Don't Let the Small Stuff Get You Down
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Photo by Arun Thomas from Pexels
A new study led by University of Miami psychologists suggests that the longer negativity lingers in your brain, the unhappier you may be.
Suppose you drop your morning coffee and it splatters everywhere. Later a colleague drops by to say hello. Do you grumble a testy acknowledgment, or cheerfully greet her?
In a new study on brain activity led by University of Miami psychologists, researchers found that how a person’s brain evaluates fleeting negative stimuli—such as that dropped cup—may influence their long-term psychological well-being.
“One way to think about it is the longer your brain holds on to a negative event, or stimuli, the unhappier you report being,” said Nikki Puccetti, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the study published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience. “Basically, we found that the persistence of a person’s brain in holding on to a negative stimulus is what predicts more negative and less positive daily emotional experiences. That in turn predicts how well they think they’re doing in their life.”
“The majority of human neuroscience research looks at how intensely the brain reacts to negative stimuli, not how long the brain holds on to a stimulus,’’ said Aaron Heller, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychology. “We looked at the spillover—how the emotional coloring of an event spills over to other things that happen. Understanding the biological mechanisms of that is critically important to understanding the differences in brain function, daily emotions, and well-being,” he added.
For their study, the researchers set out to learn how different reactions in the brain to emotional pictures relate to momentary emotional experiences in daily life and even psychological well-being over time. They hypothesized that the amygdala, the almond-shaped structure on both sides of the cerebrum that evaluates stimuli and supports emotion and memory, played an important role.
They confirmed their suspicions by analyzing data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, one of the richest and most unique longitudinal studies on the health and well-being of thousands of adults as they age. Initiated by the National Institute on Aging in 1995, the study continued in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Heller earned his Ph.D.
