The Flow Experience: A Graphic Explanation

Flow Experience: Discovered by the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who defined it as flowing experience where the self reaches undreamed levels of consciousness and an evolved level of self-hood. It can also mean a high level of attentive arousal during touch and go situations (e.g. rock climbing, auto racing) where you'll likely lose your head along with your self and your consciousness if you don't pay attention.

Flow was coined by the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi[i] to describe the unique emotional state that parallels one’s complete ‘immersion’ in a task. As described by the psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning.  In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.”[ii] These descriptions are of course metaphorical representations of the experience of flow, and describe what flow is like rather than what it is.  Because these ‘dependent’ measures of flow have no empirical referent (What is the neurological equivalent of spontaneous joy for instance?), one is left with the independent or antecedent variables of demand and skill that elicit flow, which thankfully can be empirically defined. What is unique about these variables is that they not only map to flow experiences, but also other emotional experiences such as anxiety and boredom. Thus Csikszentmihalyi's model does not just represent flow, but a wide range of emotional experiences. The question is, although emotion maps to demand and skill, can demand or skill be manipulated in the moment to elicit flow, or for that matter, any other emotion?

The Flow Channel

On the surface, the graphical representation of the flow channel is simple to understand. Just plot your moment to moment challenge against your moment to moment skill, and voila, you can predict what your emotions are going to be. For any particular task, the problem is that although demand moves up or down dependent upon the exigencies of the moment, skill should be relatively stable during or within the performance, and only change, and for the most part gradually between performances. Thus, one may accomplish a task that from moment to moment varies in demand, but the skills brought to that task are the same regardless of demand. What this means is that for any one performance set, skill is not a variable, but a constant. That is, one cannot adjust skill against demand during performance because skill can only change negligibly during performance, or in other words does not move. Thus for performance that requires any skill set, the only variable that can be manipulated is demand. For moment to moment behavior the adjustable variable that elicits flow is demand and demand alone. But that leaves us with figuring out what demand exactly is.

A demand may be defined as simple response-outcome contingency. Thus, if you do X, Y will occur or not occur. It is thus inferred that demand entails a fully predictable means-end relationship or expectancy. But the inference that the act-outcome expectancy is always fully predictable is not true. Although a response-outcome is fully predictable when skill overmatches demand, as demand rises to match and surpass skill, uncertainty in the prediction of a performance outcome also rises. At first, the uncertainty is positive, and reaches its highest level when a skill matches the level of demand. This represents a ‘touch and go’ experience wherein every move most likely will result in a positive outcome. It is here that many individuals report euphoric flow like states. Passing that, the moment to moment uncertainty of a bad outcome increases, along with a corresponding rise in tension and anxiety.

The Flow Channel

Momentary positive uncertainty as a logical function of the moment to moment variance occurring when demand matches skill has never been used as a predictor for flow, and is ignored in Csikszentmihalyi’s model because uncertainty by implication does not elicit affect. Rather, affect is imputed to metaphorical concepts of immersion, involvement, and focused attention that are not grounded to any specific neurological processes. However, the fact that act-outcome discrepancy alone has been correlated with specific neuro-chemical changes in the brain that map to euphoric, involved, timeless[iii], or immersive states, namely the activation of mid-brain dopamine systems, narrows the cause of flow to abstract elements of perception rather than metaphorical aspects of performance. These abstract perceptual elements denote information, and can easily be defined and reliably be mapped to behavior, and most importantly, corresponding affect.

A final perceptual aspect of demand that correlates with the elicitation of dopamine is the importance of the end result or goal of behavior. Specifically, dopaminergic systems are activated by the in tandem perception of discrepancy and the predicted utility or value of end result of a response contingency. The flow model maps behavior to demand and skill, but not only is skill fixed, so is the importance of the goal state that predicates demand. However, the relative importance of the goal state correlates with the intensity of affect. For example, representing an endeavor that matches his skills, a rock climber ascending a difficult cliff would be euphoric if the moment to moment end result was high, namely avoiding a fatal fall, but would be far less so if he was attached to a tether, and would suffer only an injury to his pride is he were to slip. Finally, the flow experience correlates also with a state of relaxation, which would also be predicted as choices in flow are singular and clear and involve no conflicting or stressful choices.  

The graphical model of the flow experience, like the Yerkes-Dodson model that predates it, is not an explanatory model because it does not derive from a neurologically grounded explanation of flow. Secondly, it is not even a very good descriptive model because it imputes a moment to moment variability in skill within a performance set that is not characteristic of any single performance, and because it ignores other correlations between moment to moment act-outcome discrepancy (or risk) and affect that are well demonstrated in neurological explanations of incentive motivation. Ultimately, the flow experience purports to explain a key facet of incentive motivation through an inductive approach that misrepresents the dependent (skill) and ignores the independent variables (discrepancy) that truly map to the affective and motivational experience that is flow, while ignoring the expansive neurological literature on incentive motivation.  In other words, as a creature of metaphor flow is good literature, but is not good science because it eschews the explanatory essence of science.

Journal Article On Bio-Behavioristic Theory of Flow

---

[i] Barrett L. F., Russell J. (1998) Independence and bipolarity in the structure of current affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 967–984

[ii] Goleman, D. (2006) Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam

[iii] Meck, W. H. (1996) Neuropharmacology of timing and time perception, Cognitive Brain Research, (3)3-4, 227-242

The debate over dopamine's role in reward: the case for incentive salience and ANGELINA JOLIE!

(The article below by Dr. Kent Berridge on incentive motivation is one of the most important papers I have read on behavioral neuroscience. Nonetheless, when compared to other masters of motivational literature such as Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar, one feels it needs an extra 'something' to keep your attention on the printed word and of course remind you of the magic of dopamine as you navigate through prose that is admittedly not as exciting as the 4th grade level writing style of  our two masters.) 

The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: the case for incentive salience AND ANGELINA JOLIE!

Kent C. Berridge 

  

Received: 21 March 2006 /Accepted: 20 August 2006 / Published online: 27 October 2006

# Springer-Verlag 2006/ unauthorized Angelina Jolie revision 29 Feb 2012

Abstract

Introduction Debate continues over the precise causal contribution made by mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward. There are three competing explanatory categories: ‘liking’, learning, and ‘wanting’. Does dopamine mostly mediate the hedonic impact of reward (‘liking’)? Does it instead mediate learned predictions of future reward, prediction error teaching signals and stamp in associative links (learning)? Or does dopamine motivate the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli (‘wanting’)? Each hypothesis is evaluated here, and it is suggested that the incentive salience or ‘wanting’ hypothesis of dopamine function may be consistent with  more evidence than either learning or ‘liking’. In brief, recent evidence indicates that dopamine is neither necessary nor sufficient to mediate changes in hedonic ‘liking’ for sensory pleasures. Other recent evidence indicates that dopamine is not needed for new learning, and not sufficient to directly mediate learning by causing teaching or prediction signals. By contrast, growing evidence indicates that dopamine does contribute causally to incentive salience. Dopamine appears necessary for normal ‘wanting’, and dopamine activation can be sufficient to enhance cue-triggered incentive salience. Drugs of abuse that promote dopamine signals short circuit and sensitize dynamic mesolimbic mechanisms that evolved to attribute incentive salience to rewards. Such drugs interact with incentive salience integrations of Pavlovian associative information with physiological state signals. That interaction sets the stage to cause compulsive ‘wanting’ in addiction, but also provides opportunities for experiments to disentangle ‘wanting’, ‘liking’, and learning hypotheses. Results from studies that exploited those opportunities are described here.

Conclusion In short, dopamine’s contribution appears to be chiefly to cause ‘wanting’ for hedonic rewards, more than ‘liking’ or learning for those rewards.

Keywords Accumbens. Reward . Opioid . Dopamine, Basal forebrain . Aversion . Associative learning . Appetite Addiction, ANGELINA JOLIE!

Introduction

Some questions endure for ages, faced by generation after generation. Neuroscientists hope the question, ‘What does dopamine do for reward?’ will not be among them, but it still prompts debate after several decades. Fortunately, the answers to the dopamine question are becoming better. A formal debate on dopamine’s role in reward was held at a Gordon conference on catecholamines in 2005. This article describes the incentive salience case presented in that debate, and compares it to other hypotheses. A debate stance can sometimes help clarify alternative views, and that is the hope here. Therefore, this article is not an exhaustive review of dopamine function. My goal is to provide a useful viewpoint and a critical evaluation oalternatives and to point to new evidence that seems crucial to any decision about what dopamine does for reward.

