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 coulds. This is because exactly how this genetic variation affects the oxytocin receptor and how oxytocin responds to that receptor change isn’t clear. “We don’t know how this particular variation translates to oxytocin,” Rodrigues says, “but we’re assuming that it is somehow related to oxytocin signaling or sensitivity.”
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 reactions to irritations. “It’s quite possible,” says Rodrigues. “Oxytocin can decrease your stress hormone levels. I would definitely put my bet on it that oxytocin would cause less irritability.”
A few small studies have looked at how the behavior of people with autism changes after they take an oxytocin nasal spray. One study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, found that autistic adults seemed to interact more smoothly with others after oxytocin inhalation.{52} It makes you wonder what it would do for candy-averse theater-goers.
Much of what we’ve learned so far about parts of the brain and fMRIs and so forth would seem to indicate that you become annoyed in your mind. Something unpleasant happens, you get annoyed, and your blood boils. Is that really the right order, though? The oxytocin study suggests a different route—perhaps your blood boils, and then your brain becomes annoyed. Where do feelings start—in the body or the brain? And what are emotions, anyway?
If you’re one of those people who finds it hard to express your feelings, you might feel better knowing that humans have a hard time even defining what a feeling is.
“Determining what an emotion is isn’t trivial from a scientific perspective,” says Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist and the director of the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University of Michigan. “The attempts to define emotion, in my opinion, have consistently tried to focus on different legs of the elephant: some people say, ‘It’s physiology,’ and other people say, ‘No, it’s the subject of feeling,’ and yet others say, ‘No, it’s cognition.’ There’s been a lot of debate about which is primary.” Nesse argues that emotions are the whole elephant. They comprise all of those things.
Part of the difficulty in finding a working definition may be that we haven’t been working on it that long. Despite the fact that art, music, literature, war, and peace are propelled by emotion, not to mention that emotions are obviously central to our everyday lives, there is not a long tradition of scientifically studying emotion, with a few exceptions. “As the sciences of mind and brain flourished in the twentieth century, interests went elsewhere and the specialties which we loosely group today under neuroscience gave a resolute cold shoulder to emotion research,” wrote emotion researcher Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes’ Error.{53}
The modern inquiry into emotion got a jump-start in the late nineteenth century when science heavyweights Charles Darwin and William James published their theories on the subject. Darwin tackled emotion in a book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.{54} He explored emotions through the expressions we make, noting similarities between humans and animals in the external manifestations of our emotional states. He filled the book with pictures of people and animals grimacing, crying, and smiling. There is a particularly unflattering picture of the photographer’s wife snarling.