SN exam 1
domain general view
Across emotional domains (happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust,) different regions contribute in different ways together to form our basic emotions. - recent push from scientists behind this
Neuronal communication
Amplitude of an action potential does not vary, but number of action potentials propagated per second varies along a continuum This rate of responding ("spiking rate") relates to the informational "code" carried by that neuron - this shows that it is not the size of the action potential, but rather the rate at which they are firing per second is important Some neurons may have a high spiking rate in some situations but not others ¨ Neurons responding to similar types of information tend to be grouped together (regional functional specialization)
Amygdala
Amygdala damage in humans impairs fear expression recognition in faces and (sometimes) voices but not other types of emotion -(e.g. Adolphs et al., 1994) •Fear expressions activate the amygdala during fMRI more than other expressions - **amygdala important in fear conditioning** -amygdala can be involved in racial prejudice and social evaluation - ***Monkey study shows that when monkeys amygdala is damaged, it messes up social hierachy since its so dependent on fear and processing fear*** -key in emotional memory, not episodic memory ---ex. if you had damanged amygdala and got hit in the nuts, you would remember it happening, but not what it feels like
Most specialized brains regions for emotions
Amygdala in fear •Amygdala damage in humans impairs fear expression recognition in faces and (sometimes) voices but not other types of emotion -(e.g. Adolphs et al., 1994) •Fear expressions activate the amygdala during fMRI more than other expressions Insula in disgust
Voxel
3D volumetric pixel of a certain brain area, every two seconds will collect information on the brain region it corresponds to Contrast - use voxels by comparing its activation when looking at one stimuli vs another ex. looking at faces vs looking at non faces can show higher levels of activation in region where facial recognition occurs.
Empathy/ emotional perspective taking brain regions
"pain matrix" -ACC and insula Singer et al. (2004) - Overlap in neural activation when enduring pain or observing another person endure pain - more concerned/close you are to the other person enduring pain, the higher our own brain reacts to their pain
Kim et al., 2004 - 500 dollar surprise study
**Context matters and amygdala** two different conditions 1. same suprised face, winning 500 dollars 2. same suprised face, losing 500 dollars - amygdala seems to activate more strongly for the faces that were primed with negative information (losing 500 dollars) than the same faces when prompted with positive info
Aviezer et al., 2008 - same face, different bodies study
**Context matters and amygdala** when people are judging facial expressions, the context they are in matters, not just what is conveyed by the face this study shows the same face on different bodies in different situations to show it matters
Freeman et al., 2014 - trustworthy study
**amygdala is not just negative** Presented faces both normally and with digital mask (all blurly) and trying to tell if they are trustworthy - amygdala involved in judging if a person is trustworthy or not (involved in extremes so if a person is really trustworthy or untrustworthy)
Cunningham et al., 2008 - name study
*amygdala is not just negative* -> involved in positive social evaluation Cunningham et al., 2008 -> does focus matter when focusing on positive or negative names (george clooney vs adolf hitler) ? - when focusing on positive condition, they saw activation in the amygdala, showing that amygdala is involved in processing all social conditions relevant to a persons goals, positive or negative
Darwin's principle of antithesis
*idea that opposite states of mind generate opposite actions/attidudes** certain actions or attitudes being the natural accompaniment of a given emotion or state of mind, the opposite state of mind will be expressed by actions or attitudes which are, as far as possible, the exact opposites of the former. -ex. how a dog can both growl and be all scary, while it can also be all cuddly and bendy and docile
Dunbar (1998), SocialBrain Hypothesis