Dopamine’s causal role in reward

What does dopamine do in reward? This is in essence a question about causation. It asks what causal contribution is made by increases or decreases in dopamine neurotransmission to produce changes in reward-related psychology and behavior. In this article, our focus is on cause and consequence. How to assign causal status to brain events is a complicated issue, but it is not too much an oversimplification to suggest that in practice, the causal question of dopamine’s role in reward has been approached in several experimental ways. One approach is to ask ‘What specific reward function is lost?’ when dopamine neurotransmission is suppressed (e.g., by antagonist drugs, neurotoxin, or other lesions or genetic manipulations that reduce dopamine neurotransmission). That approach asks about dopamine’s role as a necessary cause for reward. It identifies what reward functions cannot be carried on without it. A different approach is to ask ‘What reward function is enhanced?’ by elevations in dopamine signaling (e.g., elevated by agonist drugs, brain stimulation, or hyperdopaminergic genetic mutation). That approach asks about dopamine’s role as a sufficient cause for reward. It asks what reward function a dopamine increase is able to enhance (when other conditions in the brain do not simultaneously change so much as to invalidate hopes of obtaining a specific answer). A third approach is to ask ‘What reward functions are coded?’ by the dopamine neural activations during reward events (e.g., by recording firing of dopamine or related limbic neurons, measuring extracellular dopamine release, or neuroimaging activation in target structures). This question asks about neural coding of function via correlation, often in the hope of inferring causation on the basis of observing correlated functions. Dopamine function is a multifaceted target, so it helps to combine these multiple approaches. What does it contribute to reward? Let’s put on the table the best answers that have survived until today and evaluate each hypothesis for dopamine’s role against the others. These include activation-sensorimotor hypotheses of effort, arousal and response vigor; the hedonia hypothesis of reward pleasure; reward learning hypotheses of associative stamping-in, teaching signals and prediction errors; and the incentive salience hypothesis of reward ‘wanting’. I will describe each of these hypotheses in turn. Then recent experiments that pit hedonia, reward learning, and incentive salience hypothesis against each other will be considered. Their results indicates that dopamine may more directly mediate reward ‘wanting’ than either ‘liking’ or learning about the same rewards.

 Activation-sensorimotor hypothesis

Activation-sensorimotor hypotheses posit dopamine to mediate general functions of action generation, effort, movement, and general arousal or behavioral activation (Dommett et al. 2005; Horvitz 2002; Robbins and Everitt 1982; Salamone et al. 1994; Stricker and Zigmond 1986). These ideas are captured by statements in the literature such as “Dopamine mediates the ‘working to obtain’ (i.e., tendency to work for motivational stimulus and overcome response constraints, activation for engaging in vigorous  instrumental actions).” (Salamone and Correa 2002, p. 17) or “this dopamine response could assist in preparing the animal to deal with the unexpected by promoting the switching of attentional and behavioral resources” (Redgrave et al. 1999, p. 151) and “functions of the central DA systems could be explained in terms of an ‘energetic’ construct (i.e., one that accounts for the vigor and frequency of behavioral output) of activation.” (Robbins and Everitt 2006, this issue). Those sensorimotor hypotheses have much to recommend them and are supported by substantial evidence. Neuroscientists agree that dopamine systems play roles in movement activation and control and attention and arousal (Albin et al. 1995; Dauer and Przedborski 2003; Redgrave et al. 1999; Salamone and Correa 2002; Salamone et al. 2005). As an example from the 2005 Gordon debate, Salamone and colleagues have convincingly shown that low-dose neuroleptics shift choices away from effortful toward easy tasks, even at the cost of a preferred reward. However, activation-sensorimotor hypotheses are very general in scope, which makes it difficult for them to explain specific aspects of reward. They do not attempt to give clear and specific explanations of why rewards are hedonically pleasant or learned about or sought after. By extension to dopamine’s role in drug addiction and related disorders, they do not attempt to explain why addicts become compulsively motivated to take drugs again. To explain reward-specific aspects of dopamine activation and of addictive drugs, we need hypotheses of dopamine function that address more reward-specific processes themselves. In short, activation, effort or sensorimotor function does not explain why dopamine effects are rewarding, predictive or motivating—even though general activation function may be valid and important. For the rest of this paper, therefore, I will accept that dopamine does have general sensorimotor-activation functions, and will not challenge those hypotheses. But the discussion must move beyond them for the purpose of understanding dopamine’s more specific contributions to reward. We must turn to specific reward hypotheses of what dopamine does.

Analysis of hedonia hypothesis

The hedonia hypothesis suggests that dopamine in nucleus accumbens essentially is a ‘pleasure neurotransmitter’. It was developed chiefly by Roy Wise and his colleagues in the 1970s and 1980s and became a very influential view. As Wise originally put it: “the dopamine junctions represent a synaptic way station...where sensory inputs are translated into the hedonic messages we experience as pleasure, euphoria or ‘yumminess’” (Wise 1980, p. 94). Continuing echoes of the hedonia hypothesis might perhaps still be heard in more recent neuroscience statements such as “Clearly, the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system is critical for psychostimulant activation and psychomotor stimulant reinforcement and plays a role in the reinforcing action of other drugs” (Koob and Le Moal 2006, p. 89) or “The ability of drugs of abuse to increase dopamine in nucleus accumbens underlies their reinforcing effects.” ............................

Well, you get the drift. For the real article, sadly without Angelina, go here.

Mindfulness and Wanting

Arguably, the primary cause of human distress is when our deeds do not measure up to our desires, or when our short term behavior does not correspond to our long term goals.  Put another way, a major source of our unhappiness is that we often ‘want’ something that has long term or predicted utility, yet end up ‘wanting’ something that has utility only in the moment, or ‘decision utility’ (e.g., when we surrender to distraction rather than complete a more valuable task). To remedy the emotional discomfort this creates, we can rationalize why we should not want something (like the fox disparaging the unattainable grapes), or not appraise what we would otherwise have wanted (just avoid thinking about the grapes). Thus if we reduce the value of what we want by reappraising it or being merely mindful of it, we will be less desirous of it and far less upset at its prospective loss.

This latter concept of ‘mindfulness’ reduces wanting and the emotional problems that ensue due to wanting not by reappraising events, but by not appraising them at all. Although rooted in religious (Buddhism) and philosophical tradition (Stoicism), contemporary explanations of mindfulness are based upon cognitive psychology and the complementary perspective of cognitive neuroscience[i]. Cognitive psychology implies that wanting correlates with non-affective mental processes, and this idea conforms to the emphasis in cognitive neuroscience on the cortical structures that comprise the rational or ‘rationalizing’ aspect of the brain.  Because wanting is a uniform concept, the practice of mindfulness (as well as meditation for that matter) uniformly reduces all wanting through eliminating or reducing the continuous appraisal that is an elemental aspect of wanting. Thus in mindfulness everything in the perceptual field is observed and not appraised. Because of this, mindfulness practice generally occurs outside of one’s working day.

The problem with this approach is that when the perspective of ‘affective neuroscience’ is considered that gives far greater prominence to the mid-brain systems that modulate affect, ‘wanting’ always contains an affective component that represents the activity of sub-cortical structures, namely midbrain dopamine systems that are activated by the cognitive elaboration of the novel discrepancies between acts and outcomes, and do not intrinsically predict the long term utility of outcomes (i.e., as 'gut level' feelings they do not predict the future) [1]. Because of the ‘pleasure’ attendant with dopamine release, the value, ‘incentive salience’, or decision utility of behavior increases, and may conform or dis-conform with the long term logical or predicted utility of behavior[ii]. If they conform, then we have productivity, creativity, relaxation, and ‘happiness’, but if they do not conform, we have non-productivity, non-creativity, stress, and ‘unhappiness’. Because wanting is comprised of cognitive and affective components whose ends may mutually conform or non-conform, wanting is never a purely cognitive event, and some types of wanting may be good for you and others not so good. Hence, it would be more logical to be mindful towards those wants that lead you astray than those that keep you on the straight and narrow. In other words, it is best to be mindful of our irrational wants than our rational ones. The problem is not to avoid appraisals that may lead us to want, but to avoid those appraisals that lead us to ‘mis-want’[2]. Thus a mindfulness strategy must focus on non-elaborative awareness of the short term wants that dis-conform with long term goals[3]. In other words, to be not just effective but practical, mindfulness must entail not the mitigation of wanting, but of mis-wanting.

By non-appraising what we should be mindful of rather than what we could be mindful of, we can expand the applicability of mindfulness to all our working day, and finally make mindfulness a mainstream procedure that is universally embraced.  By being mindful of distraction or distractive thoughts but not our workaday behavior as well as avoiding useless elaborative thinking or rumination, we can gain the benefits of mindfulness without constraining our rational wants that populate our day. Thus mindfulness can be expanded in scope to encompass all of our daily activities without losing its therapeutic power to reduce and control harmful emotions.

Because the activity of dopamine systems is determined by anticipation and/or experience of unexpected changes in the perceived or elaborated relationship between act and outcome rather than the outcome itself (e.g. think of the 'pleasure' in anticipating opening a present on Christmas and of opening it), if follows that non-elaborative awareness will necessarily reduce dopamine activity, and therefore reduce the decision (i.e. momentary) but not predicted utility of objects or events[4]. Hence it is argued that the ‘mechanism’ of mindfulness is the cognitive inhibition of the rapidly changing and virtualized relationship of act and outcomes that elicit the positive affect that for good or ill always distorts judgment, and simultaneously engages cortical and midbrain structures. Thus, mindfulness ‘works’ by reducing dopaminergic activity through the inhibition of the elaborative cognitive behavior that elicits it. Or in other words, mindfulness reduces not the rational but the affective component in judgment or ‘wanting’.

