Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (32 page)

Putting Feelings into Words

In each of the forms of self-control we’ve looked at, there is an experience of applying effort to overcome something.
Whether it’s withholding a finger press, endorsing a statement known to be untrue, or trying not to lose your temper when your boss yells at you, there is an urge or impulse that you can feel yourself fighting against.
Yet sometimes the same mechanisms of self-control can be engaged without our even knowing it.
The author Henry Miller once wrote, “The best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature.”
Putting our feelings into words
can be tremendously cathartic and is the basis for various psychological therapies.
But it turns out that putting our feelings into words or simply being able to label them can regulate our emotions and promote our mental and physical well-being without our realizing it at all.

When young children are emotional, we tell them to “use their words.”
Preschoolers who can describe their feelings
have fewer emotional outbursts, get better grades, and are more popular with their peers.
High school students who write about
their math anxiety right before taking a math test actually do better on the test.
In my lab, we ask adults to perform a simple task, called
affect labeling
, during which people choose a word to best describe the emotional aspect of a picture.
For instance, a picture of an angry face might be shown, and the participant would have to choose whether the
word
angry
or
scared
describes the target’s emotion.
We have found that labeling the affective aspect
of a disturbing image reduces the distress a person feels while looking at the image.
Even though this result looks like what we might expect from an emotion regulation strategy such as reappraisal, people do not realize that affect labeling is an effective strategy for diminishing their negative feelings.
To examine people’s beliefs about affect labeling, we have asked individuals to predict which would be more distressing, to look at a disturbing image with no instruction or to look at the image and label the emotional aspect of it.
People almost always predict that labeling would be worse because it would focus their attention on the upsetting parts of the image.

To get a sense of how counterintuitive affect labeling effects are, imagine you have a severe fear of spiders and you have gone to get treatment for your phobia.
The therapist is going to put you through one of three kinds of treatment regimens.
She describes the three versions and lets you choose.
The first is a standard type of
exposure therapy
, which involves repeatedly seeing a real tarantula two feet away in its cage.
The second is a reappraisal treatment, which also has repeated exposures to a real tarantula, but each time the spider is presented, you will be asked to generate a reappraisal such as “Looking at the little spider isn’t actually dangerous for me.”
The third option is an affect labeling treatment, which again involves the repeated exposures, but this time while generating affect label–based statements such as “I feel anxious that the disgusting tarantula will jump on me.”
Which kind of therapy do you think would help you learn to approach the spider with less fear?
Katharina Kircanski, Michelle Craske, and I ran exactly this test with spider phobics, and
we found that affect labeling helped the most
and that the more negative the participants’ labels were, the better the final results.

Just like reappraisal, affect labeling regulates our emotions and thus appears to be a kind of
implicit self-control.
Does this kind of self-control look like the others in terms of brain activity?
Absolutely.
When people label an emotional picture
or their own emotional
response to a picture, it activates the rVLPFC and reduces activity in the amygdala.
We’ve run a number of studies now in which the same individuals use affect labeling, reappraisal, and in one case a motor self-control task.
We have seen similar things going on in the rVLPFC
across these different forms of self-control.

And thus ends our tour of self-control variations.
Whether we exercise self-control over our motor and visceral impulses, logical reasoning, social perspective taking, or emotion regulation, the rVLPFC almost always seems to be at the center of the action.
It is still unclear what exactly the rVLPFC does to stimulate self-control.
The debate typically focuses on whether this and similar regions are directly inhibiting responses in other brain regions, like the amygdala, or are helping to strengthen the nonimpulsive alternative so it can compete effectively with the impulsive response.
In any event, the question I want to turn to now is why self-control plays a central role in our tendency toward social harmony.

Alien Abductions

So far it appears that self-control is a tremendous asset, and when we use it, it involves the rVLPFC region of the brain.
Its relation to our sociality emerges when we begin to deconstruct the meaning of the word.
The word
self-control
yields two very different meanings, two ways in which
self
and
control
are related to one another.
On the one hand, the hyphenated word can imply that our self is in control, achieving its own ends effectively.
This interpretation brings to mind the notion of
willpower
, a muscular Nietzschean word for our ability to overcome whatever gets in our way through sheer personal force of mind.
But there is a second, more Orwellian connotation, linking self-control with
self-restraint.
Here, it is the self that is being controlled, which leads to the question “Who benefits when we bring the self under control?”

Perhaps a couple of hypothetical alien abductions will help us get
to the bottom of this.
Imagine that while you are sleeping soundly, little green men snatch you from your warm bed and take you to their advanced neurosurgery facility in the sky.
They are deciding whether to alter your brain such that you permanently lose all impulses, urges, desires, and emotional reactions or to leave those intact and instead perform a surgery that will leave you permanently unable to control your impulses, urges, desires, and emotional reactions.
The aliens cannot decide among themselves so they let you cast the tiebreaking vote.
Which would you prefer to lose if you had to lose either emotion or self-control forever?
It’s the classic battle between self-control and emotion, between Mr.
Spock and Captain Kirk, between businessman and Burning Man.

