7-25-24 *INTERVIEW* What Exactly Are Mixed Feelings? Dr. Anthony Vaccaro Breaks it Down

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I saw an article, and Idon't have the article in front of me,
but I got the research that thearticle is based on in front of
me about what people sometimes call mixedfeelings, and the question is are mixed
feelings really a mix of feelings orare they something else? Joining us to

(00:21):
talk about it Anthony Vaccaro. Heis a PhD and a postdoctoral research associate
at USC in Southern California and focuseson neuroscience research, including about feelings.
Anthony, Welcome to Kaaway. It'sgreat to have you here. Thanks for
having me, Ron. So I'mlooking at the title of the article,

(00:42):
and a lot of times, ofcourse with scientific articles, the titles are
a little dense. But neural patternsassociated with mixed valence feelings differ in consistency
and predictability throughout the brain. So, since I'm not a scientist and many
of my listeners are not in plainEnglish, what does that mean? Right?

(01:02):
So, when we talk about mixedfeelings, we're generally talking about when
someone reports feelings positive and negative atthe same time, so something bitter,
sweet, or maybe even nostalgic.But the question has always been are we
really experiencing some kind of one feelingthat is both positive and negative or are

(01:23):
we kind of rapidly switching between them? And of course, when we're talking
about people reporting how they feel,that can get a little hard to differentiate.
So we decided to look at thebrain and say, okay, well,
we have brain activity associated with feeling. So when we experience a mixed
feeling, is that brain activity somethingunique from the positive and negative that holds

(01:46):
stable over time or is the brainactivity kind of erratic and switching back and
forth really quickly. Interesting? Soit when when we have something that we
think are mixed feelings, we feelpositive and negative about something at the same
time, is it actually so?Is it actually a combination of positive and

(02:07):
negative feelings that are interacting with eachother or alternating with each other at some
frequency and you're trying to figure outwhat the frequency is, or is it
the thing that we where we feelkind of ambivalent in the literal sense of
that word, like two different positiveand negative. Is ambivalence its own feeling?

(02:30):
Yeah, so it appears that ambivalenceis its own feeling, but it
is kind of made up of boththese positive and negative separate elements. So
what we found was that in theseevolutionarily older parts of the brain, there
was just a positive and negative werecompletely separate, and when mixed feelings happened,

(02:51):
it wasn't really stable brain activity.But when we get to these higher
regions, things like the prefrontal cortex, we find that that ambivalent feeling is
associated with one stable pattern and thatwhole steady over time, sowing that we're
not switching back and forth. Thisis something unique in and of itself.
Well, give me an example ofa kind of thing that you found lots

(03:15):
of people feel ambivalent about that youwere able to use as a study question,
Like, for example, you couldnot use how do you feel about
the Oakland Raiders now the Las VegasRaiders? Right, because nobody's ambivalent about
that and anybody with a brain hatesthe Raiders, So you couldn't use that.
So what's something that how did youinduce ambivalence? Yeah? So this

(03:40):
is part of the problem with whythis has been so understudied is it's really
hard to induce these complex feelings ina lab setting, especially when someone's lying
down in an MRI. It's areally weird environment. But what the way
that we did it was we wentactually to with this animated short, and
it was kind of this Pixar likeshort about this girl. You see her

(04:03):
growing up with her father and chasingher dreams, and then, of course,
like happens in every animated thing,the father died and she hits Rock's
bottom and then she kind of getsthis inspiration and chases her dreams. And
we found that that kind of momentwhen she's reaching her dreams really brought up
these strong, bittersweet feeling in people. Some people were crying when they got

(04:28):
out of the MRI, okay,But so they're lying in the MRI and
at some point, so you createdor you found a short movie that creates
kind of positive and negative things atthe same time. To create ambivalence,
how do you know how do youknow that they're feeling ambivalent at a given

(04:49):
moment. I understand the MRI isgoing, so I'm trying to figure out
what's the cart and what's the horse? Do you know they're ambivalent? And
then you look at the MRI andyou say, Okay, this is what
ambivalence looks like, because I knowthey're ambivalence some other way. Or are
you looking at the MRI and saying, well, that's neither positive nor negative.
So that must be what ambivalence lookslike. Right, So we can't

(05:10):
look at the brain stuff on itsown and just say, okay, is
that ambivalent? So what we didwas as soon as the people got out
of the MRI, they had thisinterface where they could watch the film again,
and they had these buttons that theycan label the film with to indicate
when did they feel positive, whendo they feel negative, When did they
feel mixed, or when did theyfeel nothing? And using that we then

(05:34):
got basically this time course of labelinghow they were reporting they felt when they
were in the scanner. And thenwe can use these machine learning algorithms to
go back and say, okay,I have this list of when these people
switch from positive, negative, mixed, and I have this same time course

(05:55):
of their brain data. So canwe use the brain data to predict when
those transitions happened? All right,I've got about one minute left. So
what what makes this particular area ofresearch or this specific study, what makes
it interesting? What are its practicalpurposes if any? Or is this just

(06:18):
awesome nerdy stuff that you like studying, which is fine too, right,
So in terms of practical It's almostlike a step zero in my mind,
where we really wanted brain imaging researchto be translatable for the greater good and
for psychology. We want to beable to understand the major emotional events that

(06:38):
happen in people's lives. We wantto understand mental illness. But the problem
is often in this lab when we'restudying these brain things, we aren't really
inducing real strong and complex feelings inpeople that they really experience and suffer with
in real life. So in mymind, this is kind of starting to

(06:59):
think to bridge, can we studythese very complex feelings in the lab?
Fascinating? Anthony Vacaro is a postdoctoralresearch associate at the NEST Lab at the
University of Southern California. His recentarticle is entitled Neural patterns associated with mixed
valence feelings Differing consistency and predictability throughoutthe brain. In other words, folks,

(07:23):
mixed feelings are a really interesting conceptand Anthony's studying them. Thanks so
much for your time. Look forwardto having you back in reading more of
your interesting research. Thank you forhaving me. Glad to do it.