The advantages of a dopaminergic based explanation of mindfulness are numerous and compelling.

It is logical

In its essence, mindfulness changes what we want by modifying how we want, therefore it follows logically that any explanation for mindfulness must be rooted in the neuropsychology of wanting.

It is simple

The neuroscience of wanting is detailed and complex, but the description of its logical entailments is quite simple, and requires but rudimentary knowledge of neural structures and processes.

It is concrete

Instead of a metaphorical description of mindfulness that depends upon abstract cognitive behavior or the complex and indeterminate interplay of myriad cortically centered neural processes, a dopaminergic explanation of mindfulness is rooted in specific mid-brain structures whose behavior is determinate and clear.

It informs procedure

By distinguishing between wanting and mis-wanting, mindfulness procedure can be centered on mitigating those wants that pull us in directions contrary to our long term interest, and result in regret, stress, un-productivity, and unhappiness while keeping those wants that  add zest, pleasure, and meaning to life.

It explains

Mindfulness research almost exclusively follows inductive principles, wherein mindfulness practice correlates with specific emotional, neural, or behavioral states. But because mindfulness is still without an adequate explanation, it is far more difficult to justify mindfulness, specifically when posed against the equally inductive conclusions derived from personal experience, popular media, and even academic research that argue that a distracted and mindless lifestyle is good for you or at most a necessary evil.


__________________________________________________________


A Note on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction: MBSR


A truism in psychology is that if you are faced with a continuous dilemma between two alternative choices of equal value, your muscles will tense and you will be stressed. Specifically, if the affective value of a choice can be raised through its cognitive elaboration (imagining or looking forward to an email, a slice of cake, or other temptations) then it can create an artificial or affective dilemma that elicits tension, as you have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the dumb thing (e.g. doing your work rather than checking your email 40 times an hour). Contrariwise, if one can reduce the affective value of an alternative choice through being mindful of it (e.g. a email being just email or a cake just being a cake), then affective dilemmas can be reduced or eliminated, and you will become less stressed. Because an ever distractive world is full of affective dilemmas, mindfulness is a unique and sensible strategy to reduce stress, and demonstrates the predictive power of a dopaminergic theory of mindfulness. 

For a formal interpretation of MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) from a dopaminergic theory of mindfulness, go here.

---

[1] For example, we become incented to eat cake, go on a date, buy a car, etc. not only because of the utility of doing such things, but also due to the cognitive elaboration of the novel implications of doing such things. However, these novel implications do not predict the intrinsic value of the events they predicate.

[2] Mis-wanting represents distractive, addictive, or obsessive behavior (e.g., excessive rumination) in which the momentary affective ‘urge’ to perform mis-matches the objective or predicted long term value of that behavior.

[3] As an example, if you want to eat cake, the urge to do so may conform to the predicted utility of eating if it is your birthday, and dis-conform with the predicted utility of eating if it is not. Hence to be mindful of a ‘cake only being a cake’ reduces regret when you do so to stay on a diet, but ironically would increase regret if eating a cake was a cause for celebration.

[4] As an example, suppose you accidentally run over my cat. That of course is a bad thing, but as I ruminate on all the novel ways I will take my revenge, dopaminergic activity will increase, thus making the decision utility of taking vengeance a whole lot more important than the long term utility of getting even. After all, a cat is just a cat.

---

[i]Holzel, B., Lazar, S., Gard, T.,Schuman-Olivier, Z. Vago, D., and Ott, U. (2011) How Does MindfulnessMeditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual and NeuralPerspective. Perspectives onPsychological Science, 6(6),537–559

[ii] Berridge, K. (2009) Wanting and Liking: Observations from theNeuroscience and Psychology Laboratory, Inquiry,52: 4, 378—398  (Kent Berridge web site, including this article)




More references:




My e-book on the psychology of the internet, including discussion of mindfulness on pp. 143-151 and pp. 271-276




Below: video of presentation by Richard Davidson and Kent Berridge on the neuro-psychology of happiness.

Feedback and Explanation 1.0

Blocking: The concept derived from Pavlovian conditioning that associations or learning attributed to a stimulus will not occur if those associations are redundant or superfluous. For example, a lab animal may learn that a red light signals food. If a green light follows and just as reliably predicts food, the animal will not learn to associate green with the food, since prior learning 'blocks' the association. Blocking should not be confused with blockheadedness, which is characterized by an inability to learn new and better explanations to an event once the first explanation is fixed in your mind.

Explanation is critical, for if you only go by the correlations of nature, your predictions can go seriously awry. Oftentimes those correlations work consistently, and for our practical affairs universally (though not perhaps it may be added for the universe). Throw a ball into the air, and Newtonian mechanics will predict where it will land. Of course, Newton’s laws break down when you are considering the very tiny (Quantum physics) or the very large (General Relativity), but the Newtonian inductive (i.e. consistent un-falsifiable correlations prove the rule, as compared to the deductive approach that uses the rule to predict and falsify correlations) approach is a reliable solution to our practical problems, even though it is irrelevant to our cosmic ones.

When we get down to human nature however, explanation seems to be on the wane.  For our practical affairs, it is now the correlations that count. They are easy and cheap to derive, and with the advent of data mining, we can find correlations upon correlations that would make even Newton blush. Now even without Newtonian equations, behavior can be predicted with pinpoint accuracy through the correlations found through the brute force of our computing power. With predictions like this, who needs explanations!

And so we don’t.

This mindset is characterized by net denizens and wizards (Isaac Newton, who considered himself an alchemist first, was also a wizard), who have every confidence in their predictions, and have the gathered eyeballs and mega bank accounts to prove it. To illustrate this mindset in action, consider this recent article in by Thomas Goetz in Wired Magazine on ‘Feedback Loops’.  Getting feedback not only informs, but it motivates, and getting prompt and regular feedback can get people focused, motivated, and aroused to do what they need to do. This is a simple and reliable premise vouched from not only all human experience but all recent iterations of human experience. The internet in particular provides us with not only information, but also feedback as to the state of our behavior. Harness that power, and you can harness human motivation, presumably of course for the good. All well and good, except that there are negative correlations within the positive correlations that a data miner may overlook but a good theory or explanation predicts.

Life is full of traffic signals

Consider that blinking road sign up ahead that gives you your speed. The information is redundant, as you know your speed from a quick glance at your speedometer. Nonetheless, as the data show, this feedback motivates you to slow down, and even after the sign passes keep slowing down. However, as Goetz claims, this is due to the fact that ‘people are reminded of the downside of speeding, including traffic tickets and the risk of accident’ (as if the speedometer doesn’t!).  So whether information feedback is redundant or non-redundant, feedback works. The implicit correlation and thus prediction nested in Goetz’s article is that non-redundant and redundant feedback have a sort of equivalency. The fact is though, they don’t. Humans and indeed almost all sentient creatures do not tolerate information redundancy, indeed they don’t have the time or computational space for it. In fact, redundant information is automatically blocked out through a well known process aptly named ‘blocking’. As an illustration, consider another road sign example. Suppose you see a traffic light turn red, and then ten seconds later a second brown light also turns on. Both red and brown light correlate with ‘stopping’, but only the significance of the red light will be remembered. The information from the other light is redundant, and is therefore blocked. So when the light turns brown, you will not stop because your brain blocked you from considering it. This blocking phenomenon holds for all creatures and all events, and forces another explanation for Goetz’s data, namely the fact that people may be slowing down because they perceive that the blinking road sign does not just give information you already know, but information you don’t, namely the greater likelihood that there is a cop around the corner. I may be wrong here, but that is a good thing, because as with all predictions coming from good explanations, this premise is imminently testable. For example, put that feedback on your speed on every billboard you pass, and see what happens!

But there is another prediction that comes from explanation, namely that novel or unpredictable events provide an incentive salience or importance to moment to moment behavior that depends upon how information is arranged, or to point, its feedback function. The neural basis and explanation of feedback is that we are responsive not only to the ends of our behavior but to the novel twists and turns that get us there.  In other words, performance feedback works because it activates mid-brain dopamine systems that are sensitive to the novelty that is implicit in non-redundant feedback. But dopamine is not activated by redundant information, only novel info will do. Hence the motivating power of redundant information if refuted yet again, but this time from predictions derived from how explanations of how the brain actually works. In other words, it ain’t loopy feedback loops’, but the novelty that counts, or in the large the explanation that counts.

Procrastination and the spell of danger

Procrastination: the abiding problem of getting things done in time or at all, which will soon be cured by our leading psychologists as soon as they get around to it.