- gives us the idea that 151 people is the best size group for humans interms of our social capacity -Idea that we evolved more of these neurons since social skills were key to our survival Centers on the positive correlation between the mean social group size across species and the neocortex ration - means that monkeys and apes that have less developed neocortex perfect smaller groups (on slide its anywhere from 3 - 70ish group members), far less than humans - ***neocortex ratio is what sets us apart***, not brain size
The subcortex: basal ganglia
- often referred to as the midbrain structures/ Involved in modulating both action and thought by reciprocal interaction with frontal lobes strong involved in Reward association and learning, reward motivation, social motivation - **strong role in drug addiction/ other addicitions ** Implicated in Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease
**behavioral methods - computer mouse tracking**
-professor says he likes it a lot so probably will see questions about it the direction/path/trajectory of the computer mouse track is whats important, not the actual response to the question - depending on how direct/indirect the path is, we can see how the decision process is involving in real time - Very recent methodology - Real-time behavioral technique - Records participants' implicit activation of multiple response options over hundreds of milliseconds - Rich time-course information - Sensitive to relatively implicit processing
Plutchik's 3D model
1980; 8 basic emotions-fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation, joy, & acceptance; helps adjust to demands of environment; model illustrates how emotions are more alike to those situated near it than those farther away (circle)_; varies with intensity more complex because it adds varying layers of intensity per emotions than Russell's circumplex model
Austism vs Psychopathy
Autism: deficits in cognitive perspective taking (theory of mind) Psychopathy: deficits in emotional perspective-taking (apathy)
Brain methods - Event-related potentials (ERP)
Based on EEG (electroencephalography) recordings - EEG signal is ***averaged ***over many events (to reduce effects of random neural firing) and synchronized to some aspect of the event (e.g. onset of stimulus, pressing a button) - this gets rid of any extra activity/noise that dont matter to study at hand Electrodes record a series of positive and negative peaks - Timing and amplitude of the peaks is related to different aspects of the stimulus and task (e.g. consider face recognition)
**DUALISM IS NOT RIGHT** (mind/body dualism)
Cartesian dualism, argued that the pineal gland was the transducer that goes from physical to non-pyshical (soul, psyche, etc...) VERY WRONG OBVIOUSLY Dualism in the press - lots of misleading titles of articles that adds weight to this mind/body seperation,dualism myth that isnt true
Culture and Cognition
Collectivist societies encourage high context processing - Why Japanese people do better than Americans on relative tasks (incorporating the context)** - Why Americans people outperform Japanese people on Absolute tasks (better at judging individual objects without incorporating context)**
Barrett's conceptual act model (2006)
Combination of the models - idea is that we have both of these functions: Core Affect: (unpleasant x pleasant, intense x mild) scale Categorization: (different emotional groups like fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation, joy, & acceptance;
Empathy is Multi-Faceted
Definitions differ according to whether: -The observer shares the same state as the other person (e.g. pity, sympathy, false-belief all involve not sharing) -The empathic reaction focuses on what I feel or what you feel (perspective taking)
Neuron
Dendrites are imput side axon is output side myelin sheath can increase speed of processing (insulation)
Dopamine neurons in reward processing
Dopamine neurons respond to 'prediction errors' (predicted - actual reward), key idea is dopamine neurons kinda of "learn" about reward values - Ventral striatum responds to unexpected delivery of reinforcers no prediction, reward occurs - if not conditioned to a reward stimulus, dopamine will fire after stimulus is expeirenced reward prediction, reward occurs - if conditioned, dopamine will fire before stimulus is experienced following auditory or other stimuli indicating that a known reward is coming, **** but when rewards come, NO Increases in firing*** reward prediction, reward doesn't occur - reward fires a lot before when expecting, but then dopamine doesn't fire at all when no reward occurs
