Christmas spirit deficiencies
A GROUP of researchers at the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, sought to find the Christmas spirit in the human brain and suggested that a network of such a phenomenon existed.
In the introductory section of their paper, published online in the journal The BMJ, the researchers noted that in the human body where the Christmas spirit — a phenomenon “commonly described as feelings of joy and nostalgia mixed with associations to merriment, gifts, delightful smells, and copious amounts of good food” — could be found had yet to be determined.
They also estimated that millions of people worldwide were displaying Christmas spirit deficiencies, or the “bah humbug” syndrome, due to the many years they celebrated the occasion.
“We attempted to localize the Christmas spirit in the human brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging ( fMRI),” they said.
A total of 26 people served as the subjects of the study. They were asked some questions about their Christmas traditions, feelings about the festivity, and ethnicity. Some of these questions included the following: “Have you ever celebrated Christmas?” “What feeling do you associate with Christmas?” “No eggnog or gingerbread was consumed before the scans,” the researchers said.
Then the subjects were scanned with an MRI while watching a series of 84 images. Those images were displayed for two seconds each, and organized in such a way that six images with Christmas themes were followed by six everyday images, which were similar to the Christmas images in forms and features.
“The alternating sets of Christmas and everyday images gave an interleaved block stimulation with the time periods where Christmas images are being viewed as ‘ stimulation blocks’ interleaved with ‘resting blocks’ of viewing everyday image,” the researchers wrote.
Ten of the subjects were assigned to a Christmas group. Two of them were women, while the remaining eight were men. Ten were assigned to the non-Christmas group, the gender composition of which was the same as the aforementioned groups. The remaining
six were excluded from the study since some of them had a strong Christmas connection despite not traditionally celebrating it and/or some had non- positive associations with Christmas despite having a cultural background with regular Christmas celebration.
What the researchers found was that the participants had a cerebral response when viewing Christmas images. Also, they discovered that differences in response existed between people who celebrated Christmas and those without Christmas traditions.
“We identified a functional Christmas network comprising several cortical areas, including the parietal lobules, the premotor cortex, and the somatosensory cortex,” they said. Activation in these areas, they added, was consistent with their hypothesis that Christmas-themed images would
stimulate centers associated with the Christmas spirit.
Although the researchers have faith in the capacity of fMRI for exploring the brain, they said that “any fMRI experiment is only as good as its hypothesis, design, and interpretation.” One of the limitations of the study, they pointed out, is that the design does not distinguish whether the observed activation is Christmas specific or the result of any combination of joyful, festive or nostalgic emotions in general.
“Further research into this topic is necessary to identify the factors affecting one’s response to Christmas,” the researchers, whose study was published in December of last year, said. They remarked that understanding how Christmas spirit works as a neurological network could provide insight into an area of human neuropsychology and become a tool in treating the bah humbug syndrome.