skies.
14. False Alarms
Usually, it’s fun to sit in the bleachers. Maybe it’s the altitude, but there’s something easygoing about the patrons up there—bleacher bums dress casually, bring snacks, and seem to have a pretty good time. That also goes for the upper decks of a Broadway theater.
It was a rainy fall evening in Manhattan. Jude Law was playing a particularly well-dressed and anguished Hamlet at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway. The views from the upper decks were good and not obstructed. By the time the prince saw ghostly visions of his father, a pack of cellophane-wrapped Twizzlers was being passed around the last row.
That’s when the problem started. One patron wasn’t amused. Every Twizzler extraction prompted her to whip her head around and shoot icy glares. Then two people nearby slid a box of Good&Plenty out of a backpack. Even the most gingerly shake of the carton produced a loud sigh from the woman. Yet it was the Goobers at stage right that sent the lady over the edge. Without sugarcoating it, she went nuts. “
It’s possible that junk food is this woman’s pet peeve—maybe she’s a dentist or a personal trainer, and it qualifies as a “professional annoyance.” Maybe there’s some cognitive overlay that we could never guess. Or, perhaps a more depressing explanation is that this particular person suffers from a genetic predisposition to getting annoyed.
Sarina Rodrigues is a neuroscientist in the Psychology Department at Oregon State University. Her research points to one way in which genetics could play a role in irritability and what that could mean for treating annoyance. Rodrigues is broadly interested in how our brains process emotions, and her approach is to study oxytocin. It is a chemical that acts as both a neurotransmitter and a hormone and has been implicated in trust, generosity, romantic attachment, and sex. In prairie voles (
Oxytocin is manufactured in the hypothalamus region of our brains; it acts locally to help brain cells communicate over short distances and travels far afield to places such as the uterus and the heart, where it acts as a hormone. Like all hormones, oxytocin doesn’t do anything without a receptor. The receptor is a protein sticking out of the membranes of cells. When oxytocin wafts by, it engages with the receptor, which sets off a chemical cascade inside the cell. Like a car key, it doesn’t do much on its own, but with a turn, it activates a lot of sophisticated machinery.
Not all cells have all receptors. This is partly why certain hormones have specific effects—because they can interact only with certain cells. And some cells have more receptors than others: in places where reactivity is crucial to keeping us alive, such as where nerves and muscles meet to control our movements, a muscle cell can have ten thousand receptors per square micron.
There are receptors for oxytocin in cells all over the body, from the heart to the nervous system. Oxytocin fits into only one specific receptor, Rodrigues says. It’s as if oxytocin turns on only one make of car, which makes life simpler for the researchers studying it. The oxytocin receptor is coded by a gene on chromosome three. Rodrigues and her colleagues wanted to know whether a variation in this gene had any affect on a person’s behavior— specifically, on a person’s reaction to stress.
Oxytocin calms us down when we’re stressed, Rodrigues says. “It plays a key role in attenuating how much our emotional centers of the brain activate. It can actually calm the brain down. It can also lower heart rate responses during psychosocial stress.”
Stress and annoyance appear to be linked. When we’re stressed, we seem to be at higher risk for getting annoyed, Rodrigues says. “It does seem that annoyance increases when you’re stressed out. You’re much more likely to be annoyed if someone cuts you off in traffic when you’re running late than when you’re in no rush at all. It seems that we have a lower threshold for getting jumpy and irritable when we’re stressed out.”
If running up against an obstacle when you’re trying to achieve a goal puts you at risk for annoyance, stress on top of that practically guarantees it. We’re often stressed when the goal we’re trying to achieve is pressing or important. This may mean that how annoyed we are is less about the size of the obstacle than about the size of the goal.
Researchers, however, are studying another curious connection. It’s likely that the theater shusher had little ability to sympathize with the guy eating the candy. What if the last row of the theater was filled with diabetics who had low blood sugar? Maybe the guy who cut you off in traffic is in an even bigger hurry than you. Empathy would seem to be logically connected to feeling less frustrated in these situations, but it turns out that it may be biologically connected as well.
To test stress reactions, Rodrigues blasted white noise into the ears of 192 UC Berkeley college students. The students got no warning for the first blast. Then, instructions on a TV screen told participants that the next blast would come after a countdown—this gets rid of the surprise but makes people stressed as they wait for the next sound blast. It’s called a “classic startle experiment.” Stress is measured by how much your heart rate goes up while you wait for the blast.
Rodrigues wanted to know whether there was any significant correlation between a rise in heart rate—how physically stressed a person got waiting for that white noise blast—and a variation in the gene that makes the oxytocin receptor. The participants were also asked to self-report on their stress levels. The hypothesis is that differences in the gene that makes the oxytocin receptor could affect the receptor, which could affect how oxytocin works, which could affect a person’s ability to cope with stress.
That’s a lot of
Rodrigues also wanted to know how this oxytocin variation affected a person’s ability to empathize. Empathy, as you might imagine, is hard to measure, but one standard approach is a questionnaire. Items on it include “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I really get involved with the feelings of the characters in a novel.” Participants were asked to rate each statement according to how much they agreed with it.
Another way to measure empathy is with a multiple-choice test—technically called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET). The college kids were shown about thirty black-and-white photos of strangers’ eyes and were asked to select the adjective that “best describes what the individual in the photo is feeling or thinking,” according to Rodrigues’s study.{51}
Rodrigues found that people with one particular variation in the oxytocin receptor gene scored worse on the empathy test and got more stressed while waiting for the white noise blast. These two characteristics—high stress, low empathy—may be related, Rodrigues says. “There are some old studies that tap into this idea that empathy and stress are on opposite ends of the continuum. It could be something like if we’re too consumed by our own distress, we’re a bit less capable of recognizing what others are going through.” (Previous studies have shown that this genetic variation also makes you more likely to be diagnosed with autism, a syndrome that manifests in displays of anxiousness and social indifference.)
It’s jarring—the idea that the difference in a couple of nucleic acid bases on one region of one gene on one chromosome could make you more likely to get stressed and less likely to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes. “I really did come into this research as a huge skeptic,” Rodrigues says. “There are so many random gene studies saying there’s a dance gene or a divorce gene or that kind of thing. But there’s just one oxytocin receptor, and oxytocin is so potent in playing a role in social bonds and stress reactivity. So it would make sense that a variation in the receptor would have an impact on how oxytocin works in our bodies and our brains.”
Insofar as oxytocin plays a role in responding to stress, it seems likely that it also is a factor in a person’s
