Voices Lindquist ===  Kristen Lindquist : [00:00:00] *lot of modern people assume the brain evolved for thinking, right?* *Like, all of the beautiful thoughts that humans have created over the years. And I would argue that those beautiful thoughts and those maybe uniquely human pieces of art are a nice byproduct of a brain that didn't evolve for that purpose at all. The brain evolved initially to keep the body functioning in an efficient manner.* Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among [00:01:00] many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: Kristen Lindquist is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Chair in Social Psychology at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her research seeks to understand the psychological and neural basis of emotions, moods, feelings, and ultimately health and wellness. Her ongoing work uses tools from social cognition, physiology, neuroscience, and big data methods to examine how emotions emerge from the confluence of the body, the brain, and cultural learning. Dr. Lindquist, welcome to Voices.  Kristen Lindquist : Thank you so much for having me. David Staley: And I think I'm going to start with a very simple question. You study emotions, so what do you or what do we mean by emotion?  Kristen Lindquist : Yeah. David Staley: Simple question.  Kristen Lindquist : Not so simple- ... as it turns out. well, it depends on who you're asking. David Staley: Okay.  Kristen Lindquist : if you ask an everyday person, they might tell you that emotions are deceptively simple, right? They are the feelings that we have [00:02:00] when events in the world trigger them. We see a snake in the path, and our fear center activates and sort of unleashes this evolutionarily, prepackaged set of behaviors and feelings that helps us to navigate the world. And my research for the past 20 years or so has been trying to unpack this sort of common sense answer and see if it really holds up. And the answer is that it, it may not from the perspective of the brain. Certainly humans have their sort of culturally scripted answers to that question. And so in the Western world, yeah, we do experience emotions that way, but that doesn't mean that's how our brain creates them. David Staley: Culturally scripted. Say a little more about what that might mean here.  Kristen Lindquist : Everybody lives in a particular culture, right? And you can define that in lots of different ways. You and I are sitting in Ohio in the United States, right, in a Western industrialized nation. And there's lots of other micro cultures that we could talk about, right? [00:03:00] But by and large, in these Western industrialized contexts, we describe emotions that way, as these feelings that we have, these things that are triggered, and once they unfold sort of almost force us into these behaviors in this very instinctual sort of way. And that's,a common narrative. It's a common definition. David Staley: The implication is we don't control them.  Kristen Lindquist : Yes, exactly. David Staley: I wanna come back to the question of cultures- 'cause I think this has particular interest for me as an historian, but I know that one of the conclusions you've reached in your research is that, as an individual, I don't feel the same way about certain emotions every time I experience them. You've worked specifically on anxiety, right? Say a little more about your findings here.  Kristen Lindquist : Yeah. So, what we have explored is how it is that the brain is creating emotions in people and the sort of common hypothesis for really much of the last century was that there's a [00:04:00] center in the brain that creates something like fear and anxiety and it is- David Staley: The amygdala or something like that.  Kristen Lindquist : Yes. Exactly. Right? Yeah. The amygdala. Yep. This little tiny nucleus inside, the medial temporal lobe of the brain which is kind of behind your ear and, when you see something that triggers that emotion, the emotion unfolds because the amygdala is activated and something like an anxiety disorder would be a product of having a faulty amygdala, right? And so we started by asking the question, well, does the amygdala sort of uniquely produce fear, right? So if it is the fear center, then it should be consistently activated when people experience fear and it should be specific to fear and not do other things, logically. And so we did a bunch of research where we summarized all of the existing neuroimaging literature on emotion. So this is research where you stick people in a brain scanner, [00:05:00] and you see where there's blood flow happening while they experience certain emotions. And we asked across hundreds of studies, is the amygdala consistently activated when people are experiencing fear? And is the amygdala not doing other stuff? And the answer is not really, and no, it's doing lots of other stuff. So* this really moved us towards a different approach to understanding how it is that the brain creates emotion, because we were finding actually not only is the amygdala not consistent and not specific to fear, but when people are experiencing fear or anxiety, there's lots of brain regions activated really across the whole brain, including brain regions that we never historically thought of as emotional*- So brain regions that we know are involved in memory and language and, really complex abstract processing that the traditional theory said should have nothing to do with emotion whatsoever. David Staley: What are those [00:06:00] other regions, contributing to what I'm feeling?  