Brain area Reference terms
Dorsal/superior - towards to top -parietal lobe found here Ventral/Inferior - towards to bottom - temporal lobe found here Anterior/rostral - towards the front - frontal lobe found here Posterior/caudal - towards the back - occipital lobe found here Lateral (sides) or medial (middle)
Emotions - motor outcomes
Emotions elicit particular *external* motor outcomes in the face and body (expressions)
Emotions - feeling state
Emotions have a particular 'feeling state' in terms of an *internal* bodily response (e.g. sweating, heart rate, hormone secretion)
Emotions - reponses
Emotions trigger **action responses** (e.g. fight-or-flight) and **cognitive responses** (e.g. increased attention) (approach or avoid)
emotion vs motivation
Example: •Enjoying chocolate = an emotional state •Wanting chocolate = a motivational state Example in the social domain: •Being in the company of a loved one = an emotional state •Wanting the company of a loved one = a motivational state
Social exclusion study - Eisenberger · 2003
Friends exclusion -> lights up ACC and Insula (areas for our own pain and emitions regions) Stranger's exclusions -? lights up PFC (area for ToM or thinking of others) - shows we experience our friends pain as our own
grey vs white matter
Gray matter = neuronal cell bodies - actual soma, cell body White matter = axons, myelin, and glia cells; axon tracts occur within hemispheres, between hemispheres, and between cortical and sub-cortical regions - "cabling connecting different regions" as the professor put it - for example corpus callusom is white matter as it is a key connecter between brain regions, specially in this case left and right hemisphere
ToM regions - Temporal Poles
Important for semantics, including social concepts Retrieval of schemas Primary site of semantic demantia **No selective impairments in social functions** - shows that it is not a module for ToM, but may be involved in supporting its function
Brain structure - insula
Important in disgust
behavioral methods - Response times
Important to remember response times don't just tell us "when" but also how - very fast responding leads to a breakdown in accurary, hence the speed - accuracy tradeoff for example, famous study shows that humans respond faster to smiling faces than to the same faces showing neutral emotion - this shows more than response speed, but rather that humans can more easily recognize faces with emotion rather than without due to the way we store faces in our memory (we store in our memory the happy faces rather than neural faces)
ventral striatum
Key in addiction, nothing can trump activating ventral striatum in terms of pleasure/reward rodent studies have shown that this is key for reward motivation/addiction - if you gives rats a lever to stimulate their ventral striatum, they will choose doing that over anything else until they die from starvation, shows -key not just for motivating behavior, but also for anticipating reward outcome ex. knowing that hitting the lever will give u striatum stimulation in rat Ventral striatum responds to unexpected delivery of reinforcers
Experience and Brain strutcure - Maguire et al. (2000)
London taxi driver study Showed that cab drivers had abnormally large posterior hippocampus, which is heavily involved in navigation, due to their heavy reliance on it for their profession. Important since it shows not only functional patterns but also certain brain structures themselves can grow/shrink based of experience/usage
Understanding others: Mental states
Mental states consist of knowledge, beliefs, feelings, intentions, and desires Inferring them called: **mentalizing** or **theory of mind** Sharing someone's state (particularly their emotions) is linked to empathy, although more to empathy than that (since there are many different defs of empathy
Empathy vs. ToM
Mentalizing/ToM or **cognitive perspective-taking**: ability to understand others' beliefs, thoughts, and intentions Empathy or **emotional perspective-taking**: ability to understand (and sometimes share) others' emotions
mirror neurons, aka MNS (mirror neuron system)
Mirror neurons may act as a neural 'bridge' between self and other since they are Responsive not just to motor properties but also an action's goal (i.e., the intentions of the other) - in theory, mirror neurons will help us learn actions from others many different theories of what MNS does - MNS underlies ToM - MNS underlies empathy -**MNS involved in only understanding simple actions and goals (this one has the most support from science)**
