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Jim Coan and the Hand Holding Experiment

from VIRGINIA Magazine

Coan and others seek to detect and chart how moods and emotions are embodied in the brain, to map the nexus where the cognitive and the affective meet. Emotion, Coan says, is an organized set of physiological and behavioral responses to environmental stimuli. His research combines various disciplines to look at "emotional expression and individual emotion-regulation capabilities, as well as the social regulation of neural processes underlying emotional responses."

uvamagazine.org/features/article/the_wired_mind/

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Lending a hand: social regulation of the neural response to threat

Affiliation.

• 1 Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 22904, USA. [email protected]
• PMID: 17201784
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x

Social contact promotes enhanced health and well-being, likely as a function of the social regulation of emotional responding in the face of various life stressors. For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 16 married women were subjected to the threat of electric shock while holding their husband's hand, the hand of an anonymous male experimenter, or no hand at all. Results indicated a pervasive attenuation of activation in the neural systems supporting emotional and behavioral threat responses when the women held their husband's hand. A more limited attenuation of activation in these systems occurred when they held the hand of a stranger. Most strikingly, the effects of spousal hand-holding on neural threat responses varied as a function of marital quality, with higher marital quality predicting less threat-related neural activation in the right anterior insula, superior frontal gyrus, and hypothalamus during spousal, but not stranger, hand-holding.

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I Need to Hold Your Hand: The Social Regulation of Emotion

• APS 19th Annual Convention (2007)
• Emotional Control
• Social Psychology

Have you ever wondered why people surrounded by friends or family appear happier and healthier? Or why a mother’s hand so quickly soothes a scared child? University of Virginia researcher James Coan addressed these and similar questions in his invited talk, “Toward a Neuroscience of the Social Regulation of Emotion,” at the APS 19th Annual Convention in Washington, DC. He also discussed the growing body of research showing that social contact serves as a buffer between life’s stressors and our health and happiness.

From an evolutionary perspective, Coan pointed out that, “in many situations, negative emotions are very useful,” and that an intense initial physiological response to threat most likely saved our ancestors’ lives by allowing them to escape from predators in the savannah. However, this interaction between fight or flight response and our environment has become more complex as humans have evolved. Stress has become a chronic factor in our daily lives, putting us at greater risk for heart disease, impaired immune function, and even an overall decline in cognition.

This is where back rubs and beach vacations come in handy, right? Well, Coan was quick to point out that humans are, in fact, not the only mammals who take personal days. Coan referenced a recent study that claims that maternal presence reduces fear in infant “critters” across several species. More specifically, grooming, familiarity, and close proximity not only reduce glucocorticoid levels in some animals — reducing their individual stress reactivity — but increase the animals’ willingness to explore new environments.

Working at the intersection of social psychology and neuroscience, Coan uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to assess the effects of social contact on health and well-being. In one such study, Coan and colleague John Gottman measured the degree to which a humorous statement by a wife would reduce her husband’s heart rate during an argument. The results show that husband’s hearts, whether happy, unhappy, or divorced, benefit from a bit of laughter during the tiff.

Husbands are not the only ones who benefit from spousal contact. In a study published in Psychological Science (December 2006), Coan focused on the regulatory effect of hand-holding during a stressful event. Coan had 16 married women undergo an fMRI, during which he administered a small electric shock while each woman held her husband’s hand, a stranger’s hand, or no hand at all. Women reported less unpleasantness while holding their husband’s hand and even slightly lower stress levels while holding the hand of a stranger. These results could not be chalked up to politeness either, as fMRI scans confirmed their feelings.

Most strikingly, the effects of spousal handholding varied depending on marital quality, with happier couples feeling the most relief. The regulatory effect was so strong that one woman emerged from the fMRI sobbing. Initially misunderstanding the tears, “I thought for sure I was going to get shut down,” Coan said. Fortunately, they were tears of joy, as the woman recalled holding her husband’s hand during labor many years ago.

Coan said that some of his future research might focus on the effects of meditation, especially mindfulness meditation, in which a per-son becomes intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, although for now he remains focused on relationship quality and its vital role in warding off harmful health effects from stressors. But his research provides some clues into behavioral changes — for example, strengthening the bond between partners and friends — that can increase not just our quality of life but stress-related health conditions such as heart disease and others.

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A&S Magazine November-December 2020

Holding Hands - An Innovative Approach to Teaching

Within the New Curriculum, a Psychology Professor Teaches the Scientific Value of Human Contact

By: Lorenzo Perez

University of Virginia psychology professor James Coan has vivid memories of the massive heart attack that almost killed him, the “widow maker” that had doctors rushing to put a stent in his heart before it was too late. Two years later, he says he will never forget the soothing physical contact of the nurse who grabbed his hand and stroked his forehead when he feared he was moments from dying.

That experience, along with Coan’s neuroscience research on the brain mechanisms that link social support to our health and wellbeing, inspired him to design “Why We Hold Hands,” an innovative, popular new course for first-year students. 

The creative design of Coan’s course reflects the College of Arts & Sciences’ new approach to a liberal arts curriculum. First-year students take innovative Engagements seminars developed and taught by some of the College’s top faculty. The Dean’s Office typically appoints these College Fellows for two-year terms and encourages them to develop their dream courses in collaboration with colleagues from other academic disciplines. Philanthropic support funds others to teach the Fellows’ departmental courses while they focus on providing an enduring educational foundation for incoming students.

The unique topics selected by Coan and the other Fellows introduce first-year students to the standards of critical thinking, scientific research and reasoned debate that will guide the four years of their education on Grounds. In “Why We Hold Hands,” Coan combines the scientific underpinnings of how — at the elemental level of brain function — people soothe each other’s fears and anxieties with a broader exploration of how handholding and social relationships affect our sensory experiences, the lengths of our lives and everything in between. 

Plus, the value of singing with one another. (More on that later.) 

“We start the class talking in broad strokes about the methods of science, its social norms and the ethics of those norms, as well as some of the nitty gritty methods applied to behavioral ecology and the evolution of human brains,” says Coan, whose influential work has been covered in prominent journals like Science and Nature , as well as by The New York Times and other national media outlets.

University of Virginia psychology professor James Coan teaches a popular Engagements seminar based on his research on the brain mechanisms that link social support to our health and wellbeing. (Photo Credit: Stephanie Gross — http://www.stephaniegross.com )

“But we also have to study human cooperation, we have to study game theory, we have to study the evolution of social norms to begin to understand why one hand would clasp another, because it doesn’t have an obvious function in and of itself.”

Engaging the creative side of science

During a semester when pandemic restrictions require holding the class online, the irony of studying and discussing the fundamental value of human contact and real-world social interactions is not lost on Coan’s students. Yet, through the writing of personal reflection essays, poems and other creative projects inspired by the scientific readings — some of which Coan, an accomplished illustrator, has illustrated in graphic novel form — students say they absorb the seminar’s complicated scientific principles much more deeply.

The “Why We Hold Hands” class includes a series of scientific lessons illustrated in graphic novel form by Prof. James Coan, an accomplished illustrator.

“Getting in touch with my creative side and combining that with science is not something I’ve necessarily done before, but that was something I really enjoyed about Prof. Coan’s class,” says Carolyn Grimm, a first year from Northern Virginia whose family moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands six years ago. “The discussion portion of the class has been very engaging also, because it’s made me develop opinions about what we’re learning. As a result, I’ve retained the information so much more, because it’s something I enjoy.”

That’s the value of the New Curriculum and its interdisciplinary approach, Coan says.“Chopping up human intellectual activities into these different departments created the illusion that there was something really different between disciplines, and it represents a misunderstanding, at the very least, of science and how science is done,” Coan says.

"Science is fundamentally a creative process, not unlike writing poetry or composing music. You have to sit there as a scientist and repeatedly, over and over, through your career, imagine the way that the world could be, that you don’t know is true or not yet. So you’re basically using your imagination and generating these hypotheses and these models to envision a world that you don't know exists yet. And that’s hard, creative work. — Psychology professor James Coan

Second-year student Xavon Stanley says he was attracted to Coan’s seminar last spring because of his interest in evolutionary biology. A first-generation college student from Martinsville, Virginia, Stanley is considering pursuing a master’s degree in education after completing his undergraduate degree in biology. 

“I think Prof. Coan’s class gave me a much more personal appreciation for a lot of the things that we take for granted about our evolutionary history as a species,” Stanley says. “If you take a traditional evolutionary psychology class, you’re going to learn the scientific theories behind everything  — which you get in this class — but you’re not necessarily learning the things that relate to your personal life.

“Prof. Coan’s class definitely made me appreciate social interaction and offered a lot more understanding that being social is something that is ingrained in our nature. It’s one of the things that makes humans, our ability to share ideas and our ability to even express intimacy on levels that aren't necessarily physical.”

Bonding students through song

Another teaching innovation introduced in the seminar is an invitation for Coan’s students to sing aloud, in front of their classmates. The “assignment” was inspired by the videos Coan saw from Italy, with people stepping out on their balconies to lift the morale of their neighbors by singing and playing instruments during the pandemic lockdown.

At the suggestion of his young daughter, Coan asks his students, one by one,  to sing “Ah, Poor Bird,” an English children’s song. 

“It's not really a digression, because singing, like handholding, is one of the things that we’ve come to understand that humans do to signal cooperative potential, bonding, closeness and solidarity in dealing with everything from war to famine to natural disasters,” Coan says.

This semester, with students taking the class remotely, Coan had students send him audio files they had recorded of themselves singing “Ah, Poor Bird.” 

“When we saw people in Italy going out onto their balconies to sing ‘Volare’ or some other inspirational song, the point was to stand out in solidarity with people who are identified as part of your extended family, your extended, secular platonic family and sing together. When we sing in my class, it changes everything. It’s this tremendous moment of bonding,” Coan says. “Doing it by Zoom now, it’s trickier, because they have to send me files of themselves singing, and then I put the files together and send it back to them. They get to experience themselves singing with everyone else then, and it matters to them. It suddenly feels a little bit more like the class is part of a group for them.”