Kristen Lindquist : As we dug deeper, we have discovered that some of these other regions that are really representing sort of abstract knowledge, are helping to predict and then enact the emotion that somebody experiences. And this has led us down a path where we've examined how it is that people's language that they speak, their culture, their personal histories are seeding the emotions that they experience. And what newer research on the neurobiology has shown is that actually these brain regions involved in these sort of abstract, very complex, almost you would say cognitive functions- really are causal in creating the emotions. So it's not like they're sort of happening after the fact, after your primitive amygdala is firing. They're happening before the [00:07:00] amygdala is firing. So all of this knowledge and language is part and parcel of the emotion, which really sort of changes how it is that we think about what emotions are. David Staley: So I was attacked by a dog- Mm-hmm ... as a kid. That influences the way I see a sneering dog or something like that. It has nothing to do with my ancestors on the Serengeti Plain however many thousands of years ago.  Kristen Lindquist : So learning from your own personal experiences, lots of people have these stories of- a really, pivotal moment in their lives, and of course, things like post-traumatic stress disorder- are very linked to these singular traumatic events. But we can also gather these experiences from other people, right? So you may not have had to experience a snarling dog yourself, but if you had a parent who told you snarling dogs are very, very bad and in fact, you should be very scared of them, then you might have also acquired a fear of dogs in that manner. So social learning [00:08:00] plays a really important role as well. David Staley: The implication is, when I experience anxiety, that's different from your experience of anxiety. Is that the implication?  Kristen Lindquist : Yeah. So the idea is that our brains are constructing emotions in the moment to deal with the situation at hand based on our stored knowledge of what things in the world mean and their implications to us. And so your brain could be constructing a different anxiety than my brain because we have these different personal experiences. David Staley: And this only just occurs to me now, so, the implications for treating something like this, so people are prescribed medication for anxiety. Does that mean we can't... I mean, it's difficult then to, to prescribe anything for anxiety if each one of us are experiencing it so differently?  Kristen Lindquist : No. I'm not- Okay ... I'm not saying that there's not a biological basis. I'm not saying that research on antidepressants is not [00:09:00] valid. In fact, we know that antidepressants are changing how it is that the brain is engaging in these predictions, how it's sort of weighting information in the environment. So in the case of the snarling dog, antidepressants are sort of fine-tuning how it is- that your brain is weighing the prediction, that dog seems really threatening versus, oh, maybe it's not so bad. So absolutely, antidepressants, which are acting on the serotonin system and other neurotransmitters, are working. However, it also means that things like psychotherapy matter, which we already know that psychotherapy matters, but psychotherapy working on a different process. It's working on those narratives that people are bringing to bear. David Staley: Were you looking just at anxiety or other emotions in this research?  Kristen Lindquist : We have looked at a lot of different emotions over time. I think the research that you're referring to is a study where we looked at brain [00:10:00] network connectivity across the entire brain. So, we've moved away from looking at sort of singular regions based on our earliest work, and now we're looking at emotions as these really whole-brain events that are sort of constellations of all of these regions that are connected and sort of finely tuning in the moment to produce an adaptive behavior. We used an advanced neuroimaging analysis technique where we asked, "Are there different patterns across different people of connectivity?" So is there sort of a different constellation for different people for the same emotion? And, what we found is that when people were experiencing both anxiety and anger, we could differentiate anxiety from anger from one another inductively, so not, using this data-driven method, which was good. This was a good concept proof that our method could differentiate [00:11:00] things. But then we said, "Are there different patterns even within an emotion category?" So *the classic view would be that all instances of anxiety are created equal, so there should be a singular pattern for anxiety.* *There should kind of be a singular pattern for anger. But instead, we found that, there were these sort of sub-patterns that characterized different people and didn't map on to anything measurable. People were experiencing the same intensity of anxiety. They were not reporting different things that they were thinking about when they were having anxiety.