After multiple failed escape attempts, I suspect that I would ultimately choose to keep my impulses, urges, desires, and emotions and give up my ability to control any of them.
It would be embarrassing to lack self-control, but it would be devastating to lose the rest.
Who am I without all of these?
How would I know what is worth doing?
Without impulses and emotions, I would have no motivation to do anything.
Remember that not all impulses and urges are bad.
I have the urge to kiss my wife and son every day.
I have impulses to help those in need.
I have the desire to hike up mountains and watch the sun set.
These are all wonderful things without which I am not sure life would be worth living.

Unfortunately, even though you have made your choice, things get more complicated.
Before performing their operation on you, the aliens suddenly perfect a new technology that allows them to perform neurosurgery on all the inhabitants of a city at once, while they sleep in their beds.
They are going to start with your city, but because you are onboard their spaceship, you are now exempt from the surgery.
You personally get a reprieve; you will keep both your emotions and your ability to control them.
However, you now have to choose whether all the people in your city will lose their ability to feel their impulses and emotions or will lose their capacity for self-control.
Whatever you decide will be applied to everyone, so you
will be returning to either a city full of highly impulsive, emotional people or a city full of nonimpulsive, highly controlled people.
An added note: your decision will not affect your family or close friends because luckily for them, they were all away on vacation.

What do you choose for all the people who make up your city (but are not part of your immediate social networks)?
Do you want to live in Kirkville or Spocktown?
For me, and I suspect for many of you, this decision yields a different result from what I wanted for myself.
I don’t want to live in a city full of people who are impulsive nonstop without the ability to control themselves.
These people will be reckless and a constant threat to my safety.
It would be like living next door to a fraternity house where it’s always 1 a.m.
on Saturday morning.

These two hypothetical decisions suggest that I value other people’s having self-control more than I value having it myself.
Assuming this preference is generally true, we can turn it around.
If I value other people’s having self-control more than I value having it myself, it follows that the people around me care more about my having and exercising self-control than I do.
My self-control is more of a benefit to them than to me.

Who Benefits from Self-Control?

The novel
A Single Man
by Christopher Isherwood opens with the main character’s morning routine.
As he wakes,
George is merely “experience—an entity experiencing”
without any self-awareness.
There are impulses, urges, and even aches.
Pure experiences.
But then he looks in the mirror.
“It stares and stares … until the cortex orders it impatiently to wash, to shave, to brush its hair.
Its nakedness has to be covered… .
Its behavior must be acceptable to them… .
Obediently, it washes, shaves, and brushes its hair; for it accepts its responsibilities to the others.
It is even glad that it has a place among them.
It knows what is expected of it” (p.
11).

Self-control is the price of admission to society.
If you don’t restrain your impulses, you will end up in prison or a psych ward.
If you do restrain your impulses, you are allowed to freely pursue your goals.
And there are nonpunitive incentives for self-control as well.
People with greater self-control get paid more because self-control allows those individuals to do things that are of great value to the rest of society.
The thing is, just as with the alien abduction scenarios, society values our self-control more than it values our quality of life.
John Lennon once told a story about his early education that underscores this.
He said, “When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up.
I wrote down ‘happy.’
They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
For his teachers, what he wanted to be had to reflect what he would do that would benefit society.
His happiness was a nonsensical answer to them.

How many people devote countless hours of effort, requiring deep reservoirs of self-control, in order to get into medical school, where even greater self-control is required to make it through the internships and residencies, only to find out that being a doctor does not make them terribly happy.
Fewer than half of the doctors in the United States
say they would choose the same career if they had it to do over.
The world respects doctors because they do something that provides a profound benefit to the rest of us.
Adolescents want to be respected and wealthy, they want to make their parents proud, but all of the self-control that doctors-to-be apply in the pursuit of becoming a doctor might ultimately be more valuable to
us
than it is to
them
.

Pursuing careers that benefit others more than oneself might be an accidental confluence of factors, but it is not uncommon for societal norms to push people to engage in self-restraint in order to benefit the greater good.
In Beijing, many men across a wide range of ages and classes engage in a behavior that has earned them the name
bang ye,
which literally means “exposing grandfathers.”
These men roll their shirts up above their bellies on the hottest days of the
year.
In recent years, Beijing has been working to become a cosmopolitan destination city, and these bare-midriffed men conflict with this image.
Both the government and the newspapers have run campaigns to try to put a stop to this.
This is a case in which self-control would clearly benefit society but not the individuals.
Rolling up their shirts keeps the men cooler, but the society at large feels more in line with Cicero’s directive that “every man should bear his own grievances rather than detract from the comforts of others.”

As individuals and as a society, we have greater general trust in those who display self-control.
Both with strangers and with our romantic partners
, studies have demonstrated that signs of self-control warrant greater trust.
This makes good sense in the case of romantic partners
, for those low in self-control report having greater difficulty in staying faithful.

Society bestows some of its greatest rewards to those with high self-control: admissions to top universities and scholarships to pay for them.
We have already seen that the major determinants of admission, a student’s GPA and SAT scores, are both highly influenced by self-control.
We think of the SAT as an intelligence test and thus think of admissions to top universities as an intelligence competition.
Though there is truth to this, admission to top schools is just as much a competition over self-control.
How much were you able to restrain all of your distracting impulses through thirteen years of school and in studying for the SAT?
We might endorse the SAT as the ticket to admission, believing it to separate the smartest from the rest.
Indeed,
the creators of the SAT designed it to be a measure of intelligence
that could not be gamed through practice or hard work.
But ultimately, we as a society give people access to top universities based on a test that can be conquered through self-control.