The Physical Wounds of Seniors Healed Faster If They Wrote About Their Traumatic Life Experiences

I always enjoy reporting on research that supports the inseparability (the singularity) of body-mind, and if it demonstrates the power emotions can have on the body, so much the better.

So it's nice to share this article on how encouraging otherwise healthy seniors to write about their most traumatic experiences helps their physical wounds to heal more quickly, even if the writing occurred prior to the injury!

In essence, the better we are at processing emotions and feelings and not keeping them bottled up or choked down, the better our bodies can handle and heal stress of any kind, including physical injuries. This is the nature of resilience.

Study: Emotional writing heals physical wounds

Research reveals senior citizens who chronicle their most traumatic experiences tend to heal more quickly

BY TOM JACOBS

(Credit: NicoElNino Bramwell via Shutterstock)

This piece originally appeared on Pacific Standard.

For anyone still doubting the notion that our emotions—and whether we express or repress them—impact our physical health, a new study from New Zealand should settle the matter. It reports that the physical wounds of healthy seniors healed more quickly if they wrote about their most traumatic experiences.

This confirms the results of a 2010 study, and extends those findings to cover older adults—a group that is prone to suffer wounds (as from surgery), and one with less access to other ways of lowering tension (such as exercise).

Writing in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, a research team led by the University of Auckland’s Elizabeth Broadbent describes a study featuring 49 healthy adults ranging in age from 64 to 97. They were assigned to write for 20 minutes per day for three consecutive days.

Half were asked to “write about the most traumatic/upsetting experience in their life, delving into their deepest thoughts, feelings, and emotions about the event, ideally not previously shared with others.” The others were asked to “write about their daily activities for tomorrow, without mentioning emotions, opinions or beliefs.”

Two weeks later, all participants received a standard 4mm skin biopsy on their inner arm. The resultant wounds were photographed regularly over the following days to determine the rate at which they healed.

On the 11th day after the biopsy, the wounds were completely healed on 76.2 percent of those who had done the expressive writing. That was true of only 42.1 percent of those who had written about everyday activities.

“The biological and psychological mechanisms behind this effect remain unclear,” the researchers write, noting that those who had done the expressive writing did not report lower stress levels or fewer depressive symptoms than those in the control group.

Even if they weren’t consciously aware of feeling more relaxed or positive, however, the expressive writing appears to have triggered some sort of bodily reaction—presumably involving their immune systems—that hastened their recovery.

Psychologists often talk of healing emotional wounds. This study provides additional evidence that implementing their insights can help heal physical ones as well.

Nicholas Humphrey - The Evolved Self-Management System

This is a nice article from Edge . . . . Nicholas Humphrey seeks to explain the placebo effect and "a whole range of other priming effects by invoking the existence of an 'evolved self-management system.'" Geoffrey Miller replies.

Using the placebo effect as a foundation, Humphrey wonders if it is possible to co-opt that system, which is partly based in "permission" given by the cultural environment, to release other capabilities that are generally considered beyond our control.

The Evolved Self-Management System

Nicholas Humphrey [12.5.11]

I'm now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY has held posts at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and is now School Professor Emeritus at the LSE. He is a theoretical psychologist, internationally known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His most recent book is Soul Dust.

Nicholas Humphrey's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Geoffrey Miller

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THE EVOLVED SELF-MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY: I was asked to write an essay recently for "Current Biology" on the evolution of human health. It's not really my subject, I should say, but it certainly got me thinking. One of the more provocative thoughts I had is about the role of medicine. If human health has changed for the better in the late stages of evolution, this has surely had a lot to do with the possibility of consulting doctors, and the use of drugs. But the surprising thing is that, until less than 100 years ago, there was hardly anything a doctor could do that would be effective in any physiological medicinal way—and still the doctor's ministrations often "worked". That's to say, under the influence of what we would today call placebo medicine people came to feel less pain, to experience less fever, their inflammations receded, and so on.

Now, when people are cured by placebo medicine, they are in reality curing themselves. But why should this have become an available option late in human evolution, when it wasn't in the past.