* *It was just different ways that different people's brains were creating the same emotional experience, which is really fascinating and tells us something- deep, I think, about the nature of emotion and the fact that it's more malleable and situated than we tend to think. * David Staley: What are the implications of that?  Kristen Lindquist : Yeah, I mean, the implications, are important for, I think, lots [00:12:00] of different fields. I think it is important for how we treat emotion. So for many years, researchers have been looking for sort of the singular, neural center for a given emotion, again, take fear, with the idea that if we can identify the sort of biosignature, the fingerprint for anxiety, then maybe we could do a better job at targeting it with, various techniques. There's things like, TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, where you can, sort of magnetically stimulate a part of the brain and change how it's functioning. There's pharmacological methods, right? There's lots of different ways that we could potentially act on the biology itself, and the idea is if we can find the singular, subcircuit, then this would be a solution. This is telling us that there may not be a singular subcircuit. There may be multiple subcircuits, and we need to figure out in a more precision medicine sort of way what that circuit is for [00:13:00] a given individual. David Staley: Well, and maybe this moves even beyond the brain. I know you've written in some of your other research that maybe the brain's main job is not just for thinking and feeling, but as you put it, keeping the body alive.  Kristen Lindquist : Yes. David Staley: You have to explain what that means.  Kristen Lindquist : This answer really goes way back into our evolutionary past, and really to the beginning of evolution, the beginning of life, on this planet. But we as heady academics certainly, but really *a lot of modern people, I think, assume the brain evolved for thinking, right?* *Like, all of the beautiful thoughts that humans have created over the years. And I would argue that those beautiful thoughts and those maybe uniquely human pieces of art are a nice byproduct of a brain that didn't evolve for that purpose at all. The brain evolved initially to *[00:14:00] *keep the body functioning in an efficient manner.* There's scholars of brain evolution who have argued, why would you have a brain in the first place? It's incredibly metabolically costly. The human brain takes up about 20% of our energy just sort of at rest, which is a lot considering it is a very small proportion of our tissue overall. And So, what's the utility of having a brain? Brains seemed to evolve from single-cell organisms. Nervous systems seemed to evolve as single-cell organisms went from being unable to move to eventually developing the ability to move. And as organisms develop the ability to move, the sort of balance of energy expenditure changed for them, right? So in order to stay alive, an organism needs to ingest food, get rid of waste, right? The things that keep our [00:15:00] cells going. But movement is itself both costly energetically, but also gives an organism all these additional opportunities, right? Mm-hmm. It can now forage for food, it can avoid threats, and so on. And so fast-forward three billion years, and, you have these centralized nervous systems that are adept at sort of running the metabolics of the body, and the way that the brain achieves this is to sort of predictively guess what's going to happen next, and this turns out to be incredibly metabolically efficient. So when I stand up, instead of my brain reactively changing my blood pressure, which wouldn't be very adaptive, I would fall down, pass out- it predicts that I'm going to need a blood pressure change before I even ever engage my motor system, and this is both adaptive, [00:16:00] it's also metabolically efficient because it's not sort of waiting for resources to grow really low. Same goes for hunger. You experience hunger well beforeyou're dangerously out of glucose. And so the brain is sort of running this predictive model, and the idea is that with the emergence of the primate brain and its ability to have all of this prefrontal cortex that has a very specific structure that allows it to represent more and more abstract information, that brains were then able to sort of run these more sophisticated predictions. And I've hypothesized in my work that emotions are one of these predictions. Their stored information from prior experiences allows us to guess what's going to happen next, what its impact is going to be for our body, and we can extend that to other people as well. So I can guess based on your behavior what you might be [00:17:00] feeling and whether that has any implications for me. Do you mean me harm are you going to be friend or are you going to be foe? David Staley: Hmm. Why are our brains so big?  Kristen Lindquist : I mean, this is a blessing and a curse for humans, right? our brains are bigger, presumably because having this expanded prefrontal cortex is adaptive. And, arguably there's evidence that that's true. David Staley: I'm hearing some doubt.  