First year Carolyn Grimm says she enjoyed how Prof. Coan’s seminar pushed her to get in touch with her creative side while studying a scientific topic. (Photo courtesy of Carolyn Grimm.)

Grimm says it was “a little scary” the first time hearing the chorus of her and her classmates’ recorded voices that Coan had pulled together. 

“Some people were a little off tune, some are a little off beat,” she says with a laugh. “But at the same time, it was really cool, because it did feel like we were all together.”

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‘Shocking’ New Research Finds Friendships Are Key to Good Health

• By Jane Kelly , [email protected]

University of Virginia researchers have for the first time revealed brain imaging evidence that supports what experts have long hypothesized: that people with strong relationships report better general health than those who do not.

Researchers in professor James Coan’s clinical psychology lab zeroed in on the hypothalamus, which regulates stress hormones, to reveal how the brain responds differently to the threat of electrical shock when a trusted loved one is near.

While lying in a brain scanner, subjects encountered three scenarios: Holding the hand of a relational partner, holding the hand of a stranger or holding no hand at all. In each scenario, a screen in the machine visible to the test subjects displayed a blue circle, which test subjects were told corresponded to no threat of shock, or a red ‘X,’ which they were told indicated a 20 percent chance that they would receive a minor shock to their ankle. Indeed, shocks were delivered 20 percent of the time.

Psychology professor James Coan leads UVA’s Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. (Photo by Dan Addison, University Communications)

In addition to the imaging, study participants filled out a standardized health survey in which they rated their general health. Although the survey is subjective, Coan said it correlates strongly with objective measures derived from physician reports.

“What we found was that the less active your hypothalamus was when you are under threat of electric shock in the brain scanner while you are holding the hand of a relational partner, the better general health you report,” Coan said.

Nothing similar was found during stranger handholding, or while subjects faced the shock threat while alone.

“This is the first time this hypothalamus-health link has ever been reported using data from the functioning brain. The reason this is really important is that people have hypothesized, literally for decades, that we should find this, but no one has ever found this until now.”

The study, which is part of a longitudinal inquiry into how relationships affect human health, involved 75 people from the Charlottesville community. Nearly 40 percent of participants were African-American; all came from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. “One of the things that distinguishes this study is that it’s fairly well representative of Charlottesville and the country,” Coan said.

The researchers collected data over the course of four years. The study results are being published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

What the researchers were looking for in using magnetic resonance imaging was increased blood flow to the hypothalamus.

“The reason more blood is flowing to a structure is because that structure has eaten up a bunch of resources and it needs to be replenished,” Coan said. “It’s metabolized a bunch of material and it needs more food, if you will.”

When the body is under stress, the brain releases hormones like cortisol and epinephrine into the bloodstream. The trouble is the flow of those hormones removes resources from the immune system. In the long term, that cycle can lead to poor health.

“When our social support system inhibits our hypothalamus’ response to stress, we release fewer, potentially destructive stress hormones and have a stronger immune system,” Coan said.

Previous research has shown that frayed social networks can have deadly consequences. “We have all these public service announcements about exercise and not smoking, but social isolation is more deadly than all of those things,” Coan said. “The more socially isolated you are, the more likely you are to die of anything at any time, no matter where you live or what culture you inhabit.”

So simple hand-holding can be very impactful.

“Having that hand to hold signals that you have resources – you have safety – so any particular stressor is just not as stressful as it might have been,” Coan said.

“What we are finding here is that if our relationship is good and we are with someone we trust, we can say, ‘Hypothalamus, you don’t have to work as hard right now. Yeah, there is a threat, but chill out – the threat is not as threatening as if you were alone.’ Your friend will help you deal with that threat; therefore you can work less hard to deal with it, and that savings will keep you healthier in the long run.”

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May 26, 2017

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Holding Loved One's Hand Can Calm Jittery Neurons

By Benedict Carey

• Jan. 31, 2006

Married women under extreme stress who reach out and hold their husbands' hands feel immediate relief, neuroscientists have found in what they say is the first study of how human touch affects the neural response to threatening situations.

The soothing effect of the touch could be seen in scans of areas deep in the brain that are involved in registering emotional and physical alarm.

The women received significantly more relief from their husbands' touch than from a stranger's, and those in particularly close marriages were most deeply comforted by their husbands' hands, the study found.

The findings help explain one of the longest-standing puzzles in social science: why married men and women are healthier on average than their peers. Husbands and wives who are close tend to limit each other's excesses like drinking and smoking but not enough to account for their better health compared with singles, researchers say.

"This is very imaginative, cutting-edge science, linking this complex response to stress to different areas of the brain," said Dr. Ronald Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study.

In the study, to appear in the journal Psychological Science this year, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Virginia used newspaper advertisements to recruit 16 couples from the Madison, Wis., region. The couples were all rated as very happily married on an in-depth questionnaire asking about coping styles, intimacy and mutual interests.

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The power of love

James Coan leads a University of Virginia lab that explores how social relationships protect us against stress and keep us healthy

By Chris Palmer

June 2019, Vol 50, No. 6

Print version: page 68

11 min read

• Parenting, Families, Relationships

A disagreement with your co-workers leaves you rattled, and on the way home you nearly have an accident. You walk into the house and realize you forgot to stop at the market to pick up dinner. As your frustration mounts, your partner comes through the door and with a hug and a few words lifts you up. You've found the strength to get through the end of a bad day.

Explaining this simple phenomenon—the power of human connection—has been a central focus of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience (VAN) Laboratory at the University of Virginia (UVA).

High-quality social relationships have long been known to reduce stress and to be associated with longer, happier and healthier lives. But the neurophysiology underlying these links has remained elusive. Over the past quarter century, James Coan, PhD, psychology professor at UVA and director of the VAN Lab, has been synthesizing and expanding upon what he's learned in the labs of world-class experts in the fields of brain plasticity, social relationships and functional brain imaging to better understand this mechanism.

"A baseline assumption your brain has is that you'll be around people and have social relationships," says VAN Lab graduate student Sara Medina-DeVilliers. "Anytime we don't have people to rely on and we're confronted with stress, our body and our brain have to use more resources to meet goals and confront various sources of stress. We're trying to figure out how that works."

One big clue has come from Coan's discovery that merely holding a loved one's hand offers protection against the stress of an impending electric shock. Coan and the members of the lab have gone on to demonstrate this hand-holding effect across a variety of social relationships, including romantic partners, close friends, and parents and their children.

Coan and the rest of the lab—including two graduate students, two undergraduate students and a lab coordinator—are now using EEG and fMRI to examine the neurophysiology of social relationships and their potential impact on health and well-being, with specific experiments directed at depression and immune system disorders such as lupus.

"There's great power in social relationships," Coan says. "Interventions to support healthy, loving relationships have real potential to prevent and treat a wide variety of medical and psychological maladies."

Now, Coan is disseminating his findings by writing a book about his research on social relationships, hosting a podcast, and writing op-eds for The Washington Post and other outlets on the harm being done by the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents at the border. "This is something I feel very passionate about," he says.

Extra credit

Before training with some of the leading researchers in psychology, Coan wasn't sure he would even go to college. Neither of his parents attended college, and he spent his early 20's installing and repairing roofs in his native Spokane, Washington.

But when he grew bored with that job, Coan enrolled in community college and soon transferred to the University of Washington (UW). In his first quarter there, he found himself in a class taught by cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, PhD. At the time, in the early 1990s, Loftus was well known for her research on the misinformation effect, in which post-event information interferes with the memory of an original event, leading to inaccurate memories and in some cases even false memories of events that never took place. She would go on to provide contentious testimony in hundreds of criminal cases—including the O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy and Oklahoma City bombing trials—about the malleability of eyewitness testimony.

As an extra-credit assignment for Loftus's course, Coan used a novel methodology of his own invention to implant false memories in his 14-year-old brother—convincing him that he had gotten lost in a shopping mall when he was 5 years old.

The research, later refined with Loftus and published in the book "Implicit Memory and Metacognition," caused a sensation. By the summer of his first year at UW, Coan had been featured in The New York Times science section and New York magazine. "The experiment changed my life," he says. "Everyone has imposter syndrome at some point, but I had imposter syndrome squared, because of my background. This study completely changed my whole view of myself and of what was possible."

After graduating, Coan went to work as a lab coordinator for UW psychologist John Gottman, PhD, who ran the Newlywed Apartment Lab, which the media had dubbed the "Love Lab."

"We brought in couples several times a week and goaded them into fighting with each other while videotaping them and recording EKG and galvanic skin response data," Coan says. Using this data, Gottman and Coan built a model that predicted with greater than 80 percent accuracy which couples would divorce within the first five years of marriage ( Journal of Family Psychology , Vol. 14, No. 1, 2000).

After three years running Gottman's lab, Coan entered a doctoral program at the University of Arizona with neuropsychologist John Allen, PhD. Coan and Allen demonstrated that different sides of the frontal cortex could be activated by asking subjects to make facial expressions associated with different emotions ( Psychophysiology , Vol. 38, No. 6, 2001). Coan and Allen later found that differential activity in the right and left sides of the frontal cortex in the resting brain—referred to as frontal brain asymmetries—was associated with depression risk ( Journal of Abnormal Psychology , Vol. 119, No. 3, 2010).

Coan's work on frontal brain asymmetries caught the attention of Richard Davidson, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who had been one of the first to describe the phenomenon years earlier. Davidson invited Coan and Allen to write a chapter for a volume summarizing the state of frontal brain asymmetry research. Impressed by the chapter, Davidson offered Coan a postdoctoral research position in his lab in 2003. At the time, the lab was blossoming into one of the leading fMRI psychology labs as Davidson was just beginning a seminal collaboration with the Dalai Lama on studies of the neuroscience of meditation. "It was a very exciting time and was the start of a big change in my career," Coan says.

Lending a hand

After getting up to speed on fMRI, Coan began thinking about how to deploy such a powerful tool. Inspired by the work on romantic relationships that he had done with Gottman years before, Coan designed his hand-holding study. "I only had enough money to run about 15 subjects, and I thought, 'At the very least I better make sure that the effect is large,'" Coan says. "So, I selected a homogenous, all-white, middle-class sample of people in just absurdly happy relationships." The effect he saw was striking—in women who held hands with their spouses there was a strong attenuation of specific brain structures that mediate behavioral threat responses, meaning that the women felt more secure with their partners. In addition, Coan found the effect varied as a function of self-reported marital quality ( Psychological Science , Vol. 17, No. 12, 2006).

