Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where embodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain's modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver interacts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demonstrations of social embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account of them has been offered. We propose that theories of embodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these findings, and that they also suggest exciting new directions for research. We compare the PSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticisms that have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach.
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OBJECTIVE: This study was undertaken to identify brain structures associated with emotion in normal elderly subjects.
METHOD: Eight normal subjects aged 55-78 years were shown film clips intended to provoke the emotions of happiness, fear, or disgust as well as a neutral state. During emotional activation, regional cerebral blood flow was measured with the use of [15O]H2O positron emission tomography imaging, and subjective emotional responses were recorded. Data were analyzed by subtracting the values during the neutral condition from the values in the various emotional activations.
RESULTS: The stimuli produced a general activation in visual pathways that included the primary and secondary visual cortex, involving regions associated with object and spatial recognition. In addition, the specific emotions produced different regional limbic activations, which suggests that different pathways may be used for different types of emotional stimuli.
CONCLUSIONS: Emotional activation in normal elderly subjects was associated with increases in blood flow in limbic and paralimbic brain structures. Brain activation may be specific to the emotion being elicited but probably involves complex sensory, association, and memory circuitry. Further studies are needed to identify activations that are specific for emotion.
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The authors propose that people in relationships become emotionally similar over time--as this similarity would help coordinate the thoughts and behaviors of the relationship partners, increase their mutual understanding, and foster their social cohesion. Using laboratory procedures to induce and assess emotional response, the authors found that dating partners (Study 1) and college roommates (Studies 2 and 3) became more similar in their emotional responses over the course of a year. Further, relationship partners with less power made more of the change necessary for convergence to occur. Consistent with the proposed benefits of emotional similarity, relationships whose partners were more emotionally similar were more cohesive and less likely to dissolve. Discussion focuses on implications of emotional convergence and on potential mechanisms.
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Brosnan's research on chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys provides invaluable clues to unlocking the complex nature of human morality. Elaborating upon her claims, we explore the role of emotions in basic social interactions, social regulation processes, and morality, all of which may be crucial to both human and nonhuman communities. We then turn to a conceptualization of teasing and play as forums for negotiating norms and the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and focus on the role of emotions in assessing the moral character of others. Finally, we consider points of convergence and departure between human responses to relative deprivation and those observed by Brosnan in primates. We conclude that work such as Brosnan's paves the way for fruitful collaborations between scholars of morality from diverse fields.
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<p>In this book the author, a pioneer in brain research offers an entirely new model of our emotions, their origins, their power, and their malleability. For more than thirty years, the author has been at the forefront of brain research. Now he gives us an entirely new model for understanding our emotions, as well as practical strategies we can use to change them. He has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional "styles," including resilience, self-awareness, and attention. Our emotional fingerprint results from where on the continuum of each style we fall. He explains the brain chemistry that underlies each style in order to give us a new model of the emotional brain, one that will even go so far as to affect the way we treat conditions like autism and depression. And, finally, he provides strategies we can use to change our own brains and emotions if that is what we want to do. By giving us a new and useful way to look at ourselves, we can develop a sense of well-being, and live more meaningful lives.</p>
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To emote literally means to move or prepare for action. A large body of research indicates that flexor and extensor movements are conditionally associated with approach- and avoidance-related motivations. It has also been widely argued that approach and avoidant motivations are asymmetrically instantiated in the left and right hemispheres, respectively. Nevertheless, to date, these literatures remain largely separate. In the present investigation, flexor and extensor movements that were visuospatially contextualized as being directed toward the self and away from the self were observed to be asymmetrically represented in the "approach" and "avoidance" hemispheres. Moreover, this pattern of hemispheric specialization was manifested to a greater degree the higher participants' self-reported level of daily positive affect and the lower their self-reported level of dispositional anxiety. Collectively, these findings have direct implications for models of embodied emotional and perceptual processing, as well as for investigations of individual differences in emotional disposition.
