Summary: Gut bacteria have been linked to positive emotions, such as happiness and hopefulness, and good emotion management skills.
Researchers have discovered that people who suppress their emotions have a less diverse gut microbiome, while people who report happier emotions have lower levels of certain bacterium.
Key Facts:
- Researchers found a link between bacteria in the gut and positive emotions, healthy emotional management, and better physical health outcomes.
- The study included over 200 women who filled out a survey assessing their feelings and how they handled emotions, as well as providing stool samples.
- People who suppressed their emotions had a less diverse gut microbiome, and those who reported happier feelings had lower levels of certain bacteria, while people who had more negative emotions had more of those bacteria.
Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital
A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has linked bacteria in our gut to positive emotions like happiness and hopefulness and healthier emotion management skills.
Their results were published recently in Psychological Medicine.
Previous research has found that the brain communicates with the gastrointestinal tract through the gut-brain axis. One theory is that the gut microbiome plays a starring role in the gut-brain axis, linking physical and emotional health.
“The gut contains trillions of microorganisms collectively known as the gut microbiome. Many studies have shown that disturbance in the gut microbiome can affect the gut-brain axis and lead to various health problems, including anxiety, depression and even neurological disorders,” said co-corresponding author Yang-Yu Liu, Ph.D., an associate scientist in the Brigham’s Channing Division of Network Medicine and an associate professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School.
“This interaction likely flows both ways—the brain can impact the gut, and the gut can impact the brain. The emotions that we have and how we manage them could affect the gut microbiome, and the microbiome may also influence how we feel,” said first author Shanlin Ke, Ph.D., who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Liu’s lab.
The gut-brain axis might affect physical health, as well. Previous research has shown that positive emotions and healthy emotional regulation are linked to greater longevity. In contrast, negative emotions are linked to higher rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality from all causes, according to study co-corresponding author Laura Kubzansky, Ph.D., a professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The new study included more than 200 women from the Mind-Body Study, a sub-study of the Nurses’ Health Study II. These middle-aged, mostly white women filled out a survey that asked about their feelings in the last 30 days, asking them to report positive (feeling happy or hopeful about the future) or negative (feeling sad, afraid, worried, restless, hopeless, depressed, or lonely) emotions they’d had. The survey also assessed how they handled their emotions.
The two options were reframing the situation to see it in a more positive light (cognitive reappraisal) or holding back from expressing their negative emotions (suppression). Suppressing one’s feelings is often a less effective way of handling them and can lead to worse mental and physical health outcomes, co-first author Anne-Josee Guimond, Ph.D., who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher in Kubzansky’s lab, said.
Three months after answering the survey, the women provided stool samples. The stool samples were analyzed using metagenomic sequencing. The team compared the results from the microbial analysis to the survey responses about emotions and ways of managing them to look for connections.
“Some of the species that popped up in the analysis were previously linked with poor health outcomes, including schizophrenia and cardiovascular diseases,” Guimond said. “These links between emotion regulation and the gut microbiome could affect physical health outcomes and explain how emotions influence health.”
The analysis found that people who suppressed their emotions had a less diverse gut microbiome. They also found that people who reported happier feelings had lower levels of Firmicutes bacterium CAG 94 and Ruminococcaceae bacterium D16. On the other hand, people who had more negative emotions had more of these bacteria.
“I was intrigued that positive and negative emotions often had consistently similar findings in opposite directions,” Kubzansky said. “This is what you would expect, but kind of amazing to me that we saw it.”
The researchers also examined what the microbes in the gut were doing on a functional pathway level, looking for links between changes in the capacity of this activity and specific emotional states and emotion regulation methods. They found that negative emotions were linked to lowered capacity activity in multiple metabolism-related actions.
This study was limited in that its subjects were mostly postmenopausal white women. The emotion survey was also done at one point in time so that the researchers couldn’t decipher the direction of the link. The researchers want to repeat the study with more diverse populations, a more extensive emotional survey, and longitudinal data.
A more specific analysis of the microbial strains might also help develop microbiome-based therapeutics like probiotics to improve emotions and well-being.
About this emotion and microbiome research news
Author: Press Office
Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Contact: Press Office – Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Gut feelings: associations of emotions and emotion regulation with the gut microbiome in women” by Shanlin Ke et al. Psychological Medicine
Abstract
Gut feelings: associations of emotions and emotion regulation with the gut microbiome in women
Background
Accumulating evidence suggests that positive and negative emotions, as well as emotion regulation, play key roles in human health and disease. Recent work has shown the gut microbiome is important in modulating mental and physical health through the gut–brain axis. Yet, its association with emotions and emotion regulation are understudied. Here we examined whether positive and negative emotions, as well as two emotion regulation strategies (i.e. cognitive reappraisal and suppression), were associated with the gut microbiome composition and functional pathways in healthy women.
Methods
Participants were from the Mind-Body Study (N = 206, mean age = 61), a sub-study of the Nurses’ Health Study II cohort. In 2013, participants completed measures of emotion-related factors. Two pairs of stool samples were collected, 6 months apart, 3 months after emotion-related factors measures were completed. Analyses examined associations of emotion-related factors with gut microbial diversity, overall microbiome structure, and specific species/pathways and adjusted for relevant covariates.
Results
Alpha diversity was negatively associated with suppression. In multivariate analysis, positive emotions were inversely associated with the relative abundance of Firmicutes bacterium CAG 94 and Ruminococcaceae bacterium D16, while negative emotions were directly correlated with the relative abundance of these same species. At the metabolic pathway level, negative emotions were inversely related to the biosynthesis of pantothenate, coenzyme A, and adenosine.
Conclusions
These findings offer human evidence supporting linkages of emotions and related regulatory processes with the gut microbiome and highlight the importance of incorporating the gut microbiome in our understanding of emotion-related factors and their associations with physical health.
