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This Is Your Brain on Envy

February 12, 2009 5:59 PM

By MICHELLE SCHLIEF, ABC News Medical Unit

Morrissey’s indie tune about envy -- “We hate it when our friends become successful” -- was inescapable if you listened to college radio in the ‘90s. The object of jealousy in the song has never been revealed, but a new study from Japan sheds some light on just what might have been going on inside the protagonist’s brain, and what might be happening to each of us when we become possessed by the green-eyed monster of envy.

Dr. Hidehiko Takahashi and his colleagues report today in Science on a series of experiments in which they peered into subjects’ brains using fMRI to see what happened when they induced the feeling of envy in them. In the study, the participants were made to feel envious of fictitious characters. This elicited activity in an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which has been previously linked to socially painful experiences.

But Dr. Kristina Visscher, a researcher in the department of psychology at Harvard University, said not so fast.

“[Pain] is by far not the only thing that changes activity in this region,” she said.

She pointed out that other researchers have found this area “lighting up” under all kinds of circumstances, including when subjects were thinking about religious experiences, their political leanings, physical movement, optimism and making mistakes.

Just what this part of the brain does is a matter of intense scientific debate. One could argue that under certain circumstances, any of these activities can be painful. Finding out you’ve made a mistake can certainly wound your pride, after all. But it is clearly starting to look a little less like a spot in the brain that just lights up when we’re in physical pain or emotional distress.

However, said Visscher, "The idea that the brain might treat abstract social experiences and concrete physical experiences similarly would not be surprising."

For example, one recent paper from Dr. Nicole Speer, formerly of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University, found that when we read a narrative story we literally run through mental simulations of the experiences we’re reading about, activating the same brain regions that we would if we were actually participating in the real-life version of the activity.

So maybe THAT'S why listening to Morrissey always makes me a little mopey.

February 12, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (0)

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