Kristen Lindquist : with evolution, you can't really say, right? Like, we don't know for sure. What we do know is that humans seem to have been selected for having this sort of expanded prefrontal cortex. And what is interesting about this expanded prefrontal cortex is that the cells in it are pretty diffusely packed, and this just has to do with how it is that the brain grows during neurogenesis. And having those diffusely packed cells allows us to represent information [00:18:00] in a much more sort of abstract way. So instead of representing all the sort of fine grain details that you might see in visual cortex. In vision we need to represent the color and the shape and the saturation and movement and so on, right? So, like, all this fine grain detail. The prefrontal cortex allows us to sort of, like, step up some levels and even represent stuff that isn't happening in the here and now. David Staley: Mm-hmm.  Kristen Lindquist : And clearly that's been adaptive for language and for social behavior and for tool construction, right? some of the things that I wouldn't say make us uniquely human, but that humans engage in to a perhaps qualitatively different extent than other animals. David Staley: You had said earlier that, your research is based on the idea that we have to take a whole brain-  Kristen Lindquist : Mm-hmm ... David Staley: notion to be able to look at emotions. Does that extend to the entire body?  Kristen Lindquist : So yes, that does extend to the entire body. If brains evolved [00:19:00] to regulate the body, then it actually really matters what's going on in the rest of the body when people are having emotions. And I would argue that emotions stem in large part because of what's going on in the rest of the body. So in some of our research, we've examined how it is that the state of the body is sort of feeding into people's emotional experiences. Now, the sort of classic idea is that I have an emotion, it changes my body state, so I see the snake and my heart rate goes up. And yet we have shown that the reverse can also happen. David Staley: Hmm.  Kristen Lindquist : So when I was in graduate school, I taught a class for the first time, and I really liked it. I didn't actually find it to be that anxiety-provoking. I was usually pretty excited about getting up before the undergraduate classroom. But I had to walk up this huge flight of stairs to get there every day. And by the time I got to the [00:20:00] end of this huge flight of stairs, I would walk down the hallway to the room, and I would see the faces of the undergraduate students, and I would think, "Wow, I am so nervous." And it was because my heart was beating out of my chest, probably I should have been going to the gym more. and there's plenty of research to suggest that the state of our body can sort of feed into these predictions about the meaning of the situation. So here I was attuned to what was going on in my cardiovascular system and sort of misinterpreting it in this context as an experience of anxiety about teaching the class. Same goes for lots of different states. So times that you are mildly inflamed because you got a flu shot or you are fighting off a cold, we have found that this actually can change very subtly our social perception of other people. And in other cases the state of the body can contribute to whether people experience outright intense emotions like anger. David Staley: Well, I [00:21:00] said I wanted to come back to, your work on the influence of culture-  Kristen Lindquist : Mm-hmm ... David Staley: on emotions. So are there emotions that exist in some cultures but not others?  Kristen Lindquist : Yes. There are. and there's been a fair amount of work looking at sort of what these emotion concepts are, and a lot of debate about are they truly different across cultures. So there are surely examples of concepts that don't have a great translation in other cultural contexts. So, for instance, the, Japanese emotion amae is something that is actually a little bit hard, I think, for Western individuals to wrap our head around. It has to do with care and benevolence, but Japanese culture is a very sort of dyadic, close culture that focuses on sort of the collective group. And so it's not just about me [00:22:00] caring for someone. It's about the experience of being cared for- David Staley: Hmm ...  Kristen Lindquist : this sort of dynamic back and forth. Sometimes it's likened to being a child that's being cared for by a parent, like what that feels like. Although, as you can see, it just took me, Yeah a good minute to try- Right ... and explain it to you, which seems to suggest that it's not really something that we wrap our heads around particularly well. David Staley: And it's not just that we don't have a word for it. We don't actually have, in the West, that feeling.  