When we go to the movies, it’s often in the nick of time before the feature starts. And when the feature does start, we take pleasure and excitement in watching folks do things once again in the nick of time. Consider the proverbial time bomb. It is a metaphor for plot lines like getting the girl, solving the crime, averting the fire, saving the planet, and of course defusing the bomb when there is literally no time to spare. Miss the deadline and there will be a proverbial or actual explosion that will render the hero and all the good things he stands for into a pile of dust. That’s what makes drama so dramatic, the fact that the outcome is always uncertain until a resolution comes in the nick of time. Identifying with our hero in the cinema means putting ourselves in his place, and this cinematic empathy can drive us to tears, horror, disgust, or delight, but underscoring it all is a need for our undivided attention. The easiest way to do that is to literally wait until the last minute, or preferably, the last second. But that of course is courting danger, and danger is something that we presumably are instinctively geared to avoid or flee through the intervention of a ‘hard wired’ stress response, with the result that danger would be something we would continually want to avoid. But we don’t, and that’s the rub. The fact that we wait until the last minute to get things done means that we are actively putting ourselves into stressful or near stressful situations that we by all accounts should wish to avoid, but how can this be? Like a moth to the flame we are at once attracted and repelled by danger, but the problem and irony is that we couldn’t be motivated to do things otherwise. Danger increases risk, and risk embodies the prospect of uncertainty, and it is precisely this fact that makes us attentively aroused and more attuned to the task at hand. But with it, we are also incented to stay the course of being uncertain. That is the property of the neuro-modulator dopamine, which primes us to be alert and imparts incentive value to moment to moment behavior.  But because dopamine only increases the value of momentary behavior, it can act at cross purposes to our long term interests. Hence we often procrastinate to be attentive, a state of mind that is dependent upon the uncertainty of the moment but ignorant of the long term prospects of behavior irrespective of their danger.

Motivation is da bomb!

But what is procrastination?  Simple definitions of procrastination mean to postpone activities until another time. Of course, that by definition covers everything you postpone, whether it’s logical or not. So if to order our daily schedule means to do one thing in deference or postponement of another, that means that our whole life is spend procrastinating, which is absurd.  A better definition is provided by the Oxford Dictionary, which holds that “Procrastination is a postponement, often with the sense of deferring though indecision, when early action would have been preferable," or as "deferring action, especially without good reason." [i]  The concept that procrastination is an inherently unreasonable thing has been echoed by many pundits who concur that procrastination is the irrational delay of behavior.

At root however this definition is nonsense, for even irrational behavior must have a reason to be. It’s only when behavior doesn’t fit our prized model that we curse the agent rather than the explanation, but the faulty explanation always loses. Consider the behavior of the solar system. The fact that it didn’t conform to the model that put the earth in the center of the universe didn’t make the planetary motions irrational, and even faulting God for bad design principles couldn’t escape from the fact that the world worked in mysterious but not irrational ways. As creatures who embody the natural world, the conclusion is the same. Humans act in mysterious but not quite irrational ways, and behavior must serve reasons both obvious and subtle, as there is nothing nutty under the sun. The point therefore is not to decry the unreasonableness of procrastination, but investigating why for us common folks procrastination is often not an unreasonable but a necessary and rational thing.

Consider the fact that we don’t work when we are sleepy, hungry,  or are under the sun,  and generally wait until a time when we are rested, sated, or in the cool of the evening. We do this because at a later time we can work faster, more comfortably, and with more alertness and attention to our job. In these cases, ‘procrastination’ is rather a justifiable delay. Procrastination can also be a reasonable thing if we consciously or non-consciously postpone an action in order to inject an element of risk into behavior. Since risk increases dopamine release that corresponds with positive affect and attentive alertness, procrastination can actually increase the effectiveness of behavior. In other words, procrastination is a reasonable thing if it represents the non conscious manipulation of affect to increase effectiveness, whereas procrastination due to distraction or fear (e.g. postponing a trip to the dentist) simply reduces effectiveness. Doing things effectively means doing things affectively, and that often means acting just in time. Ultimately, the non-reasonableness of behavior is an aspect of everything we do because motivation requires activation, and this means affect. In other words, to be effective we must be affective, and affect never falls within ‘good reason’ unless there is good reason to manipulate affect. Ultimately, procrastination implies irrationality, but irrationality occurs when we ignore reasonable causes, and when affect is left out of the picture of human behavior we are left confused and needful of a title to describe how timeliness of behavior cannot be predicted by the reasonableness of behavior. Thus procrastination is not an artifact of behavior, but of our ignorance of how motivation works.

---

[i] Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 1996

Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR), A Bio-Behavioristic Interpretation

Muscular Tension: An Explanation from a Methodological Behaviorism

A. J. Marr






Abstract

(Published in 2010 in 'The Behavior Analyst Today', Vol(10)3, pp. 364-381)

A truism in psychology is that the activity of the striated musculature is maintained or reinforced by its consequences, and represents operant behavior. Yet, the striated musculature is divided into two main types that are different physiologically and are activated separately and not necessarily simultaneously. The question is whether they are different psychologically. That is, are different types of the striated musculature activated by different motivational principles? It is argued that separate motivational principles are imputed for different muscular types because of the private nature of muscular activity that is resistant to precise observation, but disappear with the application of experimental instrumentalities that can render these private events and their governing contingencies universally accessible or ‘public’. It is concluded that striated muscular activity is uniformly and consistently operant in nature, and can be functionally analyzed through a methodological behaviorism.


Key Words: dopamine, mindfulness, meditation, stress, tension, emotional circumplex

_________________________________________________________________

Operant conditioning represents a unique data language that describes the lawfulness of behavior as derived from the cumulative record over time of consistent correlations between the universally observed or ‘public’ form or topography of behavior and its consequences. Operant conditioning procedures are based upon methodological principles, wherein reliable behavioral consistencies or ‘laws’ are derived using a data language that precisely maps to the universally agreed upon facts of behavior. As a form of methodological behaviorism (Pavlovian or classical conditioning is another example), the experimental methodology of operant conditioning directly measures and manipulates only publicly observable behavior. Grasping, walking, talking, etc. are operant behaviors because they are correlated with or are ‘reinforced’ by specific discrete outcomes. Because these behaviors uniformly engage a specific organelle of the body, namely the striated musculature, a common presumption is that operant conditioning primarily reflects the conditioning of these muscles. Of course, convulsions, startle reactions, etc. do involve the striated musculature and can be mediated by neurological rather than purely cognitive causes, but in general muscular activity is guided by its functionality as consciously perceived.

It is commonly assumed that if striated muscles are activated, they are publically observed, and hence may be subsumed entire under an operant analysis. Yet only a fraction of striated muscular activity is observable publicly or privately. That is, the musculature may be activated yet not result in publicly observable responses, and neither may it be consciously or privately perceived by the individual. Ironically, the private activity of the musculature has long been made public through resolving instrumentalities (e.g., SCR, EMG) but rarely if ever has an operant analysis been employed to explain this behavior. Rather, tension has generally been construed to be an artifact of autonomic arousal that is elicited due to psycho-social ‘demand’. This interpretation regards muscular tension as subsumed under different motivational principles that do not incorporate contingency, such as the reflexive or S-R responses entailed by a fight or flight response, stress reaction, etc. (Marmot & Wilkinson, 2006). In this case, inferred mediating processes take the place of observed correlations between behavior and environmental events.

However, this conclusion may remain uncontested not because the relationship between tension and its governing contingencies is disproven, or because the relevant data are unobtainable, but because of a common misinterpretation of the semantics of ‘demand’. The purpose of this article is to argue that the same data and data language used to establish the concept that tension is reflexive or is a respondent can be reinterpreted to unequivocally demonstrate that muscular tension is an instrumental or operant behavior.

The Striated Musculature

Although the activity of the striated musculature comprises the majority of behavior as we understand it, its psychophysiology is not widely known. Muscle fibers are categorized into "slow-twitch fibers" and "fast-twitch fibers" (Squire et al. 2003). Slow-twitch fibers (also called "Type 1 muscle fibers") activate and deactivate slowly, but when activated they are also very slow to fatigue. Fast-twitch fibers activate and deactivate rapidly and come in two types: "Type 2A muscle fibers" which fatigue at an intermediate rate, and "Type 2B muscle fibers" which fatigue rapidly. These three muscle fiber types (Types 1, 2A, and 2B) are contained in all muscles in varying amounts. Muscles that need to be activated much of the time (like postural muscles) have a greater number of Type 1 (slow) fibers. When a muscle begins to contract, primarily Type 1 fibers are activated first, followed by Type 2A, then 2B. Type 1 fibers are often monotonically activated because of psychosocial ‘demand’ that in general does not engage fast twitch fibers. For an individual, this activation is only indirectly observed when these fibers subsequently fatigue, causing exhaustion and pain.

Muscular activation also causes systemic changes in the autonomic nervous system. Sympathetic autonomic arousal is elicited through the sustained contraction of high threshold motor units (Type 2) of the striated musculature, as occurs during running or weight training (Saito et al. 1986). But arousal may also be mediated by the sustained contraction of small low threshold motor (Type 1) units of the striated musculature (Mcguigan, 1991), and can be measured directly through EMG (electromyogram) or through indirect measures of autonomic arousal (e.g., skin conductance response or SCR; galvanic skin response or GSR) elicited by tension induced arousal. Physiologically, the neural pathways that detail how muscular tension instigates autonomic arousal (Gellhorn, 1967, 1972, Jacobson, 1970, Malmo, 1975) have been well established. Through a bi-directional connection between the reticular arousal system and muscle efferents, a dramatic decrease or increase in muscle activity throughout the body can respectively stimulate decreases or increases in sympathetic arousal. This striated muscle position hypothesis (McGuigan, 1993) holds that the critical controlling event for autonomic arousal is covert neuro-muscular activity, and that rapid striated muscular activity can “mediate and thereby control what has been called autonomic, cardiovascular, and electroencephalographic conditioning.” The question yet unanswered is how covert muscular activity is conditioned.