Soon after the hand-holding study was published, Coan joined the faculty at UVA and launched the VAN Lab, where he sought to replicate the study with a larger, more socioeconomically and racially diverse pool of participants. But because the UVA psychology department had no fMRI facilities, Coan had to scrounge for time on fMRI scanners in other departments. "We have a fantastic facility and multiple faculty who do fMRI now, but at the time it was a pretty lonely situation," Coan says. He found the hand-holding effect was just as strong in this diverse population, and his lab went on to document the effect in mother-child relationships as well ( PLOS ONE , Vol. 7, No. 12, 2012).

A few years later, in a collaboration with Susan Johnson, the developer of emotionally focused therapy (EFT) for couples, Coan recruited 22 couples who were very unhappy in their relationships and found that hand-holding did not protect them against the threat of shock at all. But after roughly 20 weeks of EFT, a type of therapy that is strongly focused on repairing adult attachment bonds, a significant hand-holding effect emerged in those couples ( PLOS ONE , Vol. 8, No. 11, 2013).

Coan and his students are also using the hand-holding paradigm to explore the link between social relationships and physical health. In 2017, they showed that the degree to which their hand-holding manipulation decreased stress-related activity in the hypothalamus, as measured by fMRI, predicted subjects' general health at a later time ( Psychosomatic Health , Vol. 79, No. 6, 2017). "Of course, that was something that was speculated about for a long time by [psychologist] Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and others," Coan says, referring to the proposed benefit of reducing hypothalamus activity to prevent it from dumping harmful levels of cortisol into the bloodstream. "Our study was the first time that anyone's ever seen that happening in vivo in the brain."

Perhaps influenced by his time in Davidson's lab, Coan, with support from the Mind and Life Institute, a nonprofit organization in Charlottesville, Virginia, has begun to explore the health benefits of the social aspects of group meditation. His team in the VAN Lab also recently secured a large grant from the Alliance for Lupus Research to use fMRI to investigate whether a popular mindfulness-based stress reduction method that emphasizes the maintenance and quality of social networks can limit the severity and frequency of lupus flare-ups.

While Coan's previous work has shown the positive effects of receiving social support, graduate student Medina-DeVilliers's doctoral research centers around EEG experiments with pairs of nurses and doctors exploring how giving support to the point of burnout can be harmful. Also riffing on the hand-holding paradigm was a project in which lab member Erin Maresh, PhD, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, showed that social anxiety and self-involvement interfere with the hand-holding effect.

Another interest of the VAN Lab is the effect of early social experiences on the developing brain. Former graduate student Marlen Gonzalez, PhD, now an assistant professor in human development at Cornell University, led an fMRI study that found people who grow up in distressed, high-crime neighborhoods tend to respond to potential rewards with increased activity in the nucleus accumbens and decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex ( Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience , Vol. 22, No. 10, 2016). This result suggests the brains of people in this population have been shaped to seek potential resources more intensely than people who grew up with more resources.

Speaking up

The media attention generated by Coan's discoveries led National Geographic television to ask him to serve as an expert on several episodes of the educational series "Brain Games" in 2014–15, in which he explained the psychology of concepts such as intuition and compassion.

Since then, Coan has branched out to other media. Since 2017, he has produced a roughly monthly podcast called "Circle of Willis," in which he interviews psychologists and other behavioral scientists studying a wide range of topics. The podcast originally grew out of his desire for a platform to discuss the replication crisis in psychology, but it quickly branched out. It took another turn last summer, when the Trump administration began separating children from their parents at the U.S. border.

Coan, shocked and wanting to do something, produced an episode of the podcast with experts who discussed what psychological research says about the effects of separating children from their parents. "It sort of went viral," he says. "I was told members of Congress and people at the U.N. listened to it." Before long, The Washington Post asked Coan to write an op-ed on child separation. He went on to write more op-eds and blog posts and co-authored a lengthy amicus brief on the topic with other researchers and professional societies for the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. "My whole research program is about how our health and happiness depend on being embedded within trusting social networks, and there's nothing more representative of that than the relationship between a young child and their parent," he says.

Getting so deeply involved in fighting the Trump administration's child separation policies took a toll, Coan says. The stress of the situation may have contributed to his severe heart attack last September. "I was just working night after night, not taking care of myself at all," he says.

Coan has since slowed down. But he's keeping his mind on public outreach, refocusing his energy on writing a book summarizing his findings on social relationships and developing a new podcast series. "These past couple years have made me wake up to the reality that the work that I and my colleagues do really can make a difference in our social lives and our policy," Coan says. "We just have to put in the effort." 

"Lab Work" illuminates the work of psychologists in research labs.

Further reading

Manufacturing False Memories Using Bits of Reality Loftus, E.F., et al. In L. Reder (Ed.), Implicit Memory and Metacognition , Erlbaum, 2017

Subjective General Health and the Social Regulation of Hypothalamic Activity Brown, C., et al. Psychosomatic Health , 2017

Lower Neighborhood Quality in Adolescence Predicts Higher Mesolimbic Sensitivity to Reward Anticipation in Adulthood Gonzalez, M.Z., et al. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience , 2016

Recommended Reading

Research foci

The Virginia Affective Neuroscience Lab is exploring:

• The power of close social relationships to mitigate stress and boost immune system health.
• The neural mechanisms that mediate these protective effects.
• The impact of early life experiences on the developing brain.

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Why People Hold Hands

Adults, children, and babies all benefit from hand-holding..

Posted February 7, 2022 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• In adults, hand-holding may lower stress and reduce pain.
• In infants and children, it can also reduce stress and help with sleep and emotional well-being.
• Instead of spending money on something fleeting, try giving your partner’s hand a squeeze or your toddler a cuddle.

Whether or not you have a romantic partner in your life, many of us are primed to think about the ones we love this time of year. And if you’re looking for something nice to do for that special someone, one of the best choices has nothing to do with jewelry, flowers, or chocolate; it just involves simply holding their hand.

According to psychologist Jim Coan from the University of Virginia, an expert on handholding, holding hands with someone you trust—whether it be a friend, a romantic partner, a parent, a sibling , or a child—can have a positive impact on your health. Why? Researchers have shown that the simple act of touch can reduce stress hormones (i.e., cortisol) (Feldman, Singer, & Zagoory, 2010) and even lower heart rate (Ludington & Hosseini, 2005).

Coan and his colleagues demonstrated this in a study where he brought couples into his lab, and then put one of them in an fMRI machine to scan the activity in their brains. While scanning them, the participants looked at a screen, and on a series of trials, they either saw a green circle or a red “X.” A green circle meant that the trial would end shortly and nothing else would happen. A red “X” meant that in a few seconds, there was a chance that they would receive a mild electric shock on their ankle. The shock wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t exactly comfortable either. The important part of the study was that during some of these trials, participants were in the fMRI scanner alone; on others, a researcher came in and held their hand, and on a final set of trials, their romantic partner came in and held their hand. Coan and colleagues found that when participants thought they might be getting a shock, they had a lower stress response in their brains when holding their partner's hand than in the other two conditions. And the happier the couples said they were in their relationships, the more the partner’s hand lessened the brain’s response to the shock (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006).

This study suggests that when we’re stressed , holding a loved one’s hand can reduce that stress, even in the body and the brain. In fact, hand-holding has been used in clinical situations that are highly stress-inducing. For example, researchers have found that patients who held a researcher’s hand during cataracts surgery reported feeling significantly less anxious during the surgery and had lower rates of epinephrine (a hormone related to anxiety and stress) (Moon & Cho, 2001). Further, researchers have even reported that handholding can be effective in reducing physical pain (e.g., Goldstein et al., 2018; Weekes et al., 1993) as well as emotional pain (Sahi et al., 2021).

But we don’t just hold our partner’s hands—we hold onto our kids, too. And research suggests that touch can be particularly important for reducing stress in children. In a similar study with 4- and 5-year-old children, Cat Thrasher and colleagues looked at the effect of a parent holding a child’s hand on the child’s performance on a threat detection task. Children sat in front of a touchscreen monitor and were asked to find a single happy face among angry face distractors or an angry face among happy distractors and touch it on the screen. In this task, children typically show a bias for threat, and detect angry targets more quickly than happy ones. In Cat’s study, the presence of the child’s caregiver produced the expected results, and children detected angry faces more quickly than happy faces. But when the caregiver held the child’s hand, children’s threat bias was significantly reduced (Thrasher & Grossman, 2019).

Research suggests that touch has immediate positive effects for babies as well. Skin-to-skin contact can reduce crying (Ludington-Hoe, & Hosseini, 2005; Michelsson, Christensson, Rothgänger, & Winberg, 1996), stress (Feldman, Singer, & Zagoory, 2010), promote sleep (Feldman, Rosenthal, & Eidelman, 2014), and even help establish a breastfeeding routine (Widström, Lilja, Aaltomaa‐Michalias, Dahllöf, Lintula, & Nissen, 2011). These effects can be incredibly long-lasting, especially for premature babies who generally require incubators after birth and don’t often receive skin-to-skin contact from their mothers right away. For example, in one study, researchers randomly assigned one group of premature infants to receive two weeks of skin-to-skin contact from their mothers, while a second group of premature infants was assigned to remain in their incubators in the hospital. The infants who were touched had healthier stress responses, sleep patterns, and even some better cognitive abilities than infants who were simply given the standard incubator treatment. Most importantly, these effects were still evident in these children 10 years later (Feldman, Rosenthal, & Eidelman, 2014). This suggests that touch can have important and long-lasting effects on children. And there’s no such thing as too much: One study found that adults who were held and cuddled as babies were the most likely to be healthy and well-adjusted as adults—in fact, the more they were carried, the better they functioned (Narvaez, Wang, & Cheng, 2016).

For more on why we hold hands, see Jim Coan’s Ted Talk .