ToM regions - rTPJ
Most specialized for ToM out of 3 regions -**Proposed ToM domain-specific 'module' but controversial** Stronger responses to other vs. own states More to false beliefs vs. false photographs **Lesions can lead to impairments in ToM tasks**
Motor/somatosensory strips
Motor cortex on paritel lobe codes for muscle movement Somatosensery strip codes for sensitivity of certain body parts, the larger the surface area on the brain, the more sensitive the body part (lips, face, fingers have larger surface areas and therefore are the most sensitive
Multi-voxel pattern analysis
Multi-voxel pattern analysis (classification) - since there can be unique patterns within a signal brain region, we need analysis to discriminate these distinct patterns to uncover the different functions. ex. areas for identifying bottles and shoes in same 1,000 voxel region, so researchers train a classifier on the different patterns of bottles an shoes in this region, and eventually the classifier can tell whether a participant is looking at a bottle or shoe just by analyzing their neuronal activity **Important - you can train a classifier to "mind read" weather a participant is looking at a specific stimuli based of patterns of neuronal activity and you can see to what extent can we discriminate factors**
Non-Additive Determinism
Multiple Factors matter, social and biological both interact in meaningful ways to determine behavior. Properties of the collective whole are not always predictable from the properties of the parts until properties of the whole have been clearly documented and studied Important to neuorscience since many different factors like social psych, cognitive psych, neurobiology, anthropology, sociology, etc... all play a role
Brain methods - Functional Neuroimaging - most important
Neural activity consumes oxygen as well as generating electrical signals - In order to compensate for increased oxygen consumption, more blood is pumped into the active region PET measures the blood flow in a region, whereas fMRI measures the blood oxygenation ***The time taken for this response is slow (several seconds) and so functional imaging has a poor temporal resolution, but a good spatial resolution*** fMRI - good spatial resolution -poor temporal resolution
Charles Darwin
Observations in 1800 that set the stage for social expressions across species, argued we evolved emotions because it was beneficial for survival - published 1872 Expression of the emotions in man and animals - particularly interested in the consistency (partiucally in disgust) between people and animals, which shows genetic and evolutionary roots of emotions - argued we have, genetically, hardwired emotions
Brain methods - Behavioral methods
Often used in addition to neuroscience methods (e.g. to correlate brain activity with performance/experience) - common to take behavioral findings and then compare them against neuro images or other information from previous studies Consists of: ¤Performance measures (e.g. **response times**, accuracy) ¤Observational measures (e.g. eye-tracking, judgments, **computer mouse tracking** ¤Survey measures (e.g. questionnaires, interviews)
Action potential
One size fits all (-70 mv at resting potential to +30mv after depolarization)
Similarity analysis in Multi-voxel pattern analysis
Overlaps between the differences within the same region, important for uncovering more specific representational structures
Motivation - Fronto-striatal-thalamic loops
Prefrontal cortex: Dopamine made in SN -> dorsal striatum caudate/putamen -> thalamus Orbiofrontal: Dopamine made in VTA -> ventral striatum (nucleus Accumbens) -> thalamus overall what we need to know Dopamine -> striatum -> thalamus
Brain methods - Electromyography (EMG)
Related to somatic nervous system (muscle activity) - particularly facial muscle activity in social neuroscience studies Examples: mimicking subtle facial expressions or the eye-blink startle response - common study set up is having a participant watch a film, and measure their facial reactions/mimicking when an actor/actress makes face Measures potential between pairs of close electrodes (relative to a third electrode elsewhere) Zygomatic/despressor muscles - associated with positive affect (happiness) Frontails/corrugator - associated with negative affect (anger)