Contingency and Demand

The contraction of Type 1 fibers occurs prior to and in tandem with type 2 muscular activation, and is essential to voluntary behavior. Type 1 activation also occurs to prime an individual for action and as such is also dependent upon the anticipated results of that activity. It thus follows that Type 1 fibres are commonly activated due to response contingencies. However, if type 1 muscular contraction occurs without the subsequent activation of type 2 musculature, then involuntary or reflexive mechanisms are generally imputed as represented by the ‘stimulus’ of demand. But does this concept of demand denote a true mechanism or is it merely a misrepresentation of the semantics or meaning of demand?

As popularly conceived, tension is a byproduct of reflexive processes (e.g. flight or fight) that are elicited by a requirement for performance represented by ‘threat’ or ‘demand’. But the requirement for performance entails a conscious or non-conscious appraisal of the consequences dependent upon performance or non-performance. These represent future contingent outcomes. Thus demand must implicate contingency. Demand also entails the conscious or non-conscious appraisal of different response options or contingencies that lead to a similar ends. Furthermore, demand occurs in a perceptual space that involves the concurrent consideration of alternative response contingencies that lead to dissimilar ends (e.g. distractions). In other words, demand entails choice. For example, a person confronting a demand to complete a project at work must choose between different response options (e.g. work faster, take short cuts), and his performance is further influenced by the availability of alternative response options (e.g. taking a break). Hence demand cannot represent a stimulus event that elicits behavior, but rather denotes alternative response contingencies or choices that lead to the emission of behavior.

Besides the cognitive element of demand, tension and associated arousal is also correlated with cognitive events that represent abstract rather than normative (i.e. means-end) properties of a contingency. For example, it has been proposed that discrepant, unpredicted, or novel events directly elicit alarm or arousal states (Ursin & Eriksen, 2004). A modification of this hypothesis proposes that discrepant events first elicit affective events which in turn “automatically and obligatorily elicit a somatic response” (Bechara & Damasio, 2005, Verdejo-Garcia et al., 2006). In short, the “primary inducer is a stimulus in the environment (i.e. risk) that elicits an emotional response” (Weller et al., 2007). However, the reflexive or ‘automatic’ link between somatic (i.e. sympathetic) arousal and unpredictable, discrepant, or risky events is not supported by the facts. Indeed, continuous positive surprise or discrepancy (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) as evidenced in creative and sporting behavior is highly correlated with profound relaxation and low autonomic arousal. Similarly, low autonomic arousal is characteristic when avoidance from surprising painful events (e.g. bad news) is impossible, as in the case of ‘learned helplessness’ (Seligman, 1975; Gatchel et al. 1977). As an alternative explanation, because affective events intrinsically denote or mark the value of the behavior that accompanies them, this behavior may also contrast with other alternatives that have value derived from a cognitive or rational domain. In other words, emotional value accentuates differences in the relative value of alternative choices, and hence may signal the emission of covert somatic (i.e. neuro-muscular) behavior. Thus it is proposed that discrepancy elicited affect does not directly elicit sympathetic arousal, but can indirectly establish a contrast between response alternatives that does.

These concepts are easily illustrated through the facts of behavior. Specifically, sustained or tonic levels of muscular tension are commonly produced under continuous or moment to moment alternative contingencies or choices wherein any choice entails near equivalent feasible or avoidable losses, or dilemmas. These dilemmas may consist of two or more rationally comparable choices that are near equivalent (e.g. what choice to make in a card game) or two choices that represent affective choices or affective vs. rational choices that are near equivalent in value and cannot be logically compared (Marr, 2006). An affective choice will be defined as an anticipatory emotion or more specifically, a priming effect due to the enhanced and sustained activity of mid-brain dopamine systems (Berridge, 2001) that provide an affective value (or ‘wanting’) to engaging in or the prospect of engaging in positive unpredicted or novel events (e.g. checking email) or primary drives (e.g. ‘wanting’ an ice cream cone). As such this activity may occur not only at the moment a discrepancy is perceived (as represented by the primary inducer), but also from moment to moment prior to or in anticipation of that event (as represented by the secondary inducer). Thus, continuous decision making between alternative contingencies (e.g. doing housework or minding a child, working or surfing the internet, staying on a diet or eating ice cream, keeping a dental appointment or staying at home) represents irreconcilable affective and/or rational alternatives wherein one choice entails the loss of its alternative, and is associated with sustained or tonic levels of tension that is painful. Surnamed the ‘Cinderella Effect’ from the fairy tale character who as a harried servant girl was first to wake and last to sleep (Wursted et al. 1991, 1996; Hagg, 1991; Lundberg, 1999), the continuous activation of type 1 motor units or muscles (also called Cinderella fibers) because of this psycho-social ‘demand’ causes them to eventually fail, and thus recruit other groups of muscles more peripheral to the original group, resulting in pain and exhaustion. In addition, as the name Cinderella suggests, these slow twitch fibers are slow to deactivate, and will continue activated even during subsequent intervals of rest (Lundberg et al, 2002). The aversive result of this long term activation conforms to McEwen’s model of ‘allostatic load’ (1998), which predicts that tension and arousal will be maladaptive when there is an imbalance between activation and rest/recovery. Specifically, continuous low level or ‘slight’ tension results in overexposure to stress hormones, high blood pressure, and resulting mental and physical exhaustion. (It must be remarked that in the aforementioned examples slight tension is correlated with moment to moment choices between alternatives that have low salience, and is characteristic of common day to day choices. However, if the choice salience was very high, wherein alternative choices represent highly salient possible outcomes such as matters of life and death, then tension and arousal would be much higher, and would be reported as anxiety or fear.)

Somatic Markers

In addition to continuous choices, intermittent choices between conflicting near equivalent low salience response options also correlate with tension induced arousal, and this activity is correspondingly intermittent or ‘phasic’. Because tension is quickly followed by a period of rest and recovery, tension is still affective, but it is not maladaptive or consciously regarded as painful. From a series of ‘choice-choice’ experiments that induced intermittent low level arousal (Damasio, 1995), tension and associated autonomic arousal have been proposed to represent a signaling or ‘gut level’ response that informs correct decision making. This is represented by Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis that posits that the visceral sensation of autonomic arousal “increases the accuracy and efficiency of the decision process” by automatically parsing the number of response options. Sympathetic autonomic arousal is in turn elicited by ‘primary or secondary inducers’ that represent affective states that are induced at the moment of discrepant or risky choices or the cognitive representation of those choices prior to action. It may be inferred from the nature of these choices that these affective states are embodied by the activity of midbrain dopamine systems that are in turn initiated by moment to moment act-outcome discrepancies. These affective states in themselves provide a ‘somatic marker’ for value by increasing the ‘incentive salience’ (Berridge, 2007) or importance of a response option. It follows that the primary and secondary inducers that instigate somatic events and in themselves comprise somatic events are elicited by abstract rather than normative properties of contingencies. In other words, the discrepancy based affect that induces somatic responses is dependent upon how reinforcement is scheduled to follow performance rather than the fact that it does follow performance. However, this invalidates the somatic marker hypothesis because primary inducers and the somatic responses they elicit are ultimately signaled not by the long term consequences of behavior, but rather by moment to moment discrepancies in behavior and its immediate consequences. Thus somatic events cannot inform the value of long term but rather short term or moment to moment choices. [1]

Whether continuous or intermittent, the demand reflected by equivalent alternative contingencies or ‘choices’ does not represent a discrete stimulus entity or entities that bypass cognition but rather comprises a cognitive event that denotes changing perceptual relationships between behavior and outcomes, or a means-end contingency or ‘expectancy’. These alternative choices describe responses that lead to primary gains at the cost of moment to moment opportunity losses. Thus the primary gain of minding a child or accessing the internet comes at the moment to moment opportunity loss of performing household chores or office work, and vice versa. But what is the purpose of concurrent muscular activation? The sustained activation of type 1 fibers as elicited by the perception of equivalent alternative contingencies serves no direct functional purpose, but it may serve an indirect one. Sustained tension is painful, and as a rule pain imposes a new action priority to escape pain and to avoid future pain (Eccleston & Crombez, 1999). That is, pain serves to initiate avoidance behavior. Thus the pain of tension may serve to motivate an individual to escape from ‘no win’ situations wherein any choice entails equivalent loss, and tension is thus indirectly reinforced. But if tension is due to information about the consequences of behavior, namely the avoidance of the painful entailments of tension, how can this be demonstrated?

Resting Protocols

The argument for the operant nature of type 1 muscular activity is that if tension only occurs when decisions result in moment to moment or imminent feasible or avoidable (i.e., opportunity) losses due to near equivalent choices, then tension will not occur if there is no possibility of avoidance of future events, or no opportunity loss. That is, the loss remains, but the opportunity to avoid it does not. Thus, if tension occurs because it signals behavior that leads to the subsequent avoidance of the events that elicit tension, then it logically follows that tension is therefore ‘reinforced’ by prospective avoidance, and is an operant behavior.

