In a recent study, CU Boulder’s Robert Moulder and colleagues find that individuals with trait neuroticism rarely modify how they respond to negative emotions 

Emotions, like temperatures, go up and down. Yet everyone copes with these ups and downs in his or her own way. Some use the same emotion-regulation strategies over and over—read a book, take a walk, watch a movie—while others change which strategy they use depending on the situation.

Research scientist Robert Moulder of the University of Colorado Boulder Institute of Cognitive Science, along with , ,  and , wanted to know why: Why do some people frequently modify their regulation strategies? Why do others reuse the same strategies? And are there benefits to both approaches?

Difficult questions, these, not least because they seek to identify patterns in what seem like random human behaviors. Which is why Moulder was particularly well-suited to the job of answering them. With a background in both mathematics and psychology, he uses chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics to understand human systems. “The way I like to describe it, I am like  from Jurassic Park, but for people instead of dinosaurs,” he jokes. “I do the ‘mathy math’ behind how psych works.”

Thanks to Moulder’s “mathy math,” he and his fellow researchers  a key distinction between those who rarely change up their emotion-regulation strategies and those who do so often: trait neuroticism.

Trait vs. state

Neuroticism, Moulder says, refers to “someone's overall tendency to engage in and ruminate on negative emotions like getting angry, getting upset, being distrustful. You can think about it as the propensity of an individual to experience and act upon negative emotions.”

There are two categories of neuroticism: state neuroticism and trait neuroticism, the differences between which Moulder illustrates with an analogy to extroversion.

“A state personality would be, say, how extroverted you are right now, or how extroverted you are in two or three days,” he says. “Have you ever gone to a party and felt really engaged but afterwards felt dead? During that party your extroversion was higher than it normally would be, and afterwards, it was probably a little lower.” 

Trait extroversion, on the other hand, takes the average of those individual moments over time. “It's kind of like your stable equilibrium,” says Moulder. “If you were going to describe to someone how extroverted you are, you'd be talking about your trait extroversion.”

The same thing goes for neuroticism. One person may have a high degree of neuroticism at any given moment but a low degree overall—high state, low trait—whereas another person may be exactly the opposite.

What Moulder and his colleagues found was that subjects with high levels of trait neuroticism tend not to experiment with their regulation strategies. “That means someone who is very high in neuroticism will consistently use the same tools over and over again, whether they’re working or not.”

A new mathematical model

Moulder and his colleagues arrived at these findings with the help of transition matrices, an analytical tool Moulder and Daniel developed in a . 

“Why people do the things they do after a negative event has thousands of components,” Moulder says. “There was not a good method for measuring that. So, we made one.”

Transition matrices are rectangular grids of rows and columns that enable study subjects to keep track of which emotion-regulation strategies they use and when they use them.

A subject who got into an argument with her boss at noon and then took a walk, for example, would put a “1” in the box in her matrix associated with taking a walk. If she received an angry email from her boss an hour later and chose this time to call a friend, she would put a “1” in the box associated with that regulation strategy.

“If someone used the exact same strategy all the time, you would just see one number in the matrix, and all the rest of the matrix would be ‘0,’” Moulder says, whereas someone who constantly switched from one regulation strategy to the next would have numbers all over his or her matrix.

These transition matrices provide two key metrics, Moulder explains: stability and spread. Higher stability means fewer regulation strategies; higher spread, more strategies. Subjects with high levels of trait neuroticism are therefore likely to have high stability. 

Just-in-time interventions

With this information about their own emotion-regulation behaviors, subjects can see which strategies they use and reuse; they get a snapshot of their own stability and spread. If they find they’re putting the same strategies on repeat, they can decide to change things up—play pickleball instead of binge-eating pickles, for instance.

“There are some times when it makes sense to choose the same strategy,” Moulder says, “but we know from prior research that there are some times when it makes sense to become more adaptive—to increase, to spread, to try other things.”

Moulder adds that the knowledge gleaned from transition matrices can also be turned toward potentially more effective approaches to emotion regulation. He and Daniel call one idea “just-in-time interventions.” 

