Soothing the Threatened Brain: Leveraging Contact Comfort with Emotionally Focused Therapy

Social relationships are tightly linked to health and well-being. Recent work suggests that social relationships can even serve vital emotion regulation functions by minimizing threat-related neural activity. But relationship distress remains a significant public health problem in North America and elsewhere. A promising approach to helping couples both resolve relationship distress and nurture effective interpersonal functioning is Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples (EFT), a manualized, empirically supported therapy that is strongly focused on repairing adult attachment bonds. We sought to examine a neural index of social emotion regulation as a potential mediator of the effects of EFT. Specifically, we examined the effectiveness of EFT for modifying the social regulation of neural threat responding using an fMRI-based handholding procedure. Results suggest that EFT altered the brain\u27s representation of threat cues in the presence of a romantic partner. EFT-related changes during stranger handholding were also observed, but stranger effects were dependent upon self-reported relationship quality. EFT also appeared to increase threat-related brain activity in regions associated with self-regulation during the no-handholding condition. These findings provide a critical window into the regulatory mechanisms of close relationships in general and EFT in particular

Reinforcement Schedules Moderate the Neural Response and Attachment Associations to Faces

Investigation of the ERP and word association correlates of variable-ratio operant conditioning of faces via a threat-support seeking paradigm

Discrepancy and evaluation in romantic relationships: testing the emotion in relationships model.

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2009. Major: Psychology. Advisors: Ellen Berscheid, Jeffry Simpson. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 101 pages, appendices A-J.This paper is a test of Ellen Berscheid's Emotion in Relationships Model (ERM; Berscheid, 1983; Berscheid & Ammazzalorso, 2001). This model is based primarily on the Discrepancy/Evaluation Theory of emotion propsed by George Mandler (1975; 1990a). The ERM predicts that emotion in interpersonal relationships occurs when our relationship partner violates our expectancies and interrupts our behavioral sequences. This expectancy violation leads to arousal. Cognitive evaluation of the situation then either simultaneously or subsequently determines whether the violation is positive or negative based on whether it provides an opportunity to promote the individual's welfare or poses a threat to the individual's welfare. The ERM also expands upon Mandler's ideas by formulating hypotheses related to the infrastructure of the relationship, specifically how interdependent relationship partners are. This paper provides strong evidence for the expectancy - arousal relationship in an experimental paradigm that tests people in intact relationships, using a real time interaction between the participant's and their partners. The ERM is well supported by the data and evidence for a variety of expectancy sources such as the partner's past behavior, social norms, individual differences in attachment history, and relationship interdpendence or behavioral closeness is gleaned and discussed

Toward a Radically Embodied Neuroscience of Attachment and Relationships?

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982) posits the existence of internal working models as a foundational feature of human bonds. Radical embodied approaches instead suggest that cognition requires no computation or representation, favoring a cognition situated in a body in an environmental context with affordances for action (Barrett, 2011; Chemero, 2009; Wilson & Golonka, 2013). We explore whether embodied approaches to social soothing, interpersonal warmth, separation distress, and support seeking could replace representational constructs such as internal working models with a view of relationship cognition anchored in the resources afforded to the individual by their brain, body, and environment in interaction. We review the neurobiological bases for social attachments and relationships and attempt to delineate how these systems overlap or don’t with more basic physiological systems in ways that support or contradict a radical embodied explanation. We suggest that many effects might be the result of the fact that relationship cognition depends on and emerges out of the action of neural systems that regulate several clearly physically grounded systems. For example, the neuropeptide oxytocin appears to be central to attachment and pair-bond behavior (Carter & Keverne, 2002) and is implicated in social thermoregulation more broadly, being necessary for maintaining a warm body temperature as has been discovered in rats (Kasahara et al., 2007) and humans (Beck et al., 1979). Finally, we discuss the most challenging issues around taking a radically embodied perspective on social relationships. We find the most crucial challenge in individual differences in support seeking and responses to social contact, which have long been thought to be a function of representational structures in the mind (e.g., Baldwin, 1995). Together we entertain the thought to explain such individual differences without mediating representations or computations. This paper was published in Frontiers: Beckes, L., IJzerman, H., & Tops, M. (2015). Toward a radically embodied neuroscience of attachment and relationships. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 9

Toward a Radically Embodied Neuroscience of Attachment and Relationships?

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982) posits the existence of internal working models as a foundational feature of human bonds. Radical embodied approaches instead suggest that cognition requires no computation or representation, favoring a cognition situated in a body in an environmental context with affordances for action (Barrett, 2011; Chemero, 2009; Wilson & Golonka, 2013). We explore whether embodied approaches to social soothing, interpersonal warmth, separation distress, and support seeking could replace representational constructs such as internal working models with a view of relationship cognition anchored in the resources afforded to the individual by their brain, body, and environment in interaction. We review the neurobiological bases for social attachments and relationships and attempt to delineate how these systems overlap or don’t with more basic physiological systems in ways that support or contradict a radical embodied explanation. We suggest that many effects might be the result of the fact that relationship cognition depends on and emerges out of the action of neural systems that regulate several clearly physically grounded systems. For example, the neuropeptide oxytocin appears to be central to attachment and pair-bond behavior (Carter & Keverne, 2002) and is implicated in social thermoregulation more broadly, being necessary for maintaining a warm body temperature as has been discovered in rats (Kasahara et al., 2007) and humans (Beck et al., 1979). Finally, we discuss the most challenging issues around taking a radically embodied perspective on social relationships. We find the most crucial challenge in individual differences in support seeking and responses to social contact, which have long been thought to be a function of representational structures in the mind (e.g., Baldwin, 1995). Together we entertain the thought to explain such individual differences without mediating representations or computations. This paper was published in Frontiers: Beckes, L., IJzerman, H., & Tops, M. (2015). Toward a radically embodied neuroscience of attachment and relationships. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 9

The social regulation of threat-related attentional disengagement in highly anxious individuals

Social support may normalize stress reactivity among highly anxious individuals, yet little research has examined anxious reactions in social contexts. We examined the role of both state and trait anxiety in the link between social support and the neural response to threat. We employed an fMRI paradigm in which participants faced the threat of electric shock under three conditions: alone, holding a stranger’s hand, and holding a friend’s hand. We found significant interactions between trait anxiety and threat condition in regions including the hypothalamus, putamen, precentral gyrus, and precuneus. Analyses revealed that highly trait anxious individuals were less active in each of these brain regions while alone in the scanner—a pattern that suggests the attentional disengagement associated with the perception of high intensity threats. These findings support past research suggesting that individuals high in anxiety tend to have elevated neural responses to mild or moderate threats but paradoxically lower responses to high intensity threats, suggesting a curvilinear relationship between anxiety and threat responding. We hypothesize that for highly anxious individuals, shock cues were perceived as highly threatening if they were alone in the scanner, possibly due to attentional disengagement, but this perception was mitigated if they were holding someone’s hand. The disengagement seen in highly anxious people under conditions of high perceived threat may thus be alleviated by social proximity. These results suggest a role for social support in regulating emotional responses in anxious individuals, which may aid in treatment outcomes