A well known procedure used to eliminate the ability to avoid loss while responding under multiple alternative contingencies is called an exclusion time out (Zirpoli, 2005). Common in educational environments, an exclusion time out describes a period of time when an individual is restrained from performing all actions which are otherwise rewarding in order to extinguish targeted behavior (e.g. temper tantrums). Thus a child under time out must sit and not participate with classmates, engage in learning tasks, read a book, etc. Although the child incurs and is aware of loss, the difference is that this loss is unavoidable or non feasible. A time out is also the defining characteristic of resting. To rest is to take a time out from the choices or demands of a working day in order to achieve a state of relaxation. However, it does not implicate to what degree choices are reduced, mainly that they are. Thus, although resting may figuratively represent an exclusion time out, it does not literally match the definition. To do that requires a radical reduction of choices that entail imminent (i.e., moment to moment) feasible or opportunity loss, and this is implicitly or explicitly entailed in meditative procedures. The research consensus is that meditative procedures, including resting protocols that also eliminate or defer this mode of choice all correlate with an attendant state of relaxation (Holmes, 1984, 1988). For meditation and resting, an individual may be aware of choices and the opportunity loss incurred by not acting upon them, but also knows that avoidance of these losses is not possible. This demonstrates that tension is indeed highly correlated with the prospective avoidance of future events, and is an operant.

However, although the dependent measure of relaxation is shared by meditative and resting states, the independent measures for these have been expanded beyond the mere attenuation of choice. Thus for meditation, relaxation may not be primarily attributed to the reduction of choice, but to the manipulation of attention. This manipulation involves focusing attention on a stimulus event (concentrative meditation, Benson’s ‘relaxation response’). But as with the semantics of demand, the semantics of focused attention is also ill defined, and must also entail the restriction of choice. In effect, the focusing of attention restricts choice by avoiding environmental stimuli or the perception of the functional consequences of those stimuli, which conforms to the definition of mindfulness as choice-less awareness (Germer et al., 2005). Because meditation must entail moment to moment choice-less awareness or mindfulness, it may be inferred that the primary dependent measure of meditation, namely muscular relaxation, is also primarily due to the mindful or choice-less awareness implicit in meditation. (It must be stressed however that although mindfulness incorporates relaxation as one of its entailments, the modification of rumination that is integral to mindfulness influences other emotional responses that have no relationship to muscular activity, such as depression, regret, etc. In other words, mindfulness is not primarily a relaxation strategy, although it incorporates elements that induce relaxation.)

To reinterpret meditative and resting protocols as a ‘time out’ or ‘choice-less awareness’ makes the independent measures for relaxation equivalent. Thus meditation is rest because their respective dependent and independent measures are the same. Because type 1 musculature is easily activated and is slow to deactivate, nearly all choice that entails moment to moment imminent feasible loss due to incommensurate or conflicting choices must be eliminated or deferred for a continuous period of time for the musculature to totally relax, and this is what meditative and resting protocols implicitly do, and for mindfulness procedures, it is what they explicitly do. Yet because muscular activation is not painful or harmful in itself unless it is sustained, it is the persistence and not the degree of muscular activation that is deleterious. Thus the continuous options involved in a distraction filled environment that entails minor yet persistent gains/losses are far more painful and harmful than the short term and generally intermittent choices that populate our ruminations or worries. It follows that although ruminative behavior causes tension through the cognitive representation of near equivalent or incommensurate choices, it generally does not populate a working day, and if it occurs we often have time to recover from our intermittent worries. However, distractive environments are common, often continuous and inescapable, and result in the persistent activation of the musculature. Moreover, in this high tech world, we consciously populate our environment with continuous distractive choices from email to the web, but continue to misattribute the resulting tension to the content rather than context of our choices. That is, by emphasizing what choices we make rather than how our choices are related to each other, the origin of muscular tension derives from the wrong cause and engenders the wrong ‘cure’. Thus choice becomes incidental to tension as the latter is attributed to the level of activity rather than the choices engendered by that activity. The remedy for this error entails ultimately a redefinition of the very concept of stress itself.

The Semantics of Stress

“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms” (Voltaire).

In his class, the psychologist F. J. McGuigan (1993) would induce relaxation in his students through the technique of progressive relaxation. He would then drop a book to demonstrate how the startle reflex and related tension and associated arousal is inhibited or impossible without the presence of muscular tonus, a finding originally made by Sherrington (1909) and explained neurologically by Gellhorn (1967,1972). This underscored the physiological fact that tension is primarily not an artifact of arousal, but its cause. If the independent measure of contingency is added to the equation, the theoretical principle follows that tension is the body’s specific response to near equivalent alternative response contingencies or choices. Because it indirectly controls and is controlled by the prospect of the occurrence or non occurrence of future events or reinforcers, tension is an operant. However, although tension and accompanying sympathetic arousal may be characterized as stress, it cannot be formally defined as stress. This is because the latter’s terms are not precisely defined.

An operant definition of tension differs from the classic definition of stress as “the body’s nonspecific response to a demand placed on it” (Selye, 1980). Yet these two principles are incommensurate not because of their predictions but because of their semantics. That is, Selye’s principle is not a scientific hypothesis because its terms are not clearly defined. The theoretical incoherence of the concept of stress explains why stress is resistant to a methodological behaviorism. It simply contains no terms that may be grounded on the publicly agreed facts of behavior. Nonetheless, a methodological behaviorism can increase our knowledge of the observable behavioral event, namely muscular tension and associated arousal, which in the popular lexicon at least is defined as stress.

Ultimately, tension is initiated by the perception of means end contingencies or expectancies. Tension is in turn instrumental in altering affect (i.e. it produces pain), which in turn intrinsically denotes the response contingencies (i.e. avoidance behaviors) that will remove the tension that causes it. This latter position conforms to the principle in cognitive neuroscience that affect is not prior to cognition nor is automatically elicited without cognition, but must be integrated with cognition (Storbeck & Clore, 2007). This is particularly important in the analysis of stress, since the common metaphorical representation of stress implies that stress is a ‘reaction’ to demand events that bypass appraisal or contingency. However, whether tension and arousal are stress or represent a kind of stress is immaterial to the pragmatic implications of an operant analysis of tension. Specifically, if the metaphor of ‘choice’ replaces the metaphor of ‘demand’ as the primary descriptor of the etiology of tension, then simple contingencies of reinforcement may provide a much more precise and uniform description of the operational measures that will permit us to predict and control the daily tensions that beset us. Nonetheless, this argument is won not by the parsimony and precision of a learning based explanation, but through the power of procedure to effect behavioral change. That of course is the mandate and justification of a true science of behavior.

Addendum:

Behavior Analysis and Tension: Clinical and Philosophical Implications

A behavior analytic interpretation of covert muscular activity or tension maps this behavior to the data language of operant conditioning. The rigorously defined syntax (data language) and semantics (meaning) of behavior analysis lends precision to the prediction and control of behavior as well as rendering its predictions easily falsifiable.  This has been amply demonstrated for a wide range of overt and covert behavior, and can be easily demonstrated for covert muscular behavior. In addition, covert muscular behavior as well as neurological activation can be correlated with aspects of environmental contingencies such as utility and discrepancy.  The various combinations of the aspects can be mapped not only to behavior but to the subjective reports of behavior or subjective emotional states. Arguably, this renders many emotional states wholly amenable to behavior analysis. These clinical and philosophical implications are discussed below.

Clinical Implications

                                   

Rest in Peace (and Quiet)

In the literature of stress, stress is commonly attributed to a monolithic ‘flight or fight’ reaction that accounts for all attributes of the stress response, from fear and anxiety to the tension that is elicited in a distractive day.  Yet for minor or small scale non conscious choices or distractions, this ‘stress’ response begins with  merely the  slight  yet sustained activation of low threshold or Type 1 muscular fibers. These muscles are activated easily and rapidly, deactivate slowly, and when sustained quickly fail and cause pain and exhaustion. (This is why at the end of a distraction filled working day we commonly report not fear or anxiety, but merely a state of exhaustion) This activation pattern does not entail fear or anger and is generally not reported as anxiety. Because of the neuro-muscular characteristics of this type of muscular activity, reducing the salience or frequency of distractive events is not enough to disengage this sustained or tonic tension. Distractions instead must be totally eliminated for a sustained period of time, and this is what is implicitly done in meditative practices. The question, yet unanswered, is what is the relative role of rumination and distraction in the maintenance of these low level stressors.

The Cinderella Effect

                                                           

 A common truism is that distractions not only cause us to get tense and remain tense during the day, but that tension ‘builds’ until we are sore and exhausted. However, the neuro-muscular processes behind this event are not widely known. Named after the fairy tale character who was first to awake and last to sleep, this ‘Cinderella Effect’ represents the fact that slight but continuous distractions (e.g. the continuous choice opportunities of surfing the internet or accessing email instead of working) elicit the continuous activation of low threshold units (also called Type 1, slow twitch, or  Cinderella fibers)  of the striated musculature, which unabated will lead to their failure and the successive recruitment of other muscular groups to take up the slack. The result is pain, exhaustion, and often a literal pain in the neck. (To elicit a similar result, try lightly clenching your fist for a minute or so.) In addition, as the name Cinderella underscores, this muscular activity does not immediately cease when distractions cease, and is sustained even when we take a break or rest.

