Priscilla Xu

The Architecture Of A Feeling: (At Least) 3 Key Questions To Ask Yourself – 3 axis of emotions

• Where are you on the alertness?
• What is your valence?
  • A good or bad feeling
• Are you interocepting or exterocepting?
  • Are you focusing on something happening inside of your body or outside?

Emotions is Subjective Yet Tractable

• The same red looks intense to different people
• The brain does not have one location for processing emotions
• The limbic system is one of the parts that manage emotions.
• To Understand Your Emotions, we need to look at infancy & puberty attachment styles.
  • When we are young and cannot speak, the need for something is experienced as anxiety.
  • Then caregiver responds to that need by assuming what it is
    • The purpose of emotions is to make predictions and make bonds.

How Do Bonds Form During Infancy?

• You Are An Infant, and you need bonds & predictions to help you survive.
• Babies cry how much depending on how they can get their needs met.
• We continue to do this when we grow up. The inner child is always there.
• Emotions have a conceptual and cultural context.

Attachment Style Hinges On How You Handle Disappointment

Strange situation task and after the caregiver returns…

• A – respond with happiness and security attached
• B – less likely to seek comfort and are avoidant babies
  • Not all avoidant babies grow up to be avoidant adults
• C – annoying and are ambivalent
• D – babies don’t have much difference in reaction

What is the definition of a good bond?

• The four components of an emotional bond:
  • They are the “Glue Points” Of Emotional Bonds: Gaze, Voice, Affect, Touch (& Written)
    • Affect: how you express emotions on the face
    • Gaze is just a simple look
    • Voice: the tone when you speak
    • Written language usage
• We read inflections and recognize the voice of familiar people.

“Emotional Health”: Awareness of the Interoceptive-Exteroceptive Dynamic

• If they are exteroceptive, they are emotionally labile.
  • Calmness only comes when the environment comes
  • How much outside disrupts the inside
  • Puberty and infancy determine much of this
• An Exercise: Controlling Interoceptive-Exteroceptive Bias
  • Biased for intero or exteroceptive?
  • Bring attention to my heart rate and what I’m feeling on my butt
• When we are young, we are more interoceptive
  • Extreme sadness makes us more interoceptive too.
  • Focus on my eyes to guide your attention to your visual field and get out of my head.
• When people are trusted, it will shift more to exteroceptive
  • The aperture of attention is shifted

Adolescence, Bonding, and Emotions

• Puberty: Biology & Emotions On Deliberate Overdrive
  • Body fat & Puberty: The Leptin Connection triggers the start of puberty around 10-12 years old.
  • Vandenbergh Effect in animal studies takes it to a prepubertal female and mates with a mature male; the female goes through puberty directly.
  • Kisspeptin: Robust Trigger Of Puberty & Performance Enhancing Agent
  • Hormone Axis in Puberty Stimulates GnRH –> Luteinizing Hormones –> estrogen or testosterone –> then negative feedback.
• Neuroplasticity Of Emotions: Becoming Specialists & Testing Emotional Bonds
  • Generalist to a specialist in 20s and puberty
  • The formation of emotional bonds and the questions of social structures and who I can rely on
  • So I can make predictions.
  • Biologically changed and emotionally changed –> identity too
• Testing Driving Brain Circuits For Emotion: Dispersal
  • At the end of adolescence, kids want to leave their primary caregivers
  • And spend more time with friends
  • Mammalian species show this too!!!!
  • It is baked into biology, LOL.
  • Increase prefrontal cortex connection
  • We are testing behaviors and what leads to success.

Science-Based Recommendations for Adolescents and Teens: The Autonomy Buffet

• Get good sleep to decrease mental health issues
• Encourage safe interactions to test autonomy
  • Buffer of events safely. Not too much risk taking.

​ “Right-Brain Versus Left-Brain People”: Facts Versus Lies

• Left Brain = Language But not logical
  • People who right who their right hand
  • Some arithmetic
• Right Brain = Spatial Awareness BUT not Emotional
• Prosody = a concerned with those elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm Such elements are known as suprasegmentals
• Oxytocin: The Molecule of Synchronizing States
  • Lactation and sex
  • Matching internal state synchrony for alertness calmness axis
  • Mirror neurons are not for empathy but just for copying actions and predicting behaviors
    • Seen in prison dilemma experiments
  • Promoting Trust & Monogamy

Vasopressin: Aphrodisiac, Non-Monogamy, and Anti-Bed-Wetting Qualities

• Giddy love and increased memory
• More in polyamory.
• Prairie voles amount of oxytocin and Vasopressin