Follow Your Heart

Scientists in China and the UK scanned the brains of people with and without depression, and they found a surprising pattern in nearly all of the depressed people: Their brain activity was out of sync in three regions collectively known as the “hate circuit”— so called because in previous experiments they have been shown to light up when people look at photographs of someone they can’t stand.

Can this study be extended to more than hate? Is it just hate that depressed individuals have a different coping mechanism for and thus project it inwards? What about other emotions? 

A very interesting article on the link between leadership and mental health and how “mentally ill” people can make good leaders.

“An obvious place to start is with depression, which has been shown to encourage traits of both realism and empathy (though not necessarily in the same individual at the same time).

 “Normal” nondepressed persons have what psychologists call “positive illusion”—that is, they possess a mildly high self-regard, a slightly inflated sense of how much they control the world around them.

Mildly depressed people, by contrast, tend to see the world more clearly, more as it is. In one classic study, subjects pressed a button and observed whether it turned on a green light, which was actually controlled by the researchers. Those who had no depressive symptoms consistently overestimated their control over the light; those who had some depressive symptoms realized they had little control.”