Thus, even slight or intermittent distractions will elicit sustained or ‘tonic’ muscular tension, and usually to harmful and painful effect. It follows logically that only a radical and sustained reduction in distraction can result in a totally relaxed state. Thus, to be relaxed, a reduction in distractive choices is not enough, distraction must instead be totally eliminated or deferred for a significant period of time, and that is what meditative practices implicitly do.  The problem is that meditation also entails a radical reduction in rumination as well as distraction, and the emphasis in meditative disciplines on the control of rumination obscures the distinctive influence of distraction in maintaining tense or anxious states. (Indeed, the respective roles of rumination and distraction have never been separately studied in the scientific literature on meditation.) However, if distraction and only distraction can be monitored and avoided in the many environments that are stressful primarily because of distraction, then one can achieve the means to be relaxed, even if the level of rumination is not altered. Thus one can learn to become relaxed even in workaday environments. 

The Cinderella Time-Out

The procedure:

First: Take a mental or physical inventory of all the minor unessential judgments in a working day that would entail minor avoidable gain/loss. These 'distractions' included doing one's work vs. reading the newspaper, watching TV, chatting on the phone, internet surfing, or other diversions.  This provides a comparative or base rate to compare future behavior, and trains you to notice or attend to distractive choices.

Secondly: Establish as a daily goal a set number, say three or four, of continuous hours of distraction free work. A continuous hour is 60 successive minutes without voluntarily engaging in a distractive activity (e.g. surfing the web, checking email, etc.)  If you prefer not to work, just take a break and sit passively. 

           

That's it.

By continuously eliminating these distractive choices from major portions of the day, you can still anticipate and be aware of them, but you cannot be stressed by choosing between them. By deferring irreconcilable choices, tension falls, relaxation occurs, and you can go about your day more relaxed, more alert, more productive, and without the painful regret that occurs from a day misspent. Finally, by providing a feedback function to train attention and to compare behavior across days, you can compare corresponding emotional behavior (i.e., tension) across behavior or 'trials', demonstrate the efficacy of the procedure, and be reinforced for the overall effort by that feedback.  In the language of behavior analysis, this method is essentially a ‘time out’ procedure, wherein reinforcing events (i.e. distractions) are for a set time eliminated or deferred.

                                                                                   

What the Cinderella Time Out Does

Practically, the Cinderella time out is essentially a method of exercising a control over tension in its often initial form as a subliminal behavior that escapes conscious awareness.  Cinderella essentially eliminates the feasibility of making alternative choices, and because their loss cannot be avoided, tension will not occur. In essence, Cinderella is merely an exclusion time out for distractive events. This method allows one to sustain a natural or homeostatic resting state that otherwise is disrupted in even a slightly distractive environment. Since for small distractions the proprioceptive stimuli which alert one to tension only indicate the presence of tension after tension has been sustained for some time, the isolation and control of the discriminative stimuli that are correlated with the initiation of slight or minor tension allow for tension to be avoided before its sustained occurrence taxes the musculature and autonomic nervous system. Conversely, the method also trains one to mentally recreate or ‘learn’ the proprioceptive stimuli associated with relaxation, and thus be able to ‘voluntarily’ induce relaxation. Since relaxation as a voluntary response (actually, what is learned is the inhibition of tension, since relaxation is not a response but is technically the non-activity of the musculature) is incompatible with tension, it will also mitigate tension caused by distraction and rumination even when both are not avoided.

                                                                                                                                   

The Cinderella time out sharply contrasts with prevalent stress control procedures, which emphasize the modification and control through psychotherapy and other means large scale or molar distractions or problems, such as domestic or other workaday difficulties and the rumination they entail. The Cinderella time out is based on the premise that tension signals avoidance behavior and is reinforced by avoidance, and is thus operant in nature.  But it differs critically from rumination based strategies for stress management because it engages the control of discriminative events (i.e. distraction) that generally do not engage conscious thought.   Because control is easy, time consuming therapeutic intervention is not required. It is important to note that this procedure dramatically alters how we conceive meditative protocols induce relaxed states. Relaxation in other words is not achieved primarily through the manipulation or attenuation of conscious rumination, but merely by dramatically reducing non-conscious choice.

Finally, since it is based on the absolute reduction of distractive events that usually result in the opportunity loss of more productive behavior, the Cinderella time out is also at root a time management procedure, and its practice will allow us to have a far more productive use of our time that is combined with a far more stress free use of our time. Apart from a reduction in stress, the psychological benefits of being more productive will also counter balance feelings of depression and frustration that follow when we frequently survey a day misspent in distractive pursuits. 

Philosophical Implications:

This article presents a new interpretation of the origin of muscular tension. However, the theoretical position that tension is an ‘operant’ is separate from the empirical observations which describe the correlation of tension induced autonomic arousal and neurological activation with clearly defined informative states. This addendum presents the essentials of this description.

The cognitive representations of our day to day activities involve primarily the contrast of innumerable means-ends expectancies or contingencies under various degrees of uncertainty. If our brains were mere computing devices, we would logically and unemotionally weigh the importance of each of these expectancies and choose one course of action. What occurs instead are parallel somatic (tension and autonomic arousal) and activating or ‘energizing’ (enhanced activity of dopamine neurons) events that are ‘painful’ or ‘pleasurable’ in nature. These changes alter the importance or salience of a momentary response option and as an additive function create emergent emotional states.

Two cognitive variables of contrast and discrepancy can be observed to respectively correlate with tension induced autonomic arousal and activation or alertness (as defined by its neurological correspondence with the increased activity of mid-brain dopamine systems) (Berridge, 2007). In addition, the degree of contrast, discrepancy, and expected utility of moment to moment responding correlate with the level of autonomic arousal and activation, and in their various permutations correspond with subjective emotional states.

As defined:

Contrast reflects the moment to moment comparative value of two alternative means-end expectancies or response contingencies.

Discrepancy reflects moment to moment unexpected variances in the immediate predicted outcome of a behavior.

Utility reflects the value of a moment to moment response as determined by long term hedonic (e.g. food, sex, etc.) or rational value (e.g. monetary reward).

Incentive salience reflects the relative importance of moment to moment responding under a response contingency due to the utility of a response and to affective responses elicited by concurrently perceived discrepancy.

If there is a contrast between two alternative response contingencies of equal utility under certainty (i.e., little or no discrepancy in moment to moment act-outcome relationships), tension induced autonomic arousal will occur, but the level of tension will vary with the utility of a moment to moment response. Thus tension will be less for low-utility choices than high. As these contingencies diverge in value, we make rational decisions to choose one of the alternatives and progressively less tension will occur. Thus the choice between two conflicting low value alternatives (e.g. what dessert to order in a restaurant) will result in lower tension than a choice between two conflicting high value alternatives (e.g. what medical procedure to choose to treat a life threatening condition). In addition, less tension will occur when more information is available that leads to one choice becoming more logically compelling.

The increase in dopaminergic activity due to moment to moment discrepancy adds another variable that increases not only the incentive salience of moment to moment responding, but also alertness (i.e., sensorimotor activation) and affective tone (i.e., a good or bad feeling). Dopamine induced activation also scales monotonically with the qualitative or informative aspects of discrepancy (Fiorillo et al., 2003). For example, tasks that entail moment to moment positive discrepancy (e.g. creative behavior, sporting activities, surfing the web, etc.) under circumstances wherein the incentive salience of alternative responses is relatively low will correlate with feelings of alertness/activation or ‘pleasure’ and low or non-existent tension (or low degree of discomfort or a pleasant feeling). Tasks that entail a moment to moment positive discrepancy wherein the incentive salience of alternative responses is relatively high will correlate with feelings of pleasure and high and/or constant tension (or high discomfort or pain). These feelings will also increase as the utility of a response increases, or in other words, we become more alert as the ‘stakes’ increase. As the incentive salience of alternative responses increases to match the increasing salience of a primary response, the level of tension and corresponding autonomic activation will increase as well, and result in a state of anxiety. Correspondingly, if the salience of a response increases as the salience of an alternative response decreases, tension will fall and activation will increase, resulting in a state of elation or ecstasy.

For example, moment to moment positive discrepancy in high value sporting or creative events (e.g., a ‘flow’ response) (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) is marked by a feeling of energy and ‘elation’ and corresponding low tension induced autonomic arousal or ‘coolness under pressure’ when the salience of contrasting response options is low. However, as the salience of these options increase in value, tension becomes progressively more likely to occur both in persistence and intensity until activation and tension are continual and high, or in other words, we become ‘anxious’ or stressed. In addition, as the salience of both primary and alternative response options decreases, activation decreases along with muscular tension, and we feel relaxed. Finally, a predictable response option that is highly salient due primarily to its high utility and contrasts with low value alternatives will often be reported as a boring or depressing experience if activation is not high enough to energize one to ‘want’ to perform an action that is ultimately valuable (e.g. working under a piece work schedule of reward such as in an assembly line).

