Getting Emotional

By Dian Land

Psychiatrist and emotions researcher Ned Kalin has a bold and hopeful dream for the not-so-distant future. Should the dream materialize, pervasive health problems plaguing our society - including depression, anxiety, some forms of heart disease, and even people's general susceptibility to disease - may be nipped in the bud.

Picture Kalin's dream. Children entering first grade will undergo physical examinations before their first days at school, just as they do today. But those visits to family physicians will include tests to determine whether the children have emotional propensities that, if left unattended, could later become problems. Physicians will administer discrete questionnaires to tease out, for example, if a child is excessively shy. Blood may be analyzed for levels of stress hormones. Brain scans may be taken, revealing the busiest channels of crosstalk between specific structures in the brain - hints of a person's ability to respond appropriately to emotional challenges.

Once certain risks are identified, Kalin imagines that additional tests will show if the children possess genes that heighten their chance of future problems. "Maybe we'll be able to just keep an eye on some of the kids at risk, or help make sure their home environments keep them healthy," says Kalin, chair of the UW Medical School's Department of Psychiatry. "For those at highest risk, I fully expect we'll have some kind of therapy that specifically regulates activity in key brain structures to make sure they don't go off course during development."

Kalin concedes that this scenario may sound time consuming and expensive - and, perhaps to some, an invasion of privacy. "But such tests could speak volumes about the brain sources of emotional patterns that lead to potentially devastating disorders such as depression and anxiety," he says. "By analyzing emotional makeup, we may be able to predict people's risk for many physical ailments as well."

The payoff for identifying the roots of these problems, and treating them before they escalate to crippling or even fatal proportions, could be enormous for individuals and society alike, he asserts.

Many people may doubt that Kalin's dream will ever become a reality. But he, more than most, is in a position to say where the study of emotions - or affective neuroscience, as it is more formally called - may lead. During the past two decades, he and his UW-Madison collaborator and friend, psychologist Richard Davidson, have played significant roles in moving the field from the fringes of science to center stage.

When the two first met, emotions were more often relegated to the intangible realm of the heart, a domain usually left to poets and philosophers. But Kalin's early work on stress hormones in monkeys and severe depression in humans, and Davidson's interest in plotting how human emotions affect the brain, pointed them in a different direction.

As the young scientists suspected, emotions are, in fact, firmly rooted in the head. They contribute in a meaningful way to decisions we make every day, determinations based on fear, love, sadness, fatigue, and all other imaginable feelings. Within specific entities in the brain lie the sources of both subtle and powerful emotions, from those that last only an instant to those that become extended moods and personality traits.

UW-Madison now has assembled one of the world's leading centers for the study of the brain and emotions. No other facility in the world boasts the resources that Kalin and Davidson have at their disposal. The university-wide HealthEmotions Research Institute is dedicated to studying the biology of emotions and how they affect physical and mental health. A primary and unique focus of the institute's work is understanding the mechanisms that underlie positive emotions.

The new W. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, located at the UW's Waisman Center and featuring highly advanced imaging technology, is central to that work. In addition, two large grants from the National Institute of Mental Health support two other emotions research centers, including the recently created Center for Mind-Body Interactions.

With Kalin at the helm of Health-Emotions and Davidson directing the Keck Laboratory and the two centers, the interconnected organizations bring together an ever-expanding core of bright scientists representing perspectives that include psychology, psychiatry, medical physics, radiology, and computer science.

And scientists aren't the only ones who are noticing. Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, eagerly accepted Davidson's recent invitation to visit the new Keck Laboratory. The Tibetan leader has expressed keen interest in the ability of imaging technology to examine the brain effects of meditation, the central practice of Buddhism for 2,500 years. During his visit last spring, the Dalai Lama met with Davidson and a handful of other Western neuroscientists to identify and design research projects on meditation.

But the researchers have always faced skeptics. During the early 1980s, some colleagues in the scientific community thought the Wisconsin researchers' views were eccentric.

"We worked hard to remind everyone that, unlike certain other groups, what we were doing was applying the tools of hard science - molecular biology, genetics, and sophisticated imaging - to the study of emotions," recalls Kalin.

Through the early nineties, the duo received precious little financial aid from the federal government for research on positive emotions. Granting agencies almost exclusively supported the study of diseases, not the psychological and physiological robustness that may prevent disease. "Initially we relied heavily on private donors," says Kalin. "And that philanthropy was critical in helping us conduct preliminary studies that produced convincing data, which is what happened with our project studying the free-ranging monkeys of Cayo Santiago. The federal government eventually understood our approach and felt confident in supporting us."

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