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The authors present an overview of the neural bases of emotion. They underscore the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and amygdala in 2 broad approach- and withdrawal-related emotion systems. Components and measures of affective style are identified. Emphasis is given to affective chronometry and a role for the PFC in this process is proposed. Plasticity in the central circuitry of emotion is considered, and implications of data showing experience-induced changes in the hippocampus for understanding psychopathology and stress-related symptoms are discussed. Two key forms of affective plasticity are described--context and regulation. A role for the hippocampus in context-dependent normal and dysfunctional emotional responding is proposed. Finally, implications of these data for understanding the impact on neural circuitry of interventions to promote positive affect and on mechanisms that govern health and disease are considered.
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<p>This research draws on ideas about emotion-related appraisal tendencies to generate and test novel propositions about intergroup emotions. First, emotion elicited by outgroup category activation can be transferred to an unrelated stimulus (incidental emotion effects). Second, people predisposed toward an emotion are more prejudiced toward groups that are likely to be associated with that emotion. Discussion focuses on the implications of the studies for a more complete understanding of the nature of prejudice, and specifically, the different qualities of prejudice for different target groups.</p>
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<p>In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact on moral judgment. Finally, emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed. Keywords embodiment, emotion, moral judgment, moralization Emotions are inherently subjective. They arise as the result of personal appraisals, and disrupt seemingly more orderly, deliberate forms of judgment and reasoning. From this perspective, emotions would seem to be inappropriate guides to decisions about moral conduct and virtuous character.</p>
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<p>The studies of emotion function and emotional disorders complement one another. In this article, the authors outline relations between the social functions of emotion and four psychological disorders. The authors first present a social-functional account of emotion and argue that emotions help coordinate social interactions through their informative, evocative, and incentive functions. They then review evidence concerning the emotional and social problems related to depression, schizophrenia, social anxiety, and borderline personality disorder and consider how the emotional disturbances related to these disorders disrupt interactions and relationships, thus contributing further to the maintenance of the disorder. They conclude by discussing research strategies relevant to the study of emotion, social interaction, and psychopathology. We can be afraid.., or get angry, or feel pity, in general have pleasure or pain, both too much and too little, and in both ways not well; but [having these feelings] at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way, is the</p>
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People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role for emotion concepts in the formation of visual percepts of emotion. As predicted, we found that perceptual priming of emotional faces (e.g., a scowling face) was disrupted when the accessibility of a relevant emotion word (e.g., anger) was temporarily reduced, demonstrating that the exact same face was encoded differently when a word was accessible versus when it was not. The implications of these findings for a linguistically relative view of emotion perception are discussed.
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Recent imaging results suggest that individuals automatically share the emotions of others when exposed to their emotions. We question the assumption of the automaticity and propose a contextual approach, suggesting several modulatory factors that might influence empathic brain responses. Contextual appraisal could occur early in emotional cue evaluation, which then might or might not lead to an empathic brain response, or not until after an empathic brain response is automatically elicited. We propose two major roles for empathy; its epistemological role is to provide information about the future actions of other people, and important environmental properties. Its social role is to serve as the origin of the motivation for cooperative and prosocial behavior, as well as help for effective social communication.
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Difficulties in social cognition are well recognized in individuals with autism spectrum conditions (henceforth ‘autism’). Here we focus on one crucial aspect of social cognition: the ability to empathize with the feelings of another. In contrast to theory of mind, a capacity that has often been observed to be impaired in individuals with autism, much less is known about the capacity of individuals with autism for affect sharing. Based on previous data suggesting that empathy deficits in autism are a function of interoceptive deficits related to alexithymia, we aimed to investigate empathic brain responses in autistic and control participants with high and low degrees of alexithymia. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured empathic brain responses with an ‘empathy for pain’ paradigm assessing empathic brain responses in a real-life social setting that does not rely on attention to, or recognition of, facial affect cues. Confirming previous findings, empathic brain responses to the suffering of others were associated with increased activation in left anterior insula and the strength of this signal was predictive of the degree of alexithymia in both autistic and control groups but did not vary as a function of group. Importantly, there was no difference in the degree of empathy between autistic and control groups after accounting for alexithymia. These findings suggest that empathy deficits observed in autism may be due to the large comorbidity between alexithymic traits and autism, rather than representing a necessary feature of the social impairments in autism.
