH anterior would result in more activated LH posterior which would result in an attentional bias toward the right and proximal side of the body. And activating emotionally associated LH anterior would result in more activated RH posterior which would show an attentional bias toward the left and distal side of the body.

They found that positive emotional words (happy, joyful, and surprised) labeled on pegs were placed more toward the left distal part, and negative emotional labels (scared, sad, disgusted) were placed quite at the center of the space.
In short, their results partially support their hypothesis.

I have some critics but I am not going to bore you with my professional opinions and abstract jargons in my interesting blog.
Let's focus on their positive finding: positive emotional words were placed on the left side and distant from the body. For people who do not read the whole paper or understand a bit about this particular research field, the result sounds amazing and puzzling.

But 1 centimeter to the left and 31 centimeters away from the body (= 1 centimeter away from the center) are not "distal" to me.
The theoretical model sounds very cool but the result, even the positive result, is not practical.

This is what I mean by a gap between scientists and lay people.
Emotion and attention are used so commonly in daily conversation, but are narrowly defined in experimental psychology (so that we can experiment on them). And the data we present are averaged numbers. For example, the 1 centimeter difference was an average from 138 people who did the task. However, it is very likely that a lay person just comes across the title of the report and is surprised by the advance of science and quickly interprets that "Oh, emotion influences how we pay attention!"

I am not against the report title. I don't belittle the significance of their findings. I am just considering what a lay person may react to a journal article. Not just job seekers but all scientists who publish articles want to be acknowledged with what they are doing.

What are we doing?
Is positive emotion keeping our attention distant from us? You know, the so-called spatial bias. Do we see the word "happy" and feel happy and put it a bit away from us?

There is a word "philosophy" in my degree, and I consistently think why this word is on my diploma. Now I kinda understand.
As a postdoc, uncertain about the career future, insecure about the financial present and future, I meditate more and more and think about why we place "happy" a bit further. We are optimistic. We believe happiness is further and as long as we keep reaching and reaching (it needs some distance to reach), we will touch it.

If all 138 participants in the study were postdocs, "happy" might have been placed 30 centimeters farther (the peg board was 61 x 61 centimeter square). Since the participants were all actually undergrads, they did not keep happy too far and still easy to touch--no sweat for simply lifting a finger for a 1-centimeter distance.

Emotion influences everything, not just attention. I personally appreciate the work done by the Heilman group. I wish I was one of the authors.
What influences emotion? The weather, definitely.
So if the weather is cold (as cold as 10F like today), I'll have some negative emotions, and my spatial attention will bias toward the right proximal side. Uh.... so?
So I should put a cup of hot chocolate close to my right hand.
After having the hot chocolate, I'll feel happy and my brain will be balanced.

Let me do a hot chocolate now. Isn't science great?