Scientific American Mind 2022 09-10.pdf

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 | MIND.SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM
PLUS:
IMPROVING TEENS’
MENTAL HEALTH
THE BRAIN-IMMUNE
SYSTEM LINK
WHAT MAKES A
GOOD GROUP
LEADER?
Protect
Your
Happiness
Social media platforms
are designed to suck us in,
but too much time spent on
them can upset our moods
WITH COVERAGE FROM
FROM
THE
EDITOR
Protect Your Mental Health
We all have the power to improve our lives, even a little bit. Research shows that two hours a week
in nature can reduce stress and blood pressure. Maintaining an active social calendar prevents cogni-
tive decline, well into old age. And for some, regular strenuous exercise appears to stave off depression
as effectively as some pharmaceutical treatments. In this issue,
Scientific American
column editor
Daisy Yuhas spoke with Amanda Baughan, a researcher in computer and human interactions at the
University of Washington about the ways that social media can detract from self-esteem and life satis-
faction (see “Why Social Media Makes People Unhappy—And Simple Ways to Fix It”). It’s become clear
that our digital interactions powerfully affect mood and quality of life, and so boundaries around social
media are just as important as any self-care routine.
It's been a joy bringing you the most important stories from
Scientific American
covering the remark-
able human mind. We editors are continually evaluating how best to deliver the crucial coverage of
these topics, and as we move forward, these PDFs you have enjoyed will become part of
Scientific Amer-
ican’s
core digital subscription and will no longer be delivered as separate publications. Keep an eye on
your in-box for more details, but I think you’ll be excited for what’s coming, and you can always find as
many fascinating articles on the topics that intrigue you most on our Web site and in our newsletters.
Thanks for reading!
Andrea Gawrylewski
Senior Editor, Collections
editors@sciam.com
Liz Tormes
On the Cover
Social media platforms are
designed to suck us in, but
too much time spent on
them can upset our moods.
Thomas Barwick/Getty Images
2
WHAT’S
INSIDE
September–
October
2022
Volume 33
•
Number 5
Nicolas McComber/Getty Images
Oscar Wong/Getty Images
NEWS
4.
A Single, Quick “Mindset” Exercise
Protects against Adolescent Stress
Reframing erroneous beliefs alleviates the
emotional upheavals that beset young people
on the cusp of adulthood
6.
Suicides among Black People May Be
Vastly Undercounted
Lack of data explains why
8.
People May Pick Friends Who Smell
Like Them
Similar body odors might determine
if two strangers will “click”
10.
Why Social Media Makes People Unhappy−
And Simple Ways to Fix It
Research suggests platform designs make
us lose track of time spent on them and
can heighten conflicts, and then we feel upset
with ourselves
13.
Guardians of the Brain
The nervous and immune systems are tightly
intertwined. Deciphering their chatter might help
address many brain disorders and diseases
19.
Mass Shootings Leave Lasting
Psychological Wounds
Tragedies such as the ones in Uvalde, Tex.,
and Buffalo, N.Y., can lead to major depression,
PTSD and other lingering mental distress
among survivors
FEATURES
Mads Perch/Getty Images
23.
When
Things Feel Unreal,
Is That a Delusion or an Insight?
The psychiatric syndrome called derealization
raises profound moral and philosophical questions
25.
Science
Shows How to Protect Kids’
Mental Health, but It's Being Ignored
Yes, the COVID pandemic has made the problem
worse. But our teens were in trouble long
before that
28.
How
the Brain Tells Apart Important
and Unimportant Sensations
Several recent studies point to a small, long-
overlooked structure in the brain stem as
a crucial gatekeeper for the body’s signals
31.
How
Dominant Leaders Go Wrong
Highly assertive, confident individuals may foster
a selfish culture that hurts productivity
34.
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
Anticipated blackness tricks your pupils
into reacting
ILLUSIONS
OPINION
3
NEWS
A Single, Quick
“Mindset” Exercise
Protects against
Adolescent Stress
Reframing erroneous beliefs
alleviates the emotional upheavals
that beset young people on the cusp
of adulthood
Close your eyes. Cast your mind
back to high school and a high-
stakes moment in your most difficult
course with your toughest teacher.
I’ll go first: Senior year, Mr. Trice, the
final exam in AP Physics. I remember
where I was sitting. I remember
staring at the paper, feeling I didn’t
know any of the answers. My heart
was pounding; my palms were
sweating. I was certain I would fail.