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The neural processes underlying empathy are a subject of intense interest within the social neurosciences. However, very little is known about how brain empathic responses are modulated by the affective link between individuals. We show here that empathic responses are modulated by learned preferences, a result consistent with economic models of social preferences. We engaged male and female volunteers in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas (fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices) towards fair players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge. We conclude that in men (at least) empathic responses are shaped by valuation of other people's social behaviour, such that they empathize with fair opponents while favouring the physical punishment of unfair opponents, a finding that echoes recent evidence for altruistic punishment.
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<p>Empathy is the combined ability to interpret the emotional states of others and experience resultant, related emotions. The relation between prefrontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and emotion in infants and children is well known. The relationship between positive emotion (assessed via parent-report), empathy (measured via observation) and second-by-second brain electrical activity (recorded during a pleasurable task) was investigated using a sample of 128 six to ten year olds. Contentment predicted increasing left-sided frontopolar activation (p<.05). Empathic concern and one form of positive empathy predicted increasing right-sided frontopolar activation (ps<.05). A second form of positive empathy predicted increasing left-sided dorsolateral activation (p<.05). This suggests that positive emotion and (negative and positive) empathy predict changes in prefrontal activity in children during a pleasurable task.</p>
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The social neuroscientific investigation of empathy has revealed that the same neural networks engaged during first-hand experience of affect subserve empathic responses. Recent meta-analyses focusing on empathy for pain for example reliably identified a network comprising anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex. Moreover, recent studies suggest that the generation of empathy is flexibly supported by networks involved in action simulation and mentalizing depending on the information available in the environment. Further, empathic responses are modulated by many factors including the context they occur in. Recent work shows how this modulation can be afforded by the engagement of antagonistic motivational systems or by cognitive control circuits, and these modulatory systems can also be employed in efforts to regulate one's empathic responses.
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Our ability to have an experience of another's pain is characteristic of empathy. Using functional imaging, we assessed brain activity while volunteers experienced a painful stimulus and compared it to that elicited when they observed a signal indicating that their loved one—present in the same room—was receiving a similar pain stimulus. Bilateral anterior insula (AI), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brainstem, and cerebellum were activated when subjects received pain and also by a signal that a loved one experienced pain. AIand ACC activation correlated with individual empathy scores. Activity in the posterior insula/secondary somatosensory cortex, the sensorimotor cortex (SI/MI), and the caudal ACC was specific to receiving pain. Thus, a neural response in AIand rostral ACC, activated in common for “self” and “other” conditions, suggests that the neural substrate for empathic experience does not involve the entire “pain matrix.” We conclude that only that part of the pain network associated with its affective qualities, but not its sensory qualities, mediates empathy.
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This commentary reflects on the articles in this Special Issue. The appearance of this group of articles underscores the important idea that a major target of mindfulness practice is on emotion. Transformation in trait affect is a key goal of all contemplative traditions. This commentary addresses several key methodological and conceptual issues in the empirical study of mindfulness. The many ways in which the term "mindfulness" is used in the articles in this Special Issue are noted, and they include its reference to states, traits, and independent variables that are manipulated in an experimental context. How the term "mindfulness" is conceptualized and operationalized is crucial, and for progress to be made it is essential that we qualify the use of this term by reference to how it is being operationalized in each context. Other methodological issues are considered, such as the duration of training and how it should be measured, and the nature of control and comparison groups in studies of mindfulness-based interventions. Finally, the commentary ends with a consideration of the targets within emotion processing that are likely to be impacted by mindfulness. This collection of articles underscores the substantial progress that has occurred in the empirical study of mindfulness and it is a harbinger of a very promising future in this area.