“If we are, let’s say, giving individuals telehealth, which is a really big space right now for therapy, we want to do something called just-in-time interventions,” he says. By understanding a person’s regulation practices, “we can say to that person, ‘Hey, you keep going to drink almost every time something negative happens. Maybe this time go read a book or a call a friend.’ We can offer alternatives that research shows will lead to better outcomes.”

The power of such interventions lies in their precision. They’re based not purely on statistics, Moulder says, but on “person-specific analysis, which we can use to give people personalized messaging that would ideally best help them in the long run.”

There’s no guarantee that switching strategies will bring the desired outcome, Moulder admits, but experimentation is part of the process. “We’re never going to know what works until we try.” 

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Postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students to increase their knowledge of demography and genetics in one of the first programs of its kind

Jason Boardman has made headlines studying the interactions between people’s genes and their environment, finding, for instance, that .

Now, the University of Colorado Boulder sociologist is helping to launch an advanced training program, one of the first of its kind in the nation, to train young scholars in this cross-disciplinary field.

The National Institute on Aging has awarded Professor Boardman, from CU Boulder’s Institute of Behavioral Science (IBS), and Professor Michael Stallings from CU Boulder’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG), $595,666 over three years, to create a formal training program in the area.

Boardman was a tenure-track assistant professor in sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2005 when he decided to expand his research in social demography, or the statistical study of human populations, to include behavioral and statistical genetics.

Jason Boardman

“Essentially, I had to take graduate level studies in these areas,” Boardman said. “I didn’t have much of a background in many of those fields, so I was raising my hand a lot.”

Boardman decided to look at the intersection and interaction between social factors — such as where one lives or works or whom one socializes with — and genetic factors as both influence complex health behaviors, such as smoking. He has published on this topic extensively, and beginning next year, like-minded post- and pre-doctoral students will be able to as well in the new training program.

Boardman’s genetic research has previously been supported by a five-year award from the in the National Institutes of Health. This grant allowed Boardman to maintain his position as a faculty member but spend nearly half of his time studying genetics with researchers at IBG.

Leaders of both IBS and IBG hailed the award:

“This is a tangible vote of support at the national level for the successful collaboration between IBS and IBG,” John K. Hewitt, director of IBG, said. “It reaffirms the value of our efforts to develop innovative interdisciplinary graduate and postdoctoral training programs.”

This training program will enable the next generation of scholars to tackle complex public-health issues such as increasing rates of obesity, individual differences in stress sensitivity, and complex and comorbid substance-use disorders with innovative and cutting-edge approaches.”

"This new grant demonstrates the leadership that Jason has achieved in connecting social and behavioral science with a deep understanding of genetics, something that draws on the outstanding expertise of the two institutes and amplifies our ability to train the next generation of researchers," Myron P. Gutmann, director of IBS, added.

Demography and genetics postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students will be annually funded by the grant over three years to increase their respective knowledge of demography and genetics —demographers will study behavioral genetics, and behavioral geneticists will study demography.

Three postdoctoral researchers, two of whom received support from NIH, have recently taken similar paths at the two research institutes, and have all been involved with innovative research projects, leading to tenure-track positions at leading universities.

Benjamin Domingue is now an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. During his time as a postdoctoral researcher with Boardman, he was supported by several funding mechanisms in an ad-hoc manner. The goal of this new program at CU Boulder is to replicate the training that Domingue received but in a more formal manner.

Brooke Huibregtse, the first postdoctoral researcher appointed to the training program, said she is excited about the opportunity to integrate new approaches with her formal training in psychology.

“Investigating genetic risk factors is only one side of the coin; it is important to also consider the social context in which complex health behaviors develop,” she said.

While there are now numerous research articles expanding on the study of the interaction between genes and environment, there is not a permanent training program today, according to Boardman. Reviewers noted that the strength of research from both the IBS and IBG, as well as researchers from CU Denver, was a significant factor in the decision to locate such a program at CU.