Kristen Lindquist : I would argue we don't have that same feeling. I mean, I think we can reflect on instances where you say, "Oh I'm a parent. I care for my child," or "I've done nice things for friends before." And, I've heard it linked to if your friend picked you up from the airport and it was really late at night, and it was really them going out of their way, you would feel amae. And I kind of get that, but only sort [00:23:00] of post-hoc would I say- Yeah ... "Sure, yeah, I think that situation qualifies." So there's examples like that where we don't have a word for it, and even sort of trying to describe the concept is a little bit hard. There's other examples where words have been imported- Mm-hmm into English, so schadenfreude is- Sure ... a great, great example. Yeah. and has become very popular, right? Yeah. So pleasure at another person's pain, like an enemy's pain. Your, colleague who you feel competitive with, doesn't get their grant funded, or, your nasty neighbor, slips on a banana or whatever, right? So that's an example of something that clearly can transcend cultures. We didn't previously have a label for it. Now people use that label- Right ... in English. Although I have some work showing that even words that are thought to have translational equivalence across languages around the entire globe [00:24:00] don't necessarily map onto the same meaning. So even if you can say, "Yes, in this culture and in this culture, these two words both mean anger," if you look at the broader semantic structure of emotion in those different language families, they're not necessarily the same. So we had a paper several years ago now where we took advantage of this really large database documenting emotion words across the entire planet in as many languages that linguists and ethnographers had documented, and we were able to take instances where it's thought that two different words share a meaning. This tells you something about semantic similarity. So in Indo-European languages, such as English, you can see that there's words for [00:25:00] wood and forest. so I believe in French, wood and forest have the same meaning. And this tells you something about the fact that people in these languages see those as sharing some semantic similarity, right? So a piece of wood and a forest, same substance. We can use this phenomenon called co-lexification to ask whether this sort of semantic similarity looks similar across different language families. And so what we did was we created these maps, these networks, where mathematically we could ask are there similar semantic patterns- Mm for emotion concepts around the world? And the answer is no. So even when words were presumably translational equivalents, so a word means anger in English and it means anger in a Austronesian language, those two language families actually [00:26:00] have different maps of what anger means. And so what that suggests is that even when there's words that we think are sort of the same, they might have these subtly different meanings in some case, or in other cases very, very distinctive- David Staley: Hmm  Kristen Lindquist : differences in meaning. David Staley: Before we started recording, we were talking about, and I'm, not a specialist so I'm not claiming any expertise here, but there's a new subfield in history, history of emotions. Mm-hmm. And the implication is that, well, one of the arguments we make in history is that there's change over time. Mm-hmm. And the implication is that the way that people experienced emotions in the past is different for different times, different eras. The way that, a Roman general understood anger is different from the way that a medieval monk, is different from a way a Victorian would experience anger. And it sounds as if that's what your research might be vindicating?  Kristen Lindquist : Yes. I love when different fields try to attack the same question using their own tools. And yes, certainly if people living in the here and [00:27:00] now in different parts of the world have different definitions of emotion, then it certainly stands to reason that emotions could have changed across history. We've done a little bit of work showing that the linguistics of emotion have changed over history. Now, of course, it's hard to, study a psychological state going back over time in the absence of things like language, but you can look at how emotion words have been used across time, across text, in, say, Google Books and, over time, emotion concepts have been getting more granular. So there's been more emotion concepts included, and it seems like people are getting more specific about their terminology over time. And even sort of going back up the linguistic tree for the meaning of singular emotion words, you can track how proto-languages [00:28:00] defined a word like sadness and see that it's really changed considerably over time, and it's only in relatively recent history, in the 16th, 17th century that the word took on a meaning that looks akin to something that we understand as sadness today. David Staley: So I will confess, that, I just sort of assumed that psychology had told us this is what emotions are, and they are physiological, and they are not, different in time and space, and now you're telling me otherwise. Is this now, the accepted, way of talking about emotions, or is your work maybe heterodox here?  