ToM regions - Medial PFC
Responds when thinking about mental states, not physical states Responds most when thinking of self (or close others) But lesions here don't necessarily disrupt performance on ToM tasks - shows that it is not a module for ToM, but may be involved in supporting its function **Considered important for creating 'social events' and thinking about others in relation to oneself, or representing information "decoupled from reality"**
Paul Ekman's 6 'basic emotions'
Similar to darwin in that it promotes a genetically, hardwired emotional model -anger -fear -happiness -surprise -sadness -disgust *Research tends to focus on these 6 universal emotions*
Summary of emotions and motivation
Six "basic" emotions: culturally universal? Components of emotion: -Circumplex model: valence and arousal -3D circumplex model: 4 bipolar dimensions of emotion -Conceptual act model: core affect + categorization Amygdala linked to fear - But amygdala is far broader than just fear processing (processes positive stimuli as well) Insula linked to disgust Striatum = primary reward processing - Striatum involved in reward prediction errors via dopamine Orbitofrontal cortex = reward processing more sensitive to goals and context Social rewards co-opt these more domain-general reward systems
History of neuroscience: new field
Social neuroscience is a NEW FIELD (20-30 years old) because.... Tools did not exist to appropriately study social neuroscience social psychology is 'messier' than, say, cognitive psychology. Therefore many neuroscientists ignored it, in order to simplify a dauntingly complex brain
Learning emotions
Stimuli eliciting emotions are linked to survival but can be learned too (e.g., via conditioning) •Priority treatment given to emotional stimuli -More attention -More memory -Action preparation
Carr et al. (2003) Imitation to empathy
Studying showing mirror neurons are important for empathy and other emotional responses -Participants shown facial expressions and asked to observe or to imitate **mirror neurons were more activated for imitation than observation** -this shows Mirror neurons can be a bridge between perceiving emotions (in someone else) and feeling emotions (in own brain) -Other studies show correlation between questionnaire measures of empathy and premotor activity when observing actions
Empathy beyond simulation
Switching off empathic (pain) simulation Seeing someone in pain might activate pleasure regions of your brain if that person cheated on you, Singer et al. (2006) -If someone is deemed 'bad' (Singer et al., 2006) When acupuncturists/doctors perform painful procedures (Cheng et al., 2007) Whether one takes self or other perspective (Lamm et al., 2007)
ToM domain specificity? 3 regions that have been proposed
Temporal Poles Medial PFC rTPJ
The subcortex: hypothalamus
The hypothalamus is concerned with regulating bodily functions/needs such as temperature, eating and drinking, sexual activity, and regulation of endocrine functions - regulating everyday functions
The subcortex: thalamus
The thalamus is a processing stage between all the sensory organs (except smell) and the cortex - relay between eyes/ears/touch sensation, etc... to the cortex\ The hypothalamus is concerned with regulating bodily functions/needs such as temperature, eating and drinking, sexual activity, and regulation of endocrine functions
Summary Understading others
Theory of mind and reasoning about mental states -Evidence of a network of around 3 regions on a variety of tasks -Different regions may have somewhat different functions; some suggest that the right TPJ is domain-specific for mentalizing •Empathy -Importance of simulation -But simulation can be overridden (e.g. by beliefs) and is context-sensitive Involvement of a number of systems depending on the empathic response
Issues with fMRI/voxels - Dead salmon study
Type I errors are likely since its hard to account for errors when using 80,000-120,000 voxels like usual - famous study is dead salmon where researchers put a dead salmon in fMRI found brain activity when they showed it imagines - Very sassy way to make the point that type 1 errors are possible if you don't correct for multiple comparisons issue ***shows why we need to correct the mutiple comparisons issues****
Univariate vs. Multivariate questions
Univariate - what region is activated? how activated is the region? Multivariate - what is this region representing, what does the activation produce?
