Neuroscience part 3: Showing anxious clients how to reframe their negative self-beliefs through reappraisal strategies can help them better control their emotional responses, says scientist and NLP practitioner Dr Trish Riddell
I’m often asked to speak on the neuroscience of learning and memory, or of coaching. Despite studying the brain for about 30 years, I still don’t always believe that I’m qualified to talk on these subjects. A little bit of me worries that someone will ask a question for which I have no answer, that someone in the audience will know more than me and catch me out, or that people just won’t believe me.
Negative self-beliefs such as these cause us to filter information so we misrepresent it in a negative manner. Rationally, I know my worries are all in my head, and I draw confidence from the fact that none of these scenarios has taken place in all the time I’ve been speaking.
I also know that being anxious about public speaking is common and that it’s just as likely that the talk will go well.
My mildly negative self-belief has never stopped me from sharing my knowledge with people. However, for some people, negative self-beliefs prevent them from doing things they have the capacity to do (and often do well) if they were prepared to try.
Identifying methods
As a neuroscientist, I am interested in the mechanisms in the brain that might result in the difference between having a mild negative self-belief that you can override, and having such a strong negative belief that it stops you achieving your potential.
More importantly, if we can identify this difference, does it help us to develop better methods for overcoming negative self-beliefs?
One potential difference between people with strong negative self-beliefs and those without, is the ability to use reappraisal when thinking about the bad things that happen.
Examples of positive reappraisal are the ability to treat the bad things in life as learning opportunities; to understand that other people have been through the same (or worse) and survived; or to realise that while things are bad at the moment, you will be able to look back on the experience and see how you grew as a result, for example. People who are good at reappraisal also have increased immune responses, and are likely to fight off minor infections better. So good things may come from bad!
We can gain perspective on how differences in attitude are created by looking at people who have much stronger negative self-beliefs. Several studies have used brain imaging to look at the differences between people with social anxiety disorders compared with non-anxious control subjects.
Gaining control
One question that has been asked is whether these groups differ in their use of reappraisal. When I think I might not be expert enough to speak on topics about the brain, I remind myself of the evidence against this: my years gathering expertise, the reactions I have had to my talks and the amazing people that respect my opinion. This helps me keep negative self-belief under control. What happens, though, when people with social anxiety reappraise negative self-beliefs?
A recent study by Goldin, Manber-Ball, Werner, Heimberg and Gross (2009) from the University of Stanford, used fMRI to look at this question.
Participants were interviewed to provide information on some events in their own lives that produced negative self-beliefs. They were then taught to reappraise these events by reframing the event. For instance, if the belief was: “I am not intelligent enough to do this”, the reframe might be to remember that “that is a thought, not a fact”, or “there are times when you have been intelligent enough”.
Brain function
Brain imaging was conducted during production of negative self-beliefs and when participants were told either to react to these beliefs (increasing the intensity) or reframe the beliefs (decreasing the intensity).
Both groups showed immediate activation of the amygdala (the part of the brain that represents threats in the environment). However, the anxious group showed greater activation than the non-anxious group to the negative self-beliefs (as has been found in previous studies).
Thus, people who are anxious have stronger emotional reactions to negative self-beliefs than people who are not. No surprises there, then.
What is more interesting is the difference in brain function between the groups when the negative self-beliefs were reappraised. The non-anxious group showed earlier and greater brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex than the non-anxious control group.
This part of the brain is known to add context to events, and so helps to regulate our emotional responses.
In comparison, the anxious group showed greater, but later, activity in the inferior parietal cortex. This part of the brain is associated with attention.
Thus, it seems that the anxious group initially tried to avoid the negative self-belief, but then attended to it more (this is like trying not to think about a white bear – trying to suppress the thought can make you attend to it more).
Some strategies
Of the two techniques for controlling emotional responses, suppression seems to make things worse, and reappraisal seems to make things better.
How might this help people with strong negative self-beliefs to be better able to manage these? The people with better control over negative self-belief had two advantages – they responded less to the negative emotion, and they had faster cognitive control of that emotion.
It can be helpful to explain this to clients whose self-beliefs affect their lives. Teaching them and having them practise reappraisal strategies would provide them with the mechanisms to reduce these negative feelings so that they become less intrusive (less of a white bear).
Indeed, studies that have trained people with negative self-beliefs in reappraisal have been shown to reduce the response to negative self-beliefs in the amygdala – back to the level found in non-anxious controls.
Dr Trish Riddell is professor of applied neuroscience at the School of Psychology and CLS at the University of Reading
Volume 7, issue 6