“This is an important indication that reviewers and NIH see this as the place to go to receive this very unique training,” Boardman said. “This training program will enable the next generation of scholars to tackle complex public-health issues such as increasing rates of obesity, individual differences in stress sensitivity, and complex and comorbid substance-use disorders with innovative and cutting-edge approaches.”

According to the proposal, IBS faculty members have expertise in areas that could not easily be duplicated by other research institutes, including the intersection of people’s genetics and their environment and its role in health outcomes, patterns of HIV/AIDS in Africa and healthy adolescent development.

“IBG has an incredibly strong and international reputation in research on genetic factors linked to different behaviors across the life course,” Boardman said. IBG “hosts annual workshops on twin modeling and advanced statistical genetics that are among the most popular courses on this topic in the country. Indeed, following a comprehensive external evaluation of IBG, one reviewer commented that IBG is, ‘a world leader that is unique in its extensive combination of human and animal model research studies of human behavioral variation.’”

Boardman said faculty members are still determining whether to offer an academic certificate for the program. Meanwhile, the interaction between IBS and IBG researchers continues to lead to interesting studies, including “wet lab” scientists such as IBG’s Tom Johnson, who studies molecular behavioral genetics using worms and mice.

“It’s amazing what comes up when we’re all together talking about this,” Boardman said.

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The ability to understand and empathize with others’ pain is grounded in cognitive neural processes rather than sensory ones, according to the results of a new study led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers.

The findings show that the act of perceiving others’ pain (i.e., empathy for others’ pain) does not appear to involve the same neural circuitry as experiencing pain in one’s own body, suggesting that they are different interactions within the brain.

Tor Wager

“The research suggests that empathy is a deliberative process that requires taking another person’s perspective rather than being an instinctive, automatic process,” said , the senior author of the study, director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU-Boulder.

was published online today in the journal eLife.

Empathy is a key cornerstone of human social behavior, but the complex neural interactions underlying this behavior are not yet fully understood. Previous hypotheses have suggested that the same brain regions that allow humans to feel pain in their own bodies might activate when perceiving the pain of others.

To test this idea, the researchers compared patterns of brain activity in human volunteers as they experienced moderate pain directly (via heat, shock, or pressure) in one experimental session, and watched images of others’ hands or feet being injured in another experimental session. When volunteers watched images, they were asked to try to imagine that the injuries were happening to their own bodies.

The researchers found that the brain patterns when the volunteers observed pain did not overlap with the brain patterns when the volunteers experienced pain themselves. Instead, while observing pain, the volunteers showed brain patterns consistent with mentalizing, which involves imagining another person’s thoughts and intentions.

The results suggest that within the brain, the experience of observing someone else in pain is neurologically distinct from that of experiencing physical pain oneself.

The research suggests that empathy is a deliberative process that requires taking another person’s perspective rather than being an instinctive, automatic process."

“Most previous studies focused only on the points of similarity between these two distinct experiences in a few isolated brain regions while ignoring dissimilarities. Our new study used a more granular analysis method,” said Anjali Krishnan, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral research associate in the at CU-Boulder while the research was conducted. She is currently an assistant professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

This new analysis method identified an empathy-predictive brain pattern that can be applied to obtain a brain-related ‘vicarious pain score,’ opening new possibilities for measuring the strength of activity in brain systems that contribute to empathy.

The results may open new avenues of inquiry into how the brain regions involved in empathy help humans relate to others when they see others experience different types of pain. Future studies may also explore the factors that influence one’s ability to adopt another’s perspective and whether it might be possible to improve this ability.

Co-authors of the new research include Choong-Wan Woo and Marina López-Solà of CU-Boulder; Luke Chang of Dartmouth College; Luka Ruzic of Duke University; Xiaosi Gu of the University of Texas at Dallas; Philip Jackson of Université Laval (Canada); Jesús Pujol of Hospital del Mar (Spain); and Jin Fan of Queens College of the City University of New York.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided funding for the study.

Trent Knoss is a science editor at the .

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