Brain methods - MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
Uses magnetic fields and radio waves to produce high quality images by manipulating the spin of hydrogen protons Pros: ¤No radioactive tracers needed ¤High resolution imaging ¤Can register water content, inflammation and bleeding Cons: ¤***Can only register structure, and not function****
using Contrast (t-test) in testing
Using participants on responses/impressions to judge wheather stimuli provided was evaluation irrelevant (not used in their decision-making) or evaluation relevant (used in their decision-making) - basically idea here is researchers don't know what specific area/mechanisms are responsible for an function, so they basically use the information provided by participants to kind of reverse locate the brain function start with study participation -> comparison -> hypothesis about brain region rather than starting with hypothesis about brain region -> study participation -> comparison -univariate analysis
fMRI slice plane
WHEN YOU GET TO THIS CARD LOOK IN SN IMAGE FOLDER
emotion
a state associated with the stimuli that are **rewarding** (one wants to get) or **punishing** (one wants to avoid)
Social and non social rewards
activate alot of the same areas - motivation is the same across cultures in the way it activates your brain
Social Neuroscience - a trusting relationship
activity associated with making a decision (e.g. to give money) in one person's brain predicts activity in the reward centers of another person's brain (even before the money is received)(King-Casas et al., 2005)
False Belief Task (Sally-Anne Task)
ally-ante tasks that can only be solved if one possesses theory of mind and can understand that someone might not share the same knowledge/perspective/view of a situation or belief
amygdala social fear & evaluation
amygdala can be involved in racial prejudice and social evaluation - trustworthiness study freeman 2014 - Cunningham et al., 2008 - name study
Social Neuroscience - Definition
an attempt to understand and explain, **using the methods and theories of neuroscience**, how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.** - Draws more from cognitive psychology rather than social psychology - Research tends to be conducted in a reductionist manner: implying that one type of explanation will become replaced with another, more basic, type of explanation over time. An interdisciplinary field that uses methodologies from both the natural and social sciences to better understand the biological mechanisms that underlie social processes and behavior - Holds that this multi-level analysis can enlighten both social psychology and neuroscience - Both neurobiological and social levels of analysis critical for accurate understanding of social behavior
Hedonic value
an value regarding whether emotions are subjectively liked or disliked
Culture and the brain
attentional network has harding time activating for the culturally non-perfered judgments in participants - Japanese network had harder time during absolute tasks - American network had harder time during relative tasks Important since it shows cultural differences actually affect the brain
Motivation - reward system
bangil ganglia region key to reward, dopamine system -Fronto-striatal-thalamic loops
Hemodynamic response function
change in the BOLD signal over time, i.e., initial dip -> overcompensation -> undershoot - lasts about 12 seconds and is what fMRI is picking up when blood flow increases to a certain area, - so when a neuroscientists is predicting function, he will predict a hemodynamic response in whatever structure he thinks is responible... -randomized presentation of fMRI trails important because it shows you can show stimuli at different intervals but still be able to recover a response
fMRI comparing across subjects
done by fitting everyones fMRI imagine into the same **talairach and MNI** atlases (shoeboxes) - to account for different sizes of heads/brains
Eisenberger et al (2003) - passing ball with 3 friends study
fMRI shows areas associated w/ phyiscal pain are the same with social rejection - dorsal anterior cingulate cortex -**when you are excluded from the passing game, it makes people very social distressed and rejected due to activation of pain perception regions** -shows social/physical pains are related which was groundbreaking for social neuroscience
ANOVA in testing
good for testing interaction affects which tells us that one factor is dependent on another -univariate analysis
Darwin's principle of serviceable habits
human emotional expressions come from patterns of behavior that were beneficial for our evolutionary predecessors - **facial expressions look they way they do for evolutionary beneficiary reasons**
social brain
humans neocortex has 6 extensively developed layers to maximize surface area which sets us apart from other animals in terms of social skills - ***neocortex ratio is what sets us apart*** - even though some animals (elephants) have more total neurons, humans have far ore cerebral cortex neurons 16.3 billion and no other animals have even 10 billion, this sets them apart socially -Idea that we evolved more of these neurons since social skills were key to our survival 4 main social brain models
Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)