Facebook image: LightField Studios/Shutterstock

Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological science, 17(12), 1032-1039.

Feldman, R., Rosenthal, Z., & Eidelman, A. I. (2014). Maternal-preterm skin-to-skin contact enhances child physiologic organization and cognitive control across the first 10 years of life. Biological psychiatry, 75(1), 56-64.

Feldman, R., Singer, M., & Zagoory, O. (2010). Touch attenuates infants’ physiological reactivity to stress. Developmental science, 13(2), 271-278.

Goldstein, P., Weissman-Fogel, I., Dumas, G., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. (2018). Brain-to-brain coupling during handholding is associated with pain reduction. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 115(11), E2528-E2537.

Ludington-Hoe, S. M., Hosseini, R., & Torowicz, D. L. (2005). Skin-to-skin contact (Kangaroo Care) analgesia for preterm infant heel stick. AACN Advanced Critical Care, 16(3), 373-387.

Michelsson, K., Christensson, K., Rothgänger, H., & Winberg, J. (1996). Crying in separated and non‐separated newborns: sound spectrographic analysis. Acta Paediatrica, 85(4), 471-475.

Moon, J. S., & Cho, K. S. (2001). The effects of handholding on anxiety in cataract surgery patients under local anaesthesia. Journal of advanced nursing, 35(3), 407-415.

Narvaez, D., Wang, L., & Cheng, Y. (2016). The evolved developmental niche in childhood: Relation to adult psychopathology and morality. Applied Developmental Science, 20(4), 294-309.

Sahi, R. S., Dieffenbach, M. C., Gan, S., Lee, M., Hazlett, L. I., Burns, S. M., ... & Eisenberger, N. I. (2021). The comfort in touch: Immediate and lasting effects of handholding on emotional pain. PloS one, 16(2), e0246753.

Thrasher, C., & Grossmann, T. (2021). Children’s emotion perception in context: The role of caregiver touch and relationship quality. Emotion, 21(2), 273.

Weekes, D. P., Kagan, S. H., James, K., & Seboni, N. (1993). The phenomenon of hand holding as a coping strategy in adolescents experiencing treatment-related pain. Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing, 10(1), 19-25.

Widström, A. M., Lilja, G., Aaltomaa‐Michalias, P., Dahllöf, A., Lintula, M., & Nissen, E. (2011). Newborn behaviour to locate the breast when skin‐to‐skin: a possible method for enabling early self‐regulation. Acta paediatrica, 100(1), 79-85.

Vanessa LoBue, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Newark.

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Holding someone’s hand can convince your brain to relax your cognitive load

Guest Author: Thing Feed

I like holding my kids’ hands when we go places. My third grader is starting to assert some independence, and won’t casually hold hands as much as she used to, a fact that reminds me to appreciate my four-year-old’s tiny grip all the more. Scientists are finding that holding hands isn’t just a small pleasantry though, as it seems to trigger changes in participants’ brains that affect stress levels, cognition and even pain perception. In fact, it’s possible that part of my enjoyment in holding my child’s hand is that I’m offloading cognitive duties to them, leaving me with an easier stroll down the street.

Dr. Jim Coan has been investigating the effects of holding hands on the brain for years. Experiments generally involved pairs of people, one of which was in an fMRI machine to monitor brain activity. In each round of the experiment, the subjects would see either a red “X” or a blue “O” displayed on a screen, the former of which warned of a 20 percent chance of the person being scanned receiving a small electric shock 12 seconds later. During the 12 seconds after seeing a red “X,” most people’s brains showed a flurry of activity, from increases in stress to paying attention to the site of the possible pain. The big variable in all this was the partner’s touch.

Hands that help vs. those that hurt

Throughout these experiments, people would be asked to either hold hands or sit near each other. Holding hands with a trusted companion was found to make a huge difference in people’s reactions— there were fewer signs of stress, agitation and even pain all over the brain. In some cases, hypothalamus activity changed enough that it’s suspected to be part of the mechanism that makes people with social connections generally have better health than people who live alone.  A variation on the study had children with anxiety disorders hold the hands of their mothers while reading scary words like “monster” instead of receiving shocks, and that small bit of physical contact was soothing enough for the kids to behave as if anxiety wasn’t an issue.

This isn’t to say that holding hands is a cure-all. The above effects were only seen in cases where a person’s partner was someone they trusted and were connected to, such as a spouse, friend or reliable roommate. In variations where people being shocked while holding a stranger’s hand, the positive effects were nearly absent. For people who lived in areas with higher crime rates, strangers actually made things worse, strongly indicating that the physical contact of hand-holding isn’t as important as the social relationship between the people involved.

Social support as a starting point

This may seem intuitive, but that doesn’t explain why any of this happens. When researchers looked at areas of the brain like the prefrontal cortex , they expected to see that holding hands inhibited activity, like the comforting touch of a partner helped the brain tamp down worry and pain. They were wrong though, as no such “self control” could be detected. One clue to help reformulate their model for hand-holding was a variation on the shock experiments that found that threats to shock a partner triggered activity in the “safe” person’s brain as if they were in danger. In other other words, the brain treated a trusted partner almost like an extension of itself.

The new model for all this activity is that as highly social animals, humans actually treat having social contacts as our baseline, rather than a modifier. It’s not that holding hands is better than normal, it’s that sharing experiences with other people is normal, and suffering alone is the more difficult alternative. (In fact, people who have stronger preferences to work alone have also been found to have higher resting glucose levels, meaning they’ve got more energy of their own to expend on daily tasks.)

Shared safety net

So having a spouse or friend with you helps you basically relax a bit, sharing responsibility for well-being with that other person, a state accentuated when you’re physically connected. Why worry about every detail of a possible threat when your friend is there to assist you? In the case of my kids, I’m hopefully not offloading too much responsibility for our safety onto a four-year-old, although knowing that the kid is safe next to me certainly does help lower my stress levels in a parking lot. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

Source: Holding Hands is More Important Than You Think by Maximus Thaler , The Evolution Institute

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The Wired Mind

Plugging into the heart of the brain

By Paul Evans

Even with a giggling crew of friends in the half-light of a smoky, bustling pub, attempting a karaoke version of Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” might make anyone nervous.

It’s a different story, however, if you’re alone in the clinical chill of a Gilmer Hall laboratory wearing a decidedly unfunky bonnet—a rubberized rig resembling Snoopy’s aviator helmet but festooned with 64 electrodes that are measuring your brain waves.

The master of ceremonies for these proceedings is James Coan, assistant professor in UVA’s neuroscience graduate program and the Department of Psychology. While keeping an eye on the karaoke singer—a student volunteer—he guides a lab tech through minute adjustments to an image on a laptop computer screen. Squiggly lines, like those on a lie-detector graph, pulse and throb as the singer steps up to the mic.

Coan pays little heed to vocal quality. Instead, he’s measuring embarrassment. And to measure it, he has to provoke it.

The point is not to humiliate. It’s to build a model that can predict success in college, or any new and potentially threatening setting. The EEG cap takes neurophysiologic measurements of the brain’s electrical activity. Coan decodes the data to gauge how well a first-year student might meet new academic and social challenges while coping with the pangs of homesickness.

The effort represents another stride for Coan in the field of affective neuroscience—the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This offspring of biology and psychology has grown over the past 20 years, overturning stodgy old-schoolers who dismissed efforts to quantify emotions as “fuzzy, superfluous or goofy,” Coan says.

Coan and others seek to detect and chart how moods and emotions are embodied in the brain, to map the nexus where the cognitive and the affective meet. Emotion, Coan says, is an organized set of physiological and behavioral responses to environmental stimuli. His research combines various disciplines to look at “emotional expression and individual emotion-regulation capabilities, as well as the social regulation of neural processes underlying emotional responses.”

In an earlier study, one that generated significant media coverage, Coan examined the response of subjects to human touch while they were in a stressful situation—anticipating a low-level shock while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. He quantified, to a dramatic extent, what lovers, poets and parents already knew: A loving touch reassures.

Jim Coan and the Hand Holding Experiment from UVA Magazine on Vimeo .

In the case of the EEG cap, mapping the parts of the brain that deal with embarrassment and performance anxiety is helping to build predictive models of an individual’s social finesse—or how one deals gracefully with potentially threatening social situations. The results from this and further studies could inspire pharmacological solutions to various forms of stress, to predict that a student’s sense of unease might provoke serious loneliness, resulting in academic struggles or worse.

The zing of Coan’s experiment lies in its predictive aspect. Can science not only measure emotion but also forecast the outcome of someone’s particular emotional problem or strength?

The answer to that question lies ahead, as do many inquiries in a realm of science that is blazing trails in our knowledge of the brain through the use of sophisticated imaging techniques. 

Where MRIs provide static pictures of brain activity, functional MRIs allow researchers to watch the brain in action. “You’re actually tracking the flow of blood through the brain,” Coan says.

During his tenure at UVA, upgrades have brought equipment to world-class levels, he says. A projection system allows subjects to watch a video screen, and researchers are able to observe people’s faces while they lie in the scanner.

Another UVA professor blazing trails in brain research is Barry Condron, biology professor and director of the neuroscience program. But while Coan’s subjects are flesh-and-blood humans, Condron’s are fruit flies, the ubiquitous drosophila. In his lab, also in Gilmer Hall, he and co-workers are taking advantage of the fruit flies’ comparatively simple neurological system to gain a glimpse of a not-so-simple target—how the brain is pieced together.

Condron’s lab has already started cracking the code of how fruit flies sense the world. Developing high-level mathematics and computer models that mimic the neuronal processes of genetically altered drosophila, the experimenters have succeeded in understanding, on a computational basis, part of a fly’s brain. That is laying the groundwork for more sophisticated subjects, such as a mouse’s brain, and, inevitably, the human brain.

Condron, recipient of a five-year, $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation recognizing distinguished young scholars in medical research, approaches his work as a reductionist: Break things down to manageable bits, scrutinize them and extrapolate.

Condron began “breaking things down” for more pragmatic purposes than deciphering consciousness. His earlier work centered, too, on fruit flies and parsing out the ways that their developing brains formed neuronal connections. Zeroing in on those processes could lead, he believes, to implications for human medicine—new therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as more effective interventions for brain trauma.