I realized it must be the result of a trick that has been played by human culture. The trick is to persuade sick people that they have a "license" to get better, because they're in the hands of supposed specialists who know what's best for them and can offer practical help and reinforcements. And the reason this works is that it reassures people—subconsciously —that the costs of self-cure will be affordable and that it's safe to let down their guard. So health has improved because of a cultural subterfuge. It's been a pretty remarkable development.

I'm now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

Go back 10 or 20,000 years ago. Eccentricity would not have been tolerated. Unusual intelligence would not have been tolerated. Even behaving "out of character" would not have been tolerated. People were expected to conform, and they did conform, because they picked up the cues from their environment about the right and proper—the adaptive—way to behave. In response to cultural signals people were in effect policing their own personality.

And they still are. In fact we now have plenty of experimental evidence about the operation of "sub-conscious primes", how signals from the local environment get to people without their knowing it and, by changing their character and attitudes, regulate the face they present to the world. It can be a change for the worse (at least as we'd see it today). But so too it can be a change for the better. People become, let's say, more pro-social, more generous.

Let's take this particular example. What cues might people pick up on that would turn them into nicer people? Well, remarkably enough just seeing something out of the corner of one's eye which suggests that other people are behaving nicely can do it. There's a wonderful experiment I heard described at a conference in Kyoto a few months ago. What the Japanese scientists did was to get their subjects to play a cooperation game, a prisoner's dilemma game, online. Subjects could choose to act generously, trust the opponent, or mistrust and default on the exchange.

Now, to one side of the computer on which subjects were playing this game, the experimenters had set up another computer with a screen-saver on it. There were two conditions. In one the screen-saver showed a little animation of two balls, one of which was helping another one over a barrier, coming up underneath it and giving it a shove-over; in the other, one of the balls was hindering another from getting over the barrier by getting in its way.

Astonishingly, the subjects of this experiment who had the cooperative animation running on the screen to one side were twice as likely to cooperate in their game with another player online, even though they didn't acknowledge that they'd noticed anything on the secondary screen. And even if they had noticed it, so what? I mean why should they copy something which is just going on a screen-saver?

But this is just one example. Now almost every month's issue of Psychological Science, for instance, reports some striking new finding about how cues from the surroundings can change people's nature. Moral judgments, reasoning skills, personal hygiene, political attitudes —you name it—are all proving to be unexpectedly malleable, as people respond to the social and physical weather signals that their brains (if not their conscious minds) pick up on.

It's been a tremendous surprise for experimental psychology and social psychology, because until now it's been widely assumed that people's characters are in fact pretty much fixed. People don't blow with the wind, they don't become a different kind of person depending on local and apparently irrelevant cues . . . But after all, it seems they do.

So what's going on? We need a theory.

You'll have guessed the way I want to take it. I began with the placebo effect. To explain placebos I think we need to invoke the existence of an "evolved health management system". The placebo effect is a particular kind of priming effect. And what I want to do now is to explain a whole range of other priming effects by invoking the existence of an "evolved self-management system".

Let's start over again with placebos. Some years ago I drew attention to the "paradox of placebos", a paradox that must strike any evolutionary biologist who thinks about it. It's this. When a person's health improves under the influence of placebo medication, then, as we've noted already, this has to be a case of "self-cure". But if people have the capacity to heal themselves by their own efforts, why not get on with it as soon as needed? Why wait for permission—from a sugar pill, a witch doctor—that it's time to get better?

Presumably the explanation must be that self-cure has costs as well as benefits. What kind of costs are these? Well, actually they're fairly obvious. Many of the illnesses we experience, like pain, fever and so on, are actually defenses which are designed to stop us from getting into more trouble than we're already in. So "curing" ourselves of these defenses can indeed cost us down the line. Pain reduces our mobility, for example, and stops us from harming ourselves further; so, relieving ourselves of pain is actually quite risky. Fever helps kill bacterial parasites by raising body temperature to a level they can't tolerate; so again, curing ourselves of fever is risky. Vomiting gets rid of toxins; so suppressing vomiting is risky.

The same goes for the deployment of the immune system. Mounting an immune response is energetically expensive. Our metabolic rate rises 15 percent or so, even if we're just responding to a common cold. What's more, when we make antibodies we use up rare nutrients that will later have to be replaced.

