Red like anger, shame and love
Many of life's great emotions are associated with the color red. During Pride Month June we celebrate diversity and love in all its forms. Shame is rebuffed. But what actually happens in our brain when we feel this feeling and why does our head turn red?
Suddenly you get hot, you feel paralyzed and your face turns tomato red - sometimes all it takes is stumbling in public and we feel ashamed.
It is no coincidence that these symptoms resemble an inflammatory reaction. Shame triggers a violent reaction in the immune system, as researchers at Pace University in New York have shown.
“The feeling of shame arises in the emotion center of our brain, the limbic system. From here, signals are transmitted to our body via the autonomic nervous system.”
Melissa Stouffer, neuroscientist and postdoc at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA)
This controls basic functions such as breathing, heart rate and metabolism and consists of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
While the parasympathetic nervous system freezes us when we are ashamed, the sympathetic nervous system simultaneously causes the pulse to increase and the blood vessels in the facial skin to dilate. So they fill with more blood. The result: we turn red, a color that hardly any mammal can see.
“Only Old World monkeys, which include humans, have developed three-color vision and can therefore see rich red,” says Melissa Stouffer, who researches the development of the human cerebral cortex. The orbital lobe associated with it is also likely to play an important role. People whose orbitofrontal cortex is damaged do not feel shame. This brain region emerged late in human evolution. Researchers assume that it serves to correct our behavior.
But it is precisely non-conformist behavior that can also advance us socially. So let’s stand up for ourselves with pride, especially in Pride Month.
This might also be of interest: Are you in the phone book and are you called Margret, Friedrich or Heinz?
A direct hit for con artists! Source: German health portal
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1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