He’s also researching the ways the brain changes as we age, how the complex wiring formed while we are still in stages of fetal development gets modified by our experience and the passage of time. Such research spins off one of the more critical insights neuroscience has provided in the past few years—that the adult brain is not as inflexible as we once believed. Instead, its recently discovered neuroplasticity enables it to respond and reshape itself to accommodate aging and other circumstances.

Condron envisions yet more radical developments. “I say the brain is a computer, and the computer a simple brain and eventually they’ll join up,” he says. “The brain is a reducible thing, and consciousness—a conversation, for example—is equations. Those equations will likely never be solved by me or my grandchildren. And we have to remember that there are people out there who say that because the human brain is so complex, we need something more than the human brain to fully understand it.

“My modus operandi, however, is that such a way of thinking is defeatist, and it’s not true,” Condron insists. “We can solve the equations. You can say, as doubters did to Edmund Hillary when he attempted Everest, ‘We’ll never get there.’ But there’s no reason not to keep the journey going.”

Such determination might stem from Condron’s studies under the first graduate student of James Watson, of the Watson-Crick team famed for its DNA revelations at the University of Cambridge. And his devotion to science might come from the infectious curiosity of his father. A soldier and amateur scientist, Condron’s father would track the movement of moths in parts of Ireland.

Coan is likewise rooted in a blue-collar background. Son of a roofer and a high-school receptionist, he grew up in working-class Silver Spring, Md., “eating Pop-Tarts and watching Bugs Bunny reruns.” Math stumped him (he flunked first-year algebra); art school beckoned. He did a lot of theater and played dime-store bass in rock/jazz outfits.

First medicine, and later science, turned his attention away from a purely artistic path. “I liked the purity, the rigor of science, the fact that scientists are so passionate about avoiding mistakes,” Coan says. “And I sensed, too, that the moment of scientific inspiration was similar to that of artistic expansion. The main difference is that art is much more concerned with the subjective, while science is concerned with the objective.”

His hand-holding study, published under the title “Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat” in December 2006’s Psychological Science, proved a breakthrough on several fronts. It has been chronicled not only in scientific journals but also in mainstream media such as the New York Times and the Discovery Channel.

The research was based on three central hypotheses: that “both spouse and stranger hand-holding would attenuate threat-responsive activity”; “that such attenuation would be maximized during spousal hand-holding”; and that such a response would be “a partial function of marital quality, with higher marital quality predicting greater attenuation.”

In setting up the study, Coan reasoned that using functional magnetic resonance imaging would allow him to measure brain activity. Using touch would supply an effective index of social interaction.

And so, working at the time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Coan assembled 16 volunteers—thirtysomething wives who had rated the relative happiness of their marriages on a scale from 1 to 151. One by one, electrodes on their ankles, they clambered into the glistening MRIs and lay motionless, computer screens alerting them to low-level incoming, intermittent electric shocks. Crammed into the laboratory just inches away from the volunteers were a technician, nicknamed “The Hand,” and each subject’s spouse.

The claustrophobia and shock provided significant threat, but invariably fears subsided with another’s touch. The degree of response climbed with intimacy. The stranger’s hand (the technician) proved calming; a spouse’s touch, more so. Most calming of all, though, was the hand-holding of a husband and wife in a very happy marriage. 

For Coan, the fact of the efficacy of touch wasn’t surprising. What was, however, was the subtlety, precision and accuracy with which the brain registered it and the emotion it provoked.

“Structures involved in the instantiation of emotion in the brain have for a very long time been considered primitive, beholden to very basic stimuli,” Coan says. “We’ve discovered, on the contrary, that these structures are exquisitely sensitive, not only to whose hand is held, but, even more amazingly, to the quality, the symbolic meaning, of the relationship between the hand-holders. The news flash was that we found that these very basic emotional structures are powerfully attuned to our social environment.”

The key word here, as always for Coan, is “social.” Indeed, what continues to distinguish his work from that of many of his more orthodox colleagues in brain research is his fascination with and fervor for understanding life’s “socioemotional” richness. That pursuit has meant he’s moving the experimental paradigm of his field further from the individual and more to the communal.

While, for example, his peers have studied the effects of stress on individual subjects and researched ways to reduce it—such as meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy and physical exercise—Coan looks at stress reduction, as he looks at so much else, as a socially regulated enterprise. 

“If an ultimate goal for all of us is maximal health and well-being,” he says, “people need to learn how to allow themselves to be soothed by others. In all likelihood, that ability is at least as important as our ability to calm ourselves. Probably more so. After all, we’re intensely social as a species.”   

Pausing to tinker with a palm-sized EEG cap specially designed for babies, Coan reflects on the “behavioral ecology” of the brain when its owner perceives it to be in good company. “If you think you have someone to help you, the brain—which is, like water, always seeking its own level, trying to get the most from the least—is making a simple bet. It’s saying, ‘If I have any difficulty now, I have some help.’

“Emotional information, you see, definitively informs how we perceive information coming from our senses. And we’re just beginning to chart the implications of that knowledge.”

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1. Introduction

James Arthur Coan, Jr. (born July 11, 1969) is an American affective neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, writer, podcast host, human rights activist, and psychology professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he serves as director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. Coan's research on false memories and holding hands has attracted significant media attention.

In 1991, as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Coan designed the Lost in the Mall technique that successfully implanted false memories first in his little brother, then in several subjects in a formal experiment supervised by psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus, [ 1 ] and finally in many more subjects in several replication experiments by other researchers. [ 2 ] These studies made national news, [ 3 ] and contributed to the scientific discrediting of repressed memories. Advocates of recovered-memory therapy criticized Coan's method and attacked Loftus on ethical grounds. [ 4 ]

Also as an undergraduate at UW, Coan began working in the marriage lab of psychology professor John Gottman, a collaboration that continued during Coan's doctoral work at the University of Arizona. Coan helped Gottman refine and expand the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF), a method for coding human emotion based on close observation of facial expressions—including minute, subtle expressions rarely noticed by untrained observers. [ 5 ]

After completing his Ph.D, Coan emerged as a leading authority in interpersonal emotion regulation. Coan researched hand holding first as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and later as a professor at the University of Virginia. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Coan showed that holding hands with a spouse relieved subjects' anxiety in response to anticipated threats, and that the degree of relief correlated positively with self-reported relationship quality. [ 6 ] This work attracted international media attention, [ 7 ] leading to a TED Talk [ 8 ] and a recurring on-camera gig as a science expert on National Geographic Network's Brain Games science series. [ 9 ] Coan appeared in nine episodes of Brain Games during the 2014 and 2015 seasons. [ 10 ]

Coan attracted additional national press coverage for replicating the soothing effect of spousal handholding with committed same-sex couples, [ 11 ] and for showing similar effects with close relatives and friends. [ 12 ]

Coan's research on the psychological and physical health benefits of strong friend and family networks developed into Social Baseline Theory, which the Boston Globe described as arguing "that the human brain depends upon a sophisticated network of relationships to coordinate cognitive energies and accomplish shared goals, which [Coan] suggests is unique to humans. Unlike most primates, human beings are prepared to have multiple kinds of caregivers, and we tend to cooperate reflexively with one another from an early age. 'We have huge brains that are incredibly metabolically expensive,' Coan says. 'We’re not particularly good at physically defending ourselves compared to other mammals. Friendship is a fundamental feature of how we have been shaped by natural selection to continually adapt and survive.'” [ 13 ]

In April 2019, the New York Times consulted Coan on the psychology of physical boundaries in response to the Me Too movement as it applied to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. [ 14 ]

Since 2017, Coan has hosted and produced the podcast Circle of Willis, where he interviews prominent scientists, including Lisa Feldmann Barrett, John Caciappo, Nilanjana Dasgupta, Lisa Diamond, Sue Johnson, Brian Nosek, Nicole Prause, Simine Vazire, David Sloan Wilson. [ 15 ] In a special 2018 Halloween episode, Coan described his experience surviving a widowmaker heart attack earlier that year. [ 16 ] Coan's Circle of Willis podcast is supported by the Virginia Quarterly Review and the University of Virginia's Center for Media and Citizenship.

In the summer of 2018, Coan engaged in activism against the Trump Administration's family separation policy. First, he produced a special Circle of Willis episode, "Children at the Border," featuring interviews with five leading experts detailing the physical and psychological harm the policy inflicts on children. [ 17 ] Then, Coan penned a The Washington Post op-ed condemning family separation, [ 18 ] and was quoted by a Post reporter regarding the effects of family separation and no-touch policies on affected migrant children. [ 19 ] In August 2018, Coan joined an amicus brief on behalf of affected children, filed with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. [ 20 ]

During the 2019-20 COVID-19 outbreak, Coan's hand-holding research attracted additional international media coverage; interviewers asked Coan to discuss how social distancing requirements could impact physical and mental health. [ 21 ]