Given these costs, it becomes clear that immediate self-cure from an occurrent illness is not always a wise thing to do. In fact there will be circumstances when it would be best to hold back from deploying particular healing measures because the anticipated benefits are not likely to exceed the anticipated costs. In general it will be wise to err on side of caution, to play safe, not to let down our defenses such as pain or fever until we see signs that the danger has passed, not to use up our stock of ammunition against parasites until we know we're in relatively good shape and there's not still worse to come. Healing ourselves involves—or ought to involve—a judgment call.

It makes sense that our brains should have come to play a crucial part in the top-down management of bodily health. As I see it, what the health management system has evolved to do is to perform a kind of economic analysis of what the opportunities and the costs of cure will be: what resources we've got in reserve, how dangerous the situation is right now, what predictions we can make of what the future holds. In effect the system acts like a good hospital manager who has to decide just what resources to keep in store, how quickly to treat a patient, how long before discharging them, etc., overall trying to produce an optimal outcome on the basis of a forecast about what's coming down the road: whether there's another epidemic looming, for example, or whether we're entering a season where there won't be enough food available.

There's plenty of evidence that we have just such a system at work overseeing our health. For example, in winter, we are cautious about deploying our immune resources. That's why a cold lasts much longer in winter than it does in summer. It's not because we're cold, it's because our bodies, based on deep evolutionary history reckon that it's not so safe to use our immune resources in winter, as it would be in summer. There's experimental confirmation of this in animals. Suppose a hamster is injected with bacteria which makes it sick—but in one case the hamster is on an artificial day/night cycle that suggests it's summer; in the other case it's on a cycle that suggests it's winter. If the hamster is tricked into thinking it's summer, it throws everything it has got against the infection and recovers completely. If it thinks it's winter then it just mounts a holding operation, as if it's waiting until it knows it's safe to mount a full-scale response. The hamster "thinks" this or that?? No, of course it doesn't think it consciously—the light cycle acts as a subconscious prime to the hamster's health management system.

So now, where does the placebo effect fit in? Placebos work because they suggest to people that the picture is rosier than it really is. Just like the artificial summer light cycle for the hamster, placebos give people fake information that it's safe to cure them. Whereupon they do just that.

This suggests we should see the placebo effect as part of a much larger picture of homeostasis and bodily self-control. But now I'm ready to expand on this much further still. If this is the way humans and animals manage their physical health, there must surely be a similar story to be told about mental health. And if mental health, then—at least with humans—it should apply to personality and character as well. So I've come round to the idea that humans have in fact evolved a full-blown self management system, with the job of managing all their psychological resources put together, so as to optimise the persona they present to the world.

You may ask: why should the self need any such "economic managing"? Are there really aspects of the self that should be kept in reserve? Do psychological traits have costs as well as benefits? But I'd say it's easy to see how it is so. Emotions such as anxiety, anger, joy will be counterproductive if they are not appropriately graded. Personality traits—assertiveness, neuroticism, and friendliness—have both down- and up-sides. Sexual attractiveness carries obvious risks. Pride comes before a fall. Even high intelligence can be a disadvantage (we can be "too clever by half", as they say). What's more—and this may be the area where economic management is most relevant of all— as people go through life they build up social psychological capital of various kinds that they need to husband carefully. Reputation is precious, love should not be wasted indiscriminately, secrets have to be guarded, favors must be returned.

So, I think humans must have come under strong selection pressure in the course of evolution to get these calculations right. Our ancestors needed to develop a system for managing the face they present to the world: how they came across to other people, when to flirt, when to hold back, when to be generous, when to be mean, when to fall in love, when to reject, when to reciprocate, when to punish, when to take the lead, when to retire, and so on. . . All these aspects had to be very carefully balanced if they were going to maximize their chances of success in the social world.

Fortunately our ancestors already had a template for doing these calculations, namely the pre-existing health system. In fact I believe the self management system evolved on the back of the health system. But this new system goes much further than the older one: it's job is to read the local signs and signs and forecast the psychological weather we are heading into, enabling us to prejudge what we can get away with, what's politic, what's expected of us. Not surprisingly, it's turned out to be a very complex system. That's why psychologists working on priming are discovering so many cues, which are relevant to it. For there are of course so many things that are relevant to managing our personal lives and coming across in the most effective and self-promoting ways we can.

