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New brain research suggests that humiliation is the strongest emotion a human can feel.

Wired.com reports on this claim and delves into the question of, Is humiliation really more intense than other negative emotions such as anger or shame?

The researchers, Marte Otten and Kai Jonas, conducted two studies in which dozens of male and female participants read short stories involving different emotions, and had to imagine how they’d feel in the described scenarios.

The first study compared humiliation (e.g. your internet date takes one look at you and walks out), anger (e.g. your roommate has a party and wrecks the room while you’re away) and happiness (e.g. you find out a person you fancy likes you). The second study compared humiliation with anger and shame (e.g. you said some harsh words to your mother and she cried).

The researchers used EEG (electroencephalography) to record the surface electrical activity of their participants’ brains. They were interested in two measures in particular – a larger positive spike (known as the “late positive potential” or LPP); and evidence of “event-related desynchronization,” which is a marker of reduced activity in the alpha range. Both these measures are signs of greater cognitive processing and cortical activation.

The study’s finding was that imagining being humiliated led to larger LPPs and more event-related desychronization than the other emotions. According to Otten and Jonas, this means that humiliation, more than the other emotions they studied, leads to a mobilization of more processing power and a greater consumption of mental resources. “This supports the idea that humiliation is a particularly intense and cognitively demanding negative emotional experience that has far-reaching consequences for individuals and groups alike,” they concluded.

This does not conclusively support the idea that Humiliation is our strongest emotion.  Further research should be conducted, but this does note that the brain seems to be doing more when a person feels humiliated, but we do not seem to know exactly what yet. One possibility, the researchers acknowledge, is that humiliation requires more mental processing, not because it’s so intense, but because it’s a complex social emotion that involves monitoring loss of social status.

Fetal imaging has grown slowly but surely over the last 2 decades.  Today we have 4D imaging that shows unborn babies in surprisingly great detail.  According to new research reported on by Mail Online, babies begin practicing their facial expressions such as smiling 16 weeks before they are born.

The study led by psychologists at Durham University, monitored the development of the unborn infants’ emotional and language abilities.  Their findings are published in the journal Physiology and Behaviour.

The researchers took ultrasound scans of 15 healthy fetuses at regular intervals between 24 and 36 weeks of pregnancy. Using 4D scans, that can capture frame-by-frame pictures, the scientists tracked the fetuses’ mouth movements and compared them to the development of the different parts of their brains.  The right side of the human brain is related to emotional skills and controls the left-sided mouth movements, whereas the left side of the brain is linked to language skills, and controls the right-hand side of the mouth.  The researchers found that the mouth movements they tracked were significantly biased towards emotional left-sided movements.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Their findings suggest that babies refine the neurological ability to show emotion very early in their development.  Previous research into the development of babies between five and 12 months of age has shown that they use the right side of their mouth when babbling, suggesting that the left part of their brain is specialized for language.  Lead author Dr Nadja Reissland noted:

 ”As the left hemisphere of the brain is larger in fetuses from 22 weeks you would expect to see that the right side of the child’s face is more expressive, but we found the opposite.  What our research shows is that while both right and left mouth openings increased as the fetus grew, there was a consistent bias towards left-sided mouth openings.  This suggests that babies are more neurologically prepared to use the emotionally expressive side of their face and that the neurological preparedness to use language develops later when it is needed.“

Psychologists say the images show infants practicing mouth movements (which express their emotions) that they will need after birth to bond with their parents.