• Coan, James. (1997). Lost in a Shopping Mall: An Experience With Controversial Research. Ethics & behavior. 7. 271-84.
• Loftus, E.F. (1999). "Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings" (PDF) Ethics & Behaviour 9 (1): 51–60. https://web.archive.org/web/20100619082741/http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall07/brunnquelld/psy8542/Session%2015/Loftus%20-Lost%20in%20the%20Mall%20-%20Misrepresentations%20and%20misubders.pdf
• Associated Press (1992, August 14), Analyst doubts abuse "memories." Tri-City Herald, A5; Daniel Goleman (1992, July 21), Childhood trauma: Memory or invention? New York Times, C1.
• Lynn S. Crook & Martha C. Dean (1999) "Lost in a Shopping Mall"--A Breach of Professional Ethics, Ethics & Behavior, 9:1, 39-50
• John Gottman et al. (1995), The Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF) for Observing Emotional Communication in Marital and Family Interaction, Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum; James Coan & John Gottman (2007), The Specific Affect Coding System, in James Coan and John Allen, eds., The Handbook of Emotion Elicitation & Assessment, Oxford University Press.
• Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x
• Benedict Carey, Holding Loved One's Hand Can Calm Jittery Neurons, New York Times January 31, 2006 https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/health/psychology/holding-loved-ones-hand-can-calm-jittery-neurons.html; Miranda Hitti, Holding Spouse's Hand May Reduce Stress, CBS News December 20, 2006 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/holding-spouses-hand-may-reduce-stress/; Virginia Goldsmith, Feeling Stressed? Try Holding Your Husband's Hand, Reuters January 20, 2007 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-stressed/feeling-stressed-try-holding-your-husbands-hand-idUSFLE97176820061219; Markus C. Schulte Von Drauch, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," Sueddeutsche Zeitung, May 22, 2010 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/leben/sozialverhalten-i-want-to-hold-your-hand-1.925271
• Why We Hold Hands: Dr. James Coan at TEDxCharlottesville 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UMHUPPQ96c
• Chris Palmer, The Power of Love: James Coan leads a University of Virginia lab that explores how social relationships protect us against stress and keep us healthy American Psychological Association Monitor 50:6 June 2019, p. 68 https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/06/power-love
• IMDb, Jim Coan, Internet Movie Database https://www.imdb.com/name/nm6675320/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
• Stephanie Pappas. Marry or Move in Together? Brain Knows the Difference. Live Science, February 14, 2014 https://www.livescience.com/43401-marry-cohabite-brain-differences.html
• Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Midlife Friendship Key to a Longer, Healthier Life, NPR March 16, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/03/16/470635733/midlife-friendship-key-to-a-longer-healthier-life; Dr. James Coan, University of Virginia - The Human Brain and Empathy, WAMC January 13, 2014, https://www.wamc.org/post/dr-james-coan-university-virginia-human-brain-and-empathy; David Salvo, Study: To the Human Brain, Me is We, Forbes, August 22, 2013 https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2013/08/22/study-to-the-human-brain-me-is-we/#4450e39fff1a
• Matthew King, The Brain Benefits of Having Buddies, Boston Globe, March 9, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/03/09/the-brain-benefits-buddies/CXpnRArZRvEhuD2rtoZthM/story.html; Daniel Dworkin and John McBratney, How Deeper Relationships Yield Better Results, Forbes, March 12, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkotter/2019/03/12/deeper-relationships-better-results/#120d23363c98; J.A. Coan and E.L. Maresh, Social baseline theory and the social regulation of emotion, in J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of Emotion Regulation, Guilford Press, 2013.
• Benedict Carey, Beyond Biden: How Close Is Too Close? New York Times April 4, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/health/psychology-metoo-biden.html
• James A. Coan, Jr., Circle of Willis podcast, http://circleofwillispodcast.com/
• James A. Coan, Jr., Halloween Special: The Widowmaker, Circle of Willis podcast October 31, 2018 http://circleofwillispodcast.com/halloween-special-the-widowmaker
• James A. Coan, Jr., Children at the Border, Circle of Willis podcast June 11, 2018 http://circleofwillispodcast.com/children-at-the-border
• James A. Coan, The Trump Administration is Committing Violence against Children, Washington Post June 15, 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-is-committing-violence-against-children/2018/06/15/9be06440-70c0-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html
• Kristine Phillips, Reports have spread that shelter workers can’t comfort migrant children. Rules aren’t that simple, Washington Post June 20, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/06/20/reports-have-spread-that-shelter-staff-cant-comfort-migrant-children-rules-arent-that-simple/
• Reyna v. Hott, https://www.justice4all.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/29-Shonkoff-amicus-08-22-2018.pdf
• Robin Wright, "How Loneliness from Coronavirus Takes Its Own Toll," New Yorker March 23, 2020; Jason Vermes, "As physical distancing expands amid COVID-19 pandemic, some worry about a social recession, CBC Radio: The Current, March 31, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-31-2020-1.5516352/as-physical-distancing-expands-amid-covid-19-pandemic-some-worry-about-a-social-recession-1.5516473 https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-loneliness-from-coronavirus-isolation-takes-its-own-toll; Rajat Mitra, "Will the Coronavirus Epidemic Change Us Permanently?" Outlook India April 9, 2020 https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/opinion-will-the-covid19-epidemic-change-us-permanently/350399; Ida Brandtzæg & Stig Torsteinson, "Når vi ikke kan holde hånden," Psykologisk April 13, 2020 https://psykologisk.no/2020/04/nar-vi-ikke-kan-holde-handen/

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James Coan Keynote - Eastern Mennonite University Attachment Conference

Filming date: 31 Mar 2011

Location: Eastern Mennonite University

Science > Neuroscience > Human Neuroscience Archive

Keywords : emotion, social regulation, Emotion Regulation, Attachment, Religion and Psychology, relationships

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Posted on : 13 Jul 2012

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Lending a Hand Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat

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Mutuality and the social regulation of neural threat responding

James a. coan.

a University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Shelley Kasle

b University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Alice Jackson

Hillary s. schaefer, richard j. davidson.

c University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Recent studies have shown that the presence of a caring relational partner can attenuate neural responses to threat. Here we report reanalyzed data from Coan, Schaefer, and Davidson (2006) , investigating the role of relational mutuality in the neural response to threat. Mutuality reflects the degree to which couple members show mutual interest in the sharing of internal feelings, thoughts, aspirations, and joys – a vital form of responsiveness in attachment relationships. We predicted that wives who were high (versus low) in perceived mutuality, and who attended the study session with their husbands, would show reduced neural threat reactivity in response to mild electric shocks. We also explored whether this effect would depend on physical contact (handholding). As predicted, we observed that higher mutuality scores corresponded with decreased neural threat responding in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and supplementary motor cortex. These effects were independent of hand-holding condition. These findings suggest that higher perceived mutuality corresponds with decreased self-regulatory effort and attenuated preparatory motor activity in response to threat cues, even in the absence of direct physical contact with social resources.

Social support promotes physical health ( Dekkers et al., 2001 ; Yarcheski & Mahon, 1999 ), decreases risk of mortality ( Cobb, 1976 ; House, Landis & Umberson, 1988 ), buffers against risk for affective disorders ( Jung-Soon & Kyung-Sook, 2001 ; Kessler & Essex, 1982 ), and increases health-promoting or maintaining behaviors ( McNicholas, 2002 ). Touch is an important facilitator of this support. Soothing touch alleviates distress in children undergoing lumbar punctures ( Vannorsdall, Dahlquist, Pendley, & Power, 2004 ), and HPA activity in women asked to give a socially stressful speech ( Ditzen et al., 2007 ). The frequency of hugs in married couples is associated with lower blood pressure ( Light, Grewen, & Amico, 2005 ), and the presence of a relational partner can decrease threat reactivity in the brain – an effect that is potentiated by high relationship quality ( Coan et al., 2006 ; Frazier, Tix, & Barnett, 2003 ).

The health enhancing properties of social support are nowhere more evident and powerful than in attachment relationships ( Coan, 2008 ; Mikulincer, Shaver, & Pereg, 2003 ). Infant–caregiver attachments are characterized by high levels of dependence on the part of the infant, necessitating one of the bedrock features of any attachment bond: a strong motivation to maintain close proximity to a responsive caregiver ( Bowlby, 1973 ). Moreover, a caregiver’s ability to respond effectively to the infant’s needs plays a pivotal role in determining the quality of the attachment bond that develops ( Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978 ). A secure attachment bond is most likely to develop when a caregiver is sensitive to the child’s signals, and consistently responsive – both physically and emotionally – when needed. Adult attachment relationships are similarly rooted in partner responsiveness, especially during periods of stress ( Hazan & Shaver, 1987 ; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007 ). Adults are more likely to develop secure attachment relationships when their partners are sensitive and responsive to their needs ( Collins & Feeney, 2000 ), and when they perceive that their partners are understanding, validating, and caring toward them ( Reis, Clark, & Holmes, 2004 ).

One distinction between infant–caregiver versus adult attachment bonds is the notion of interdependence . Although infants are highly dependent upon caregivers for emotional and physiological support, caregivers are not similarly dependent upon infants. By contrast, adults in attachment relationships frequently require emotional support from one another. Within the attachment framework, a great emphasis upon perceived responsiveness in times of need or stress is common to both infant–caregiver and adult attachment literatures ( Bowlby, 1973 ; Coan et al., 2006 ; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007 ). However, the complexity of interdependence that characterizes adult attachment relationships suggests important differences in how adults manage attachment relationships.

In tacit recognition of this, researchers of adult attachment relationships have begun to study attachment processes from more complex dyadic perspectives (e.g., Bodenmann, Pihet, & Kayser, 2006 ; Kane et al., 2007 ). Moreover, researchers of adult attachment recognize great flexibility in attachment theory as a framework for understanding adult interpersonal relationships ( Coan, 2010 ; Davidovitz, Mikulincer, Shaver, Ijzak, & Popper, 2007 ; Granqvist, Mikulincer, & Shaver, 2010 ). For example, adult attachment researchers have shown that when individuals can rely on their romantic partners to provide a secure base for goal pursuit and personal growth, they experience increases in self-esteem, positive mood, and confidence in achieving future goals ( Feeney, 2004 ). New evidence also suggests that couples who are better at talking about and capitalizing on each others’ positive experiences – a manifestation of responsiveness rooted in the potentiation of positive affect – report higher levels of intimacy and relationship satisfaction ( Gable, Reis, Impett, & Asher, 2004 ). Moreover, affective behavior observed during positive “love” interactions may predict variance in relationship satisfaction and divorce risk long neglected by overreliance on observations of interpersonal conflict ( Graber, Laurenceau, Miga, Chango, & Coan, 2011 ).

Mutuality and responsiveness in attachment relationships

One perspective on positive dyadic interactions that may influence the regulatory functioning of attachment relationships is the notion of mutual psychological development, or mutuality . Mutuality implies a “shared sense of relationship” ( Genero, Baker, Surrey, & Baldwin, 1992 , p. 37) – a reciprocal sharing of thoughts and feelings in close relationships characterized by a genuine interest in the subjective reality of each member that emphasizes responsiveness during the routine sharing of internal feelings, thoughts, aspirations, and joys ( Genero et al., 1992 ). Mutuality manifests as a genuine interest in fostering growth in one’s relational partner, an interest that is perceived to be reciprocal ( Miller & Stiver, 1997 ). The key to this construct is its emphasis on authentic mutual interest coupled with perceived success in mutually felt understanding (cf., Oishi, Krochik, & Akimoto, 2010 ). Originally developed as part of “Self-in-Relation Theory” ( Surrey, 1985 ), mutuality empowers relationships by bringing clarity, directness, and predictability to the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of the individuals who inhabit them.