There wasn’t a happy ending for
me about overcoming adversity. I was
able to discard my final test score by
taking the actual AP exam, which
I also bombed. Not surprisingly, I think
of that experience as all bad, an
enduring embarrassment. But maybe
it didn’t have to be that way. Recalling
such an experience in a new light is
step one of a promising new inter-
vention designed to help adolescents
reframe stress and anxiety. Step two
is equipping them with clear, accessi-
ble information so that the next time
they feel that way, they will see the
experience as a path to learning and
growth and even a resource to thrive.
A paper published on July 6 in
Nature
reports that this one-time
online intervention, which takes
about 30 minutes, improved the way
young people thought about stressful
events (such as my physics test) and
their fretful responses (such as my
racing heart). The intervention
combines growth mindsets, the belief
that ability is not fixed but can be
developed with effort and support,
and stress-can-be-enhancing
mindsets, the belief that physiological
responses to stress can be an asset.
Milko/Getty Images
4
NEWS
As students work through the
exercise themselves, they read
information about how the brain
builds on experience and how the
body uses stress—a pounding heart
delivers extra oxygenated blood to
the brain, the better to help you think.
They see how it works in the real
world: there is a story about a
calculus professor who greets
students on the first day of class
with a reminder of the frustrations
they will surely feel and the reassur-
ance that struggle is learning. The
intervention hints at strategies for
success in stressful situations
(“Remind yourself that feelings of
confusion and struggle when doing
difficult schoolwork won’t last
forever”). And it asks participants
to write about what they might do
differently next time.
Rigorously tested in multiple
experiments involving thousands
of high school and college students
before and during the pandemic, the
brief, scalable intervention appears
to shift something fundamental: our
interpretation of the world around us
and our response to it. Compared
with those in a control group, partici-
pants in the intervention group
thought about stress differently,
turning it into a means of energizing
the motivation to accomplish a goal.
But the intervention also changed
their physiological responses for the
better, triggering the body to respond
to events as a challenge rather than
a threat. It lowered cortisol levels and
improved cardiovascular functioning.
It also lessened overall anxiety levels,
with lasting effects in some cases.
“Difficulty and struggle are your
friend,” says Christopher Bryan, a
social psychologist at the University
of Texas at Austin and an author of
the new study. Those experiences
don’t feel good in the moment, he
says, “but it’s the path anyone who
ever became truly excellent at
anything had to travel.”
The intervention is not just a
hypothetical exercise. The stress
that adolescents feel has reached
alarming proportions. Last Decem-
ber, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy
declared adolescent mental health
a public health crisis exacerbated by
the pandemic, and anxiety disorders
lead the mental health challenges
faced by young people. “If you can
shift your mindset about what
anxiety is and what it isn’t, how to
be anxious in the right way, every-
thing changes,” says Tracy Den-
nis-Tiwary, a professor of psychology
at the City University of New York’s
Hunter College and author of
Future
Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You
(Even though It Feels Bad),
who
wasn’t involved in the study. “This
paper is a beautiful empirical demon-
stration of that potential.”
Criticisms of some previous mind-
set research emphasized the lack of
statistical rigor or meaningful effects
of an intervention on participants.
The new paper uses Bayesian
analysis, which is widely considered
a more reliable measure of the effects
of behavioral interventions than other
techniques, such as null hypothesis
tests of statistical significance. The
effect sizes—measuring how strong
a finding is—varied from small to large
across the six experiments. And as
would be expected, they were higher
in the laboratory experiments than in
the real world. But they were consis-
tently meaningful. “[The study] had
broad, multilevel impact on important
and well-validated indices of stress
and anxiety,” Dennis-Tiwary says.
Intriguingly, the intervention did not
work for everyone in the same way.
“The most vulnerable people in the
most stressful time benefit the most,”
says David Yeager, a developmental
psychologist at U.T. Austin and a
co-author of the paper. He emphasiz-
es that the intervention is not intend-
ed to be used for survivors of trauma
and abuse, but administering it broadly
does no harm. In addition to address-
ing mental health issues, a goal of
the intervention is to help adoles-
cents engage with challenging
courses and projects. In a charter
school in one of the experiments,
63 percent of participants passed
their math and science classes,
compared with 47 percent of
students in a control group.
The researchers found that they
had to rework a previous growth
mindset intervention. That earlier
exercise proved effective, especially
for low-achieving students, in a
national study of more than 12,000
students reported in
Nature
in 2019.
But it didn’t consider the visceral
butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling.
“That’s a limitation of previous
mindset interventions because we
forgot about or didn’t tap into those
stressful emotions,” Yeager says.
The usefulness of the new “syner-
gistic” intervention could be consider-
able, he says, although more study
of its lasting effects is warranted. The
exercise is currently centered on
5

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