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Once we have a theoretical understanding of how all this works, can we exploit it in practical ways to change people's lives for the better? Does it offer us tools for social engineering? 

Read the rest of the article and Miller's reply.

The Body and the State - Session One | The New School for Social Research

The New School for Social Research hosted a conference on The Body and the State, and these two videos comprise Session One (also included in the Keynote Address to begin the conference). There are at least four sessions posted now, each with two videos (I believe). Over the next several days I will post the individual sessions.

This is some interesting stuff - the discussions cover a variety of different topics about how the body is conceived in relation to various collective structures (LR in integral speak), including health, disability, media, soldiers, human rights, religion, and citizenship.

THE TRACE:
VIOLENCE, TRUTH, AND THE POLITICS OF THE BODY
KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Moderated David Van Zandt, President of The New School

Didier Fassin, MD, MPH, James D. Wolfensohn Professor, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study; Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Join us as speakers discuss the body as a human rights arena in which many forces, such as religion, science, media, and the market, struggle for control over policies that control our bodies. We hope to illuminate how the often tacit assumptions about the "normal," "healthy," and "acceptable" body lead to policies which are, at their core, unjust.

Keynote:


And now on with the conference.

The Body and the State - Session I - Part 1
CONCEPTIONS OF THE "NORMAL" BODY

We all have our own ideas about what a "normal," "healthy" body is, but these ideas are neither given nor based on some eternal biological definition. Rather, they reflect many different forces within a culture and they change over time. How do these views influence public policy in different locations? How do social dynamics affect conceptions of maleness and femaleness and how do they differ in different societies?

RELIGION
Religions exert powerful pressure on how the conception of the normal or morally acceptable body is understood. How do images of the normal body differ across religious traditions? Case studies are reviewed on the role of religion in affecting state policy with regard to the body.

Joan's Two Bodies: Was Joan of Arc Killed by the Church or the State and Does it Matter?
• Winnifred F. Sullivan, Member, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study; Associate Professor, Director of the Law and Religion program, University at Buffalo Law School

Ascribing Citizenship on the Muslim Body
• John Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis

MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY
Notions of the "healthy," "normal" body often bring with them the imprimatur of science. What role does science play in our understanding of what is normal and what is not? How are these understandings reflected in policy? Does this science-policy interplay differ across cultures?

The Body as a Biological and Genetic Entity
• Elof Axel Carlson, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Stony Brook University

Moderator: Ann Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research

MORE INFORMATION

Part One:

The Body and the State - Session I - Part 2
THE CITIZEN & MEDIA

Bodies of Rights and Biomedical Markets
• João Biehl, Professor of Anthropology, Co-director, Program in Global Health and Health Policy, Princeton University

THE CITIZEN
What is the relationship between individual bodies and the body politic? What constitutes the "normal" body of the citizen, and does this vary from country to country? What does the foreigner, the non-citizen, reveal about the body of the citizen? Do existing laws and policies differentially shape certain types of bodies and affect genders and races differently? Why does the health of the citizen matter?

Disability and the Normal Body of the Citizen
• Susan Schweik, Professor, Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of California, Berkeley

Making Willing Bodies: Manufacturing Consent Among Prisoners and Soldiers
• Bernard E. Harcourt, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

THE MEDIA
Advertising, film, television, and the internet have profound impacts on our idea of the "normal" body and how it is or should be treated. What is the media's impact on policy with regard to the body? How does this vary across cultures?

Losing Bodies
• Susie Orbach, Visiting Professor, Sociology, London School of Economics

Indian Cinema and the Beautiful Body
• Sumita S. Chakravarty, Associate Professor of Culture and Media, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts

Moderator: Ann Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research

Part Two:


THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

Tags: body, society, media, citizens, normal, healthy, The Body and the State, New School for Social Research, normal body, social dynamics, gender, Winnifred F. Sullivan, Joan of Arc, John Bowen, Elof Axel Carlson, Ann Stoler, João Biehl, Susan Schweik, disability, bodies, Bernard E. Harcourt, soldiers, prisoners, Susie Orbach, Sumita S. Chakravarty, David Van Zandt, Didier Fassin, politics