The impact of mutuality on the regulatory functions associated with attachment relationships is evident in a variety of ways. For example, mutuality is associated with greater emotional resiliency ( Gottlieb, 1992 ), more effective relational coping ( Coyne & Bolger, 1990 ), faster recovery from eating disorders ( Tantillo & Sanfter, 2003 ), lower levels of depressive symptoms ( Genero et al., 1992 ), lower levels of daily anger ( Sperberg & Stabb, 1998 ), and higher self-esteem ( Lippes, 1998 ). Higher levels of mutuality are associated with higher quality of life and greater self-care agency among breast cancer patients ( Kayser, Sormanti, & Strainchamps, 1999 ), as well as less depression, lower anxiety, lower disease impact, and even lower levels of physical disability among individuals suffering from rheumatoid arthritis ( Kasle, Wilhelm, & Zautra, 2008 ). Similarly, higher levels of mutuality reported by women with rheumatoid arthritis prospectively predicted lower levels of inflammation for up to a year ( Kasle, Wilhelm, McKnight, Sheikh, & Zautra, 2010 ). Ultimately, a key process in attachment bonding is perceived partner responsiveness, and mutuality contributes to an expanded view of how responsiveness manifests in attachment relationships.

The social regulation of neural threat responding

Outside of basic work in social cognition ( Amodio & Frith, 2006 ; Pelphrey & Morris, 2006 ), little is known about the neurobiology of human social relationships, and still less is known about how the human brain transforms strong social relationships into decreased negative affect and improved physical health ( Coan, 2008 ). Recently, Coan (2010) proposed the Social Baseline Theory (SBT), which states among other things that the neural substrates of socially mediated forms of emotion regulation are unlikely to involve neural systems supporting the self -regulation of emotion. This perspective derives from empirical observations that the successful provision of support does not appear to cause activations in self-regulatory circuits such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). On the contrary, neural systems supporting self-regulatory efforts are typically less active when social support is provided, as are the many emotion-generative circuits those self-regulatory efforts are intended to inhibit ( Coan et al., 2006 ; Connor et al., 2012 ; Eisenberger, Taylor, Gable, Hilmert, & Lieberman, 2007 ). SBT proposes that this decrease in self-regulatory effort confers energy-saving advantages to the socially mediated forms of emotion regulation. It is in this sense that socially mediated forms of emotion regulation likely constitute a “baseline” or default emotion-regulation strategy for most people, most of the time ( Beckes & Coan, 2011 ). Indeed, a large body of research suggests that self-regulation, including the self-regulation of emotion, is depleting if engaged for long periods of time, resulting in subjective feelings of exhaustion and steady decreases in self-regulatory capabilities ( Galliot & Baumeister, 2007 ). By contrast, evidence suggests that people work less hard to regulate themselves when social resources are available ( Fitzsimons & Finkel, 2011 ).

One of the important observations in the literature on socially mediated forms of emotion regulation is the moderating impact of relationship quality ( Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001 ; Robles & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2003 ). For example, in Coan et al. (2006) , when placed under threat of mild electric shock, relationship quality moderated the regulatory impact of supportive hand-holding in the superior frontal gyrus, right anterior insula, and hypothalamus ( Coan et al., 2006 ). Specifically, although no association obtained between relationship quality and brain activity in either the alone or stranger conditions, brain activity in all three regions was lower during spouse hand-holding if relationship quality was higher. Thus, relationship quality impacted neural threat responding specifically in the physical presence of the spouse.

For this study, we have reanalyzed data reported in Coan et al. (2006) to investigate the role of mutuality on the neural response to threat. As reviewed above, mutuality measures a vital form of responsiveness within attachment relationships – one that emphasizes mutual interest in sharing internal feelings, thoughts, aspirations, and joys ( Genero et al., 1992 ). We suspect that mutuality, by virtue of its broad focus on positive aspects of the relationship, is likely to have a similarly broad impact on neural threat responding. That is, mutuality reflects a form of responsiveness that is not contingent upon the presence of a potential threat. Thus, it may manifest as a moderating influence that reduces threat reactivity generally (i.e., not only during partner hand-holding; cf., Eisenberger et al., Lieberman). In this way, mutuality would distinguish itself from relationship quality per se. Importantly, all analyses reported below are first statistically adjusted for relationship quality in order to determine the degree to which mutuality impacts neural threat responding independently.

Participants

Participants included 16 married couples preselected to score “highly satisfied” on the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS; Spanier, 1976 ), operationalized as scores above a 40 on the DAS’s Satisfaction subscale. For the original study, highly satisfied couples were selected in order to capture, as clearly as possible, the normative regulatory impact of supportive hand-holding on threat responding among high functioning attachment relationships. Mean ages of the husbands and wives were 33 ( SD = 10) and 31 ( SD = 6), respectively. Couples self-identified their ethnicities as Caucasian ( N = 15) and Asian ( N = 1). Couples were recruited by way of print advertisements in the Madison, WI, area. Exclusion criteria included pregnancy, psychopathology in the past or present, or other characteristics that would be risk factors in close proximity to the fMRI scanner. Later, total DAS scores were recorded from both husbands and wives. The total DAS score has a theoretical range extending from 0 to 151, with scores lower than 100 thought to indicate distressed marriages. Mean total DAS scores were 126 (SD = 6) and 127 (SD = 10) for husbands and wives, respectively, indicating a generally high level of marital quality among the couples in this sample. The Pearson correlation between husbands’ and wives’ DAS scores was 0.20, n.s. Total DAS scores were used for the analyses reported below.

Husbands and wives completed the Mutual Psychological Development Questionnaire (MPDQ; Genero et al., 1992 ), a robust instrument used to gauge bidirectional exchange of thoughts, openness to feelings, and other aspects of reciprocity in interest and conversation. The instrument is made up of two subscales designed to measure one’s own responsiveness to a partner ( self-mutuality ) and the partner’s responsiveness to the self ( other-mutuality ) respectively. Each subscale comprises a stem statement (“When we talk about things that matter to me, my spouse/partner is likely to …” and “When we talk about things that matter to me, I am likely to …”) and 11 items (such as “express an opinion clearly” and “have difficulty listening”). Each item receives a rating from 1 (low) to 6 (high). After reverse-scoring indicated items, average scores ranging from 1 to 6 were obtained separately for both husband and wife, as well as for self and other, yielding four mutuality scores total: wife–self (wife’s perceptions of her own responsiveness), wife–partner (wife’s perceptions of her partners’ responsiveness), husband– self, and husband–partner.

Only the wives underwent fMRI scanning. Husbands completed questionnaires and provided hand-holding. All participants gave written informed consent in accord with the Human Subjects Committee of the University of Wisconsin medical school and received monetary compensation for participation.

Telephone screenings determined eligible participants, who were told they would be participating in a study on hand-holding. Two visits to the laboratory were scheduled for each couple. During the first visit, couples completed the MPDQ, the complete DAS, and other measures of relationship quality before experiencing a trial run in the laboratory’s mock fMRI scanner. Approximately one week later, participants returned for second visit, during which the experiment’s brain-imaging procedure was conducted. Couples completed an fMRI safety assessment in a waiting room while the wife’s left or right ankle, counterbalanced across participants, was attached to two Ag-AgCl shock electrodes. The wife then entered the MRI chamber and high-resolution anatomical scans were collected before the functional imaging.

During functional scanning for the experiment, the wife was presented with 12 threat cues (a red “X” on a dark background) and 12 safety cues (a blue “O” on a dark background). Cues were in random order, within each of three counterbalanced blocks of 8 cues per block, totaling 24 cue trials (see Coan et al., 2006 ). Trials were randomized within subjects, and block order was counterbalanced between subjects. During each of the three blocks, the wife held either her husband’s hand, the hand of an unseen, anonymous male experimenter, or no hand. All hand-holding involved participants’ right hands; left hands provided responses on a button box. All but three participants held the hand of the same male experimenter; two other male volunteers served as hand-holders when the experimenter was not available. Threat cues indicated a 20% chance of receiving an electric shock, while safety cues indicated no chance of shock. Electric shocks were delivered using an isolated physiological stimulator (Coulbourn Instruments, Allentown, PA) with 20 ms duration at 4 mA. Two shocks were delivered per block to each subject.

Each trial comprised a threat or safety cue with a duration of 1 s and then an anticipation period whose duration varied between 4 and 10 s. During the anticipation period, wives focused on a fixation cross. Shocks were delivered only at the end of the anticipation period. The end of each trial was indicated by the presentation of a small circle; between trials, a black screen was presented and subjects were told to rest until the start of the next trial. The resting period was also of varying duration, between 4 and 10 s.

Image acquisition and data analysis

Functional magnetic images were acquired with a General Electric (Fairfield, CT) Signa 3.0-T high-speed magnetic imaging device, with a quadrature head coil. A total of 215 functional images were collected per block, in volumes of 30 × 4 mm sagittal echo-planar slices (1 mm slice gap) covering the whole brain. A repetition time of 2 s was used, with an echo time of 30 ms, a 601 flip, and a field of view of 240 × 240 mm, with a 64 × 64 matrix, resulting in a voxel size of 3.75 × 3.75 × 5 mm. A T1-weighted spoiled-gradient-recalled anatomical scan consisting of 124 × 1.2 mm slices was acquired before functional imaging to assist with localization of function.