Kristen Lindquist : I would say that my work has challenged sort of the reigning paradigm. although it's interesting talking about history. If you go back and look at the history of scientific study on emotion, which has existed mostly in neuroscience and psychology, but you can go back to philosophy, and it's sort of toggled over [00:29:00] time between something that looks more like my approach and more like what we call the discrete emotion approach or the basic emotion approach, the idea that emotions are instincts that sort of evolved specifically as these packages and there's six to seven of them, although people debate vigorously about what the right number is and which ones they are and so on. And our work, which has been growing and gaining a fair amount of support, I would argue, not just from my lab, but from, other labs beyond my lab, is arguing that, this is not the case, that emotions absolutely are biological. Everything about psychology is biological, right? But that there's these cultural influences, and the approach combines a newer model of evolution, which looks not just at genetic transmission, which of course influences [00:30:00] emotion and behavior and so on, right? We know people with certain genes maybe have stronger emotional reactions, but there's another pathway, which is the social learning pathway. And so people within their lifetimes can learn from other people, from their own experiences about emotion, and we believe that within a culture, adults, for instance, teach infants and children about the emotion categories that are most relevant and most adaptive in their culture. It's also the case that over human history, those concepts can evolve. They can get passed between groups. The ones that end up being popular, whether adaptive or because somebody really famous popularized them, they can latch on and get propagated just as you would think about genes being [00:31:00] propagated. So this dual inheritance model is the way that we think about how it is that human psychology has come to be. There's some genetic evolution, but there's also this social learning evolution process. David Staley: What originally drew you to these questions about emotion?  Kristen Lindquist : Yeah. David Staley: Of all the things you could study in the world, why, why this?  Kristen Lindquist : I know. I always liked school. I like learning about lots of things, and I think at some point, I was going into college struggling because I liked lots of different subjects, and I couldn't really pin it down. I think I considered medicine. I ended up starting as a biology major because I thought medicine might be something I was interested in, but I hung onto an English major too because I have always loved literature. I'm still an avid fiction reader, and what I loved about literature was its [00:32:00] ability to describe the rich mental lives of humans- and variation in those mental lives. , Right, it told the stories of people's inner workings. And for a long time as an undergraduate, I wasn't sure how to reconcile those two things. Biology on the surface seemed very different from flowery literature. And at some point I took a psychology class and I thought, "Huh, this is interesting." And fast-forward, I was able, through an experimental psychology degree, that then I verged into neuroscience to unite these different interests, right? I have the biological piece. I study the brain, I study the body. I study how it is that the, two work together and all of the anatomy and physiology and how that's working, to contribute to health and wellness. But I'm still able to get at these questions about the richness of what makes us human. David Staley: Tell us what's next. What are you working on [00:33:00] now?  Kristen Lindquist : We have, a lot of work that's going on. It's keeping us very busy. We are continuing to ask questions in general about how it is that the brain and the body and their confluence in culture are creating people's emotional experiences. *A lot of our work is looking across the lifespan, so it's not just the case that two 20-year-olds who live on different continents could have different emotions, but that the same 20-year-old who becomes a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old and an 80-year-old is going to experience changes in their emotion across their lifespan.* Mm-hmm. In part because their body is changing- and their brain is changing and maturing and aging and all of the sort of health consequences that come with that, but also because their learning is changing across time. So we're doing a lot of work looking across the adult lifespan, how it is that emotions are changing, [00:34:00] and how that's a product of the body and the brain , and their interactions. David Staley: How do you study something like that? It's a longitudinal study, I'm guessing.  Kristen Lindquist : So we have a first study that's a cross-sectional study where we just look at people of different ages from 18 to 85, and we have a lot of rich, really beautiful data on them, including things about their health and their wellness and their physiology. they wore Fitbits as they wandered around in daily life, so we know what their cardiovascular system is doing in daily life. We're asking them to report on their emotions in daily life, so they get a little ping on their phone at various points throughout the day, and they tell us, "What's happening right now? What are my feelings?" This really naturalistic way of studying their emotions. They do a brain scan. We measure, their cardiovascular responses in the scanner as they are experiencing emotions, and so we're able to sort of use all of this rich data to converge and ask questions about the patterns and how they're changing. But yes, the next [00:35:00] step is a longitudinal study where we're following people through time as they age. David Staley: Well, Kristen Lindquist, thank you.  Kristen Lindquist : Thank you. It was a pleasure Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.