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Abstract: There is a lack of unified statistical modeling framework for cerebral shape asymmetry analysis in literature. Most previous approaches start with flip-ping the 3D magnetic resonance images (MRI). The anatomical correspondence across the hemispheres is then established by registering the original image to the flipped image. A difference of an anatomical index between these two images is used as a measure of cerebral asymmetry. We present a radically different asymmetry analysis that utilizes a novel weighted spherical harmonic representation of cortical surfaces. The weighted spherical harmonic representation is a surface smoothing technique given explicitly as a weighted linear combination of spherical harmon-ics. This new representation is used to parameterize cortical surfaces, establish the hemispheric correspondence, and normalize cortical surfaces in a unified mathemat-ical framework. The methodology has been applied in characterizing the cortical asymmetry of a group of autistic subjects.
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Prior research has demonstrated that people who are more connected with nature report more subjective well-being. However, guided by the sensitization model of well-being, we expected that the positive relation between connectedness with nature and psychological well-being would only be significant for those who tend to engage in nature's beauty (i.e., experience positive emotional responses when witnessing nature's beauty). In Study 1, we found the positive relation between connectedness with nature and life satisfaction was only significant for individuals higher, and not those lower, on engagement with natural beauty. Study 2 conceptually replicated this finding using self-esteem as an outcome. Moreover, the results were not affected by age, gender, Big Five personality traits (Study 1) or social desirability (Study 2). Thus, the current research extends past literature and demonstrates that connectedness with nature only predicts well-being when individuals are also emotionally attuned to nature's beauty.
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<p>In two prior studies, we investigated the neural mechanisms of spatial attention using a combined event-related potential (ERP) and positron emission tomography (PET) approach (Heinze et al. [1994]: Nature 392:543-546; Mangun et al. [1997]: Hum Brain Mapp 5:273-279). Neural activations in extrastriate cortex were observed in the PET measures for attended stimuli, and these effects were related to attentional modulations in the ERPs at specific latencies. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and ERPs in single subjects to investigate the intersubject variability in extrastriate spatial attention effects, and to qualitatively compare this to variations in ERP attention effects. Activations in single subjects replicated our prior group-averaged PET findings, showing attention-related increases in blood flow in the posterior fusiform and middle occipital gyri in the hemisphere contralateral to attended visual stimuli. All subjects showed attentional modulations of the occipital P1 component of the ERPs. These findings in single subjects demonstrate the consistency of extrastriate attention effects, and provide information about the feasibility of this approach for integration of electrical and functional imaging data.</p>
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BACKGROUND: Relationships between aberrant social functioning and depression have been explored via behavioral, clinical, and survey methodologies, highlighting their importance in the etiology of depression. The neural underpinnings of these relationships, however, have not been explored.
METHODS: Nine depressed participants and 14 never-depressed control subjects viewed emotional and neutral pictures at two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning sessions approximately 22 weeks apart. In the interim, depressed patients received the antidepressant Venlafaxine. Positively rated images were parsed into three separate comparisons: social interaction, human faces, and sexual images; across scanning session, activation to these images was compared with other positively rated images.
RESULTS: For each of the three social stimulus types (social interaction, faces, sexual images), a distinguishable circuitry was activated equally in non-depressed control subjects and post-treatment depressed subjects but showed a hypo-response in the depressed group pre-treatment. These structures include regions of prefrontal, temporal, and parietal cortices, insula, basal ganglia, and the hippocampus.
CONCLUSIONS: The neural hypo-response to positively valenced social stimuli that is observed in depression remits as response to antidepressant medication occurs, suggesting a state-dependent deficiency in response to positive social incentives. These findings underscore the importance of addressing social dysfunction in research and treatment of depression.
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