Using Analysis of Functional Neural Images (AFNI) software (Version 2.52; Cox, 1996 ), raw data was reconstructed off-line with a 1-voxel in-plane full-width/half-maximum Fermi window, six-parameter rigid body-motion correction, high-pass filtering of 1/60 s (to remove signal unrelated to stimulus presentation), and removal of ghost and skull artifacts. Trials during which shocks were delivered were excluded from analysis to minimize movement artifacts. Time series were fit to an ideal hemodynamic response with a least squares general linear model; the motion parameters were entered as covariates. The beta weights that resulted were converted to percentage signal change, and the maps transformed to standard Talairach space ( Talairach & Tournoux, 1988 ).

Functional regions of interest (ROIs)

As an intermediate data-reduction step, activation to threat cues and safety cues were contrasted to determine the normative threat response in the no-hand-holding condition. Voxel-wise t -tests that indicated greater activation in threat-cue than safety-cue trials identified multisubject ROIs ( p < .005 corrected, with corrections estimated from Monte Carlo simulations). This statistical procedure allowed us to empirically identify clusters of neural activity normatively associated with the presence of a threat – clusters that are available for subsequent analyses involving hand-holding condition and mutuality scores. This analysis identified activation in a network of regions consistently shown to be associated with responses to threat, negative affect, or anticipation of pain, including the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (right dlPFC), right inferior frontal gyrus, left superior frontal gyrus, right anterior insula, supplementary motor cortex (SMC), caudate–nucleus accumbens (NAcc), putamen, hypothalamus, right postcentral gyrus, superior colliculus, posterior cingulate, and left supramarginal gyrus ( Davidson & Irwin, 1999 ; Ploghaus et al., 1999 ; Salomons, Johnstone, Backonja, & Davidson, 2004 ; Wager et al., 2004 ). It was thus possible to restrict statistical tests described below to only these regions.

Linear Mixed Models were conducted using SPSS’s Linear Mixed Model Module. For these models, brain activation was predicted by Hand Holding Condition (Alone, Spouse, Stranger), Wife DAS, both husband and wife mutuality scores (Husband Other Mutuality, Husband Self Mutuality, Wife Other Mutuality, and Wife Self Mutuality), and all interactions between Hand Holding Condition and husband and wife mutuality scores. This statistical model utilized a type 1 sum of squares procedure that allowed us to remove variance in brain activity attributable to wife DAS scores first, before analyzing all other effects. The type 1 sum of squares also minimized the impact of multicolinearity among the various mutuality scores, all of which were at least moderately correlated, all r s ≥ 0.32, all p s ≤ .03. Thus, all effects of mutuality reported below are statistically independent of wife DAS score effects reported in Coan et al. (2006) . Husband mutuality scores were included as well, in order to consider the possibility that husband mutuality scores are associated with wife threat-responding.

No main effects of Hand Holding Condition or DAS were observed that have not been reported elsewhere from these data, nor were any Mutuality by Hand Holding Interaction effects observed. We did, however, observe main effects of Wife Other Mutuality in predicting threat related neural activation independent of Hand Holding Condition in both the SMC, F (1, 30) = 4.80, p = .04, and right dlPFC, F (1, 31) = 4.24, p = .05. Subsequent regressions (depicted in Figure 1 ) revealed that greater Wife Other Mutuality corresponded with reduced threat-related activation in both regions, although the specific correlation was only statistically significant in the right dlPFC, r = −0.57 ( p = .02), with SMC r = −0.40 ( p = .12).

Main effects of Wife Other Mutuality score on threat related brain activity averaged across hand-holding conditions. Percentage signal change is graphed as a function of Wife Other Mutuality score, with correlation coefficients included. Section A depicts this association in the supplementary motor cortex ( x = 4, y = 6, z = 46; t -score = 3.63; size = 4043 mm 3 ). Section B depicts this association in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex ( x = 3, y = 44, z = 2; t -score = 3.81; size = 350 mm 3 ).

Higher mutuality scores corresponded with decreased activations in a limited set of threat-responsive regions, but across all experimental conditions. Specifically, the down-regulatory impact of mutuality was (a) independent of hand-holding condition, and (b) particularly pronounced in the right dlPFC, a region powerfully implicated in the effortful self-regulation of emotion. Importantly, higher mutuality scores also corresponded with decreased threat reactivity in the SMC, a structure thought to utilize emotional information to modify and prepare behavioral responses in the primary motor cortex ( Hajcak et al., 2007 ). As predicted, higher levels of mutuality were nowhere under any circumstances associated with increased threat responding. In sum, it appears that higher perceived mutuality corresponds with decreased self-regulatory effort and attenuated preparatory motor activity in response to threat cues, even in the absence of direct physical access to social resources.

The MPDQ is designed to measure mutual felt understanding and genuine interest – generalized forms of responsiveness to and by relational partners. We know already that relationship quality is associated with decreased threat-related neural activity when holding the hand of one’s relational partner. Perhaps the reason there was no interaction between mutuality and hand-holding condition is because mutuality confers a global, trait-like sense of relative attachment security, expressed here at the neural level. That is, it is possible that relationship experiences that lead to high mutuality (e.g., mutual intimate disclosure) lead to the development of stable neural orientations (such as increased basal levels of opioid activity – see below) that result, in turn, in general decreases in the need for self-regulatory effort. By contrast, it is possible that the DAS captures aspects of the relationship (consensus, satisfaction, cohesion) that are more state-like, thus placing greater regulatory dependence upon the physical presence (hand-holding) of the relational partner. In the current study, it is also worth noting that partners were present in the laboratory setting throughout the experiment. Thus, wives high in perceived mutuality may have derived a sense of increased security by the mere presence of their husband in the laboratory setting ( Kane, McCall, Collins, & Blascovich, 2012 ), even in the absence of direct physical contact.

Possible mechanisms linking mutuality to decreased threat responding

SBT argues that structures implicated in the self-regulation of emotion are themselves regulated by social proximity and interaction. In this sense, social affect regulation is not so much “down-regulatory” in the sense that effortful emotion regulation is typically characterized (e.g., via cognitive reappraisal or mindful awareness). Rather, perceived social resources obviate the need for the activation of emotion, returning the individual to a baseline state of relative calm by other, likely perceptual, means.

Several candidate mechanisms, including endogenous opioids, oxytocin, and dopamine, have been proposed as links between social resources and decreased negative affect. For example, opioid tone, or basal levels of opioid activity, may play a role in limiting levels of stress reactivity in a variety of contexts ( LaPrairie & Murphy, 2009 ; Slattery & Neumann, 2008 ), and opioid activity can increase in the presence of social resources ( Panksepp, 1998 ). Indeed, Eisenberger et al. (2007) has suggested that the activity of endogenous opioids associated with social relationships may be particularly pronounced in regions such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). The dACC has a very high density of opioid receptors ( Rainville, Duncan, Price, Carrier, & Bushnell, 1997 ), and opioid activity in the dACC is known to play a powerful role in modulating sensitivity to both pain and stress ( Eippert et al., 2009 ; Zubieta et al., 2001 ). Moreover, abundant evidence suggests endogenous opioid activity throughout the brain is highly sensitive to social contact ( Nocjar & Panksepp, 2007 ). It is possible that higher levels of mutuality correspond with higher opioid tone throughout the brain, requiring higher levels of stress before the brain will activate stress responses via circuits like the dACC. If true, and if mutuality is indeed contributing to the modulation of opioid tone in the dACC and elsewhere, the notion that mutuality confers a stable, trait-like advantage in confronting various life stressors would seem particularly likely.

The neuropeptide oxytocin is also likely to play a role mediating the effects of mutuality on threat reactivity in the brain ( Gainer & Wray, 1994 ). Oxytocin activity is also highly responsive to social proximity, increasing levels of trust and sensitivity to social cues ( Kosfeld, Heinrichs, Zak, Fischbacher, & Fehr, 2005 ; Ross et al., 2009 ; Uvnaes-Moberg, 1998 ), and is associated with decreased threat reactivity ( Windle, Shanks, Lightman, & Ingram, 1997 ), even in the amygdala ( Kirsch et al., 2005 ). Still others have suggested that dopaminergic, reward-related processing in the presence of social resources may inhibit negative affect ( Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky, 2005 ; Younger, Aron, Parke, Chatterjee, & Mackey, 2010 ). More research is needed to assess the likelihood that basal levels of these latter possible mechanisms can be modulated by experiences similar to those tapped by the MPDQ.

Higher levels of mutuality correspond with decreased threat respond in the brain, regardless of the “on-line” or direct physical contact with social resources. The associations between mutuality and neural threat responding are neither as great nor as pervasive as those observed during supportive hand-holding (cf., Coan et al., 2006 ). Nevertheless, mutuality’s impact on the regulation of emotion is not likely to be trivial. The region most strongly associated with mutuality was the dlPFC, a region widely known for its role in working memory and effortful emotion regulation. Also implicated was the SMC, a region that likely supports preparation for the activation of behavioral motor responses to affectively salient situations. These effects suggest that individuals who experience their relationships as characterized by higher levels of mutual understanding and genuine interest are not working as hard to regulate their negative affect, and are preparing fewer or less intense behavioral affective responses. According to SBT, this is because higher levels of mutuality signal the increased dependability of the relational partner, and a commensurably decreased need to deploy affective responses to uncertain threats. This could result in real savings in cognitive and metabolic effort ( Beckes & Coan, 2011 ). Ultimately, our focus on mutuality has the potential to expand the conceptualization and measurement of partner responsiveness as applied to attachment relationships, much as recent work on the capitalization of positive affect has done (cf., Coan, 2011 ; Ditzen et al., 2007 ; Gable et al., 2004 ; Graber et al., 2011 Reis & Gable, 2003 ). Indeed, we view mutuality as an important marker of perceived partner responsiveness – a critical component of secure and well-functioning attachment bonds (see Kane et al., 2012 ). If true, our findings suggest that the regulatory impact of one’s closest relationship is yoked in part to the perception that one’s partner is responsive to a wide range of needs, including a need for felt understanding and genuine interest. And the impact of such responsiveness may even decrease the processing load imposed on circuits of the brain supporting emotion regulation and action planning during stressful events.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Grants P50-MH06931 and MH43454 to R.J.D. We thank David Sbarra for his thoughtful suggestions, and Josh Glazer, Josie Golembiewski, and Megan Roach for their assistance in data collection and reduction.

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