				High Salience response option
(6)
	Anxiety					elation
					(5)
		(2)		(1)
High Salience Response Option						Low Salience Response Option
					(4)
	boredom					relaxation
(3)
				Low Salience response option

Figure 1.

To illustrate how affect dynamically changes over time as a function of information and discrepancy, consider the hypothetical example of a worker in a home office (Figure 1). Waking up in the morning and accessing email, the daily news, social network postings, etc. correlates with a feeling of pleasantness (1). However, as the morning progresses, this behavior begins to contrast with other equally salient response options (her work), correlating with sustained tension (2). If these ‘distractive’ choices continue, the musculature will soon fatigue and be replaced by other muscular groups, creating muscular pain and a feeling of exhaustion at the end of the day. If the worker begins to cold call clients with little or no response, then she will quickly become bored (3), and may also become depressed when she recognizes that her lack of activation forestalls her obtaining her long term goals. Taking a time out from her duties by sitting quietly and barring distractive thoughts will result in relaxation (4). If she is completing a project to meet a deadline ‘just in time’, then she will feel pleasantly alert (5). If she falls behind her task and/or is distracted by other pressing matters and thus perceives alternative irreconcilable choices or dilemmas, she will feel anxious (6).

This model assumes that emotional states are additive functions of separate somatic and neurological events (tension, dopamine activity) that occur due to different informative or cognitive causes (contrast, discrepancy). Remarkably, the core affective states that correspond with these physiological events have been correlated with each other to reflect strikingly similar emergent emotional states. This conforms with the core premise of ‘circumplex’ models of emotion (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1998) that posit that emotions are additive functions of separate affective processes that are mediated by separate causes (Figure 2). To bridge between the data language of these two models, high and pronounced tension and autonomic arousal would represent an unpleasant state, and profound relaxation would represent a pleasant state. Similarly, the high and persistent activation of dopamine systems would be related to high activation and alertness, and conversely low activation of dopamine systems would be related to low activation and low alertness or fatigue.

Figure 2.

Ultimately, the difference between both models is a matter of semantics. Namely, circumplex models such as the Feldman Barrett and Russell model map the additive or emergent functions of different core affective states, but do not clearly describe the physiological components of those states. More importantly, circumplex models do not describe how those states correlate with aspects of information, cognition, or contingency. Adding these two variables change the model from a descriptive account of emotion to a predictive account that allows behavior and affect to be generated through the simple manipulation of information. That is, emotions are behavioral, and can be described and manipulated through the simple arrangement of response contingencies.

References:

Bechara, A. & Damasio, A. (2005) The somatic marker hypothesis: a neural theory of economic decision. Games and Economic Behavior, 52(2), 336-372

Berridge, K. (2001) Reward learning: reinforcement, incentives, and expectations. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 3, Academic Press, New York.

Berridge, K. (2007) The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: the case for incentive salience. Psychopharmacology, 191, 391-431

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow, the psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Collins.

Damasio, A. (1995) Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Avon: New York

Eccleston, C. & Crombez, G. (1999) Pain demands attention: a cognitive-affective model of the interruptive function of pain. Psychological Bulletin, 125(3): 356-366

Feldman Barrett L, Russell J. (1998) Independence and bipolarity in the structure of current affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74:967–984

Fiorillo, C., Tobler, P, & Schultz, W. (2003) Discrete coding of reward probability and uncertainty by dopamine neurons. Science, 299:1898-1902

Gatchel, R. J., McKinney, M.E., Koebernick, L. F. (1977) Learned helplessness, depression, and physiological responding. Psychophysiology, 14 (1), 25–31.

Gellhorn, E. (1967) Principles of autonomic-somatic integration. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Gellhorn, E. & Kiely, W. F. (1972) Mystical states of consciousness: Neurophysiological and clinical aspects. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 154, 399-405

Germer, C. K., Siegel, R. D., Fulton, P.R. (2005) Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. Guilford Press

Guillaume, S., Jollant, F., Jaussent, I., Lawrence, N., Malafosse, A. & Courtet, P. (2009) Somatic markers and explicit knowledge are both involved in decision-making. Neuropsychologia, 47(10): 2120-2124

Hagg, G. (1991) Static Work loads and occupational myalgia- a new explanation model. In P. A. Anderson, D. J. Hobart, and J. V. Danhoff (Eds.). Electromyographical Kinesiology (pp. 141-144). Elsevier Science Publishers, P. V.

Holmes, D. S. (1984) Meditation and somatic arousal reduction. A review of the experimental evidence. American Psychologist, 39(1), 1-10

Holmes, D. S. (1988) The influence of meditation versus rest on physiological arousal: a second evaluation. In Michael A. West (Ed.) The Psychology of Meditation, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Jacobson, E. (1970) Modern treatment of tense patients. Springfield, Il: Charles C. Thomas.

Lundberg, U. (1999) Stress Responses in Low-Status Jobs and Their Relationship to Health Risks: Musculoskeletal Disorders. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 896, 162-172.

Lundberg, U., Forsman, M., Zachau, G., Eklo F., M., Palmerud, G., Melin, B., & Kadefors, R. (2002). Effects of experimentally induced mental and physical stress on trapezius motor unit recruitment. Work & Stress, 16, 166-170

Malmo, R. B. (1975) On emotions, needs, and our archaic brain. New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston

Marmot, M. G. , Wilkinson, R. G. (2006) Social determinants of health. 2^nd ed. Oxford University Press

Marr, A. J. (2006) Relaxation and Muscular Tension: A Bio-behavioristic Explanation, International Journal of Stress Management, 13(2), 131-153

McEwen, B. S. (1998) Stress, adaptation, and disease: allostasis and allostatic load. New England Journal of Medicine, 338, 171-179

McGuigan, F. J. (1993) Biological Psychology: A Cybernetic Science. New York: Prentice Hall.

McGuigan, F. J. & Lehrer, P. (1993) Progressive Relaxation, Origins, Principles, and Clinical Applications. In Paul M. Lehrer (Ed.). Principles and Practice of Stress Management, 2^nd ed. Guilford Press

Saito, M., Mano, T., Abe, H., Iwase S. (1986) Responses in muscle sympathetic nerve activity to sustained hand-grips of different tensions in humans. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 55(5), 493-498

Seligman, M. E. P. (1975) Helplessness: On depression, development and death. Freeman, San Francisco.

Selye, H. (1980) Selye’s Guide to Stress Research, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold

Sherrington, C. S. (1909) On plastic tonus and proprioceptive reflexes. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2, 109-156

Squire, L. R., McConnell, S. K., Zigmond, M. J. (2003) Fundamental neuroscience, 2^nd ed. Academic Press

Storbeck, J. & Clore, G. L (2007) On the interdependence of cognition and emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 21(6): 1212-1237

Ursin, H., Eriksen, H. R. (2004) The Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress. Psychoneuroedocrinology, 29, 567-592

Verdejo-Garcia, A. Perez-Garcia, M. & Bechara, A. (2006) Emotion, decision making, and substance dependence: A Somatic-Marker model of addiction. Current Neurophamarcology, 4(1): 17-31

Weller, J. , Levin, I.,Shiv, B. & Bechara, A. (2007) Neural correlates of adaptive decision making for risky gains and losses. Psychological Science, 15(11), 958-964

Wursted, M., Eken, T., & Westgaard, R. (1996) Activity of single motor units in attention demanding tasks: firing pattern in the human trapezius muscle. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 72, 323-329

Wursted, M., Bjorklund, R., & Westgaard, R. (1991) Shoulder muscle tension induced by two VDU-based tasks of different complexity. Ergonomics, 23, 1033-1046

Zirpoli, T. J. (2005) Behavior Management: Applications for teachers. 4^th ed. Saddle River, N. J.: Pearson Education

For much more on the somatic marker hypothesis, take a look at my new e-book on the psychology of the internet: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet

---

[1] It must be finally noted that the independent measure for the somatic marker is wholly inconsistent with the antecedents for behavior that measure implies. Namely, if the somatic marker of tension induced arousal signals effective choices, it should be correlated with occasions wherein effective choices can be made. But this is not the case. Indeed, autonomic arousal generally indicates or ‘marks’ not effective decisions we should make but effective decisions we cannot make. In other words, tension induced arousal does not generally correlate with logically comparable decisions but with decisions that cannot be logically resolved, or dilemmas (Marr, 2006). As a final note, although near universally employed as the primary dependent measure for the somatic marker as well as other emotional states such as anxiety, the SCR carries no information on the emotional valence of arousal (Guillaume et al. 2009), whereas the sustained activity of the musculature that is concomitant with the SCR and is an eliciting and integrated aspect of arousal does, and as a painful event may signal the avoidance of choice. Hence the primary reliance on the SCR leads to the incorrect conclusion that arousal is an affectively neutral event that signals the resolution of choice rather than an affectively aversive event that may signal choice avoidance. This also leads to a logical inconsistency in somatic marker theory, wherein the increased incentive salience that primary inducer brings to a response option elicits a painful somatic response that decreases the incentive salience for the same response option! Or in other words, two somatic markers may act at cross purposes, resulting in a feeling of indecision that many an anxious engaged couple would attest.