important reward region Integrating reward value with current context or state (Small et al., 2001) - **basically if you like ice cream but you have already had a pint, this will let you know you have had enough** OFC lesions disrupt reversal learning (Rolls et al., 1994) - shifting focus (so if there was an experience where red square meant good and blue square meant bad, OFC key for relearning once experiment changes conditions and makes red square bad and blue square good OFC lesions lead to inappropriate joking or flirting, abnormal social behavior (Grafman et al., 1996) - shows it regulates social wants and needs depending on context (basically lets u know its more appropriate to make a joke when with friends vs your boss Sensitive to 'regret' or foregone rewards (Blair et al., 2006)
Saxe (2003) false belief story study and rTPJ
like the sally-anne tasks but geared towards older people about driving a porsche or ford and whether other persons knows if its a porsche or a ford - results showed that rTPJ is key for ToM
Brain methods - fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
measures BOLD - blood oxygen dependent response - idea is that In order to compensate for increased oxygen consumption, more blood is pumped into the active region, so fMRI can see what area of a brain is active based on the increased blood oxygenation content - fMRI picks up ratio of Oxyhemoglobin to Deoxyhemoglobin (and when there is more oxyhemoglobin shows blood flowing into that area) - this hemodynamic response function peaks after 6 seconds of activation, so 6 seconds after
Hot or Not: Social Influence Study
presenting faces of varying attractiveness to subjects who rate them, then after they tell the subjects how other people rate them - after you see other peoples opinions, you moves your scores slighlty higher if others thought they were attractive, and moved your scored significantly down if others thought they were ugly Found that in activation in straitum and OFC changed in accordance with others opinions, showing that other peoples opinions literally change the way your brain processes social and cultural stimuli and context
Haber & Barchas (1983) amphetamine gorilla study
prime example of importance of Non-Additive Determinism injecting monkeys with amphetamine Expected all monkeys to get more dominate, but only dominate monkeys got more dominate, while submissive monkeys got more submission **- Prime example that shows that social neuroscience (dominate or submissive behavior patterns) in addition to biological science (amphetamine injection) is very important to consider**
Important fMRI technique - spatial smoothing
seems counterintuitive but very effective important processing technique where you apply a normally distributed blur to an fMRI image in order to increase the signal:noise ratio to emphasize activity - The random noise goes away and important clusters come out
Correcting for multiple comparisons - Motion Correction
since subjects rarely stay perfectly still in fMRI, they move which in turn moves the orientation of the voxels, messing everything up **so you have to estimate their movements/rotations on x,y, and z axis and then implement those corrections""
motivation
states in which rewards are sought and punishments are avoided
Humphrey (1976) - social skills in primates
the higher intellectual faculties of primates have evolved as an adaptation to the complexities of social living. For better or worse, styles of thinking which are primarily suited to social problem-solving colour the behaviour of [humans] and other primates even towards the inanimate world. ¤social life conferred enormous advantages to primates ¤social life requires much more brain power ¤the brain mechanisms so evolved from social life form the foundation of our present intellect
Fear Conditioning & the Amygdala
the process of classically conditioning animals to fear neutral objects Results from mice studies: - Lesions of amygdala disrupt fear conditioning - Lesions of amygdala after conditioning also disrupt response - Lesions do not disrupt fear response to shocks
Russell (1980) circumplex model of emotion
valence and arousal are separate dimensions of emotion, and distinct emotions represent intersections along these dimensions Falls on a scale where emotions can be rated as negative (unpleasant) or positive (pleasant) and also as intense or mild
Theory of Mind (ToM) - simulation theory
we understand others by simulating their behavior in our own heads - More popular than theory-theory Advantages of simulation theory: - No need for specialized mechanism (grounded in perceptual motor circuits which we know we have) - Evolutionary continuity with other species - Mirror neurons: prime example of how we simulate others actions - Mirror neurons are rarely tested in humans, normally tested in monkeys since they are much more definitive in monkeys and we only think they exist in humans Disadvantages: - Observable behavior can be a poor predictor of internal states - Neural regions that respond when thinking about others dont similarly respond during imitation **These disadvantages raise the question if there might be a specialized theory of mind mechanism that helps us understand other people and their thoughts/perspectives**
Theory of Mind (ToM) - theory theory
we understand others by using learned or innate abstract, logical rules and a 'folk psychology'
Summary of SN methods
¨Action potentials are one-size-fits-all, and neurons code for information through several ways of firing action potentials ¨brain anatomy basics ¨response times and mouse-tracking can assess more implicit processes ¨ERP valuable for timing ¨fMRI: ¤Measures blood oxygenation (and by inference, neuronal activity) ¤Sluggish hemodynamic response taking several seconds - great spatial resolution, temporal resolution is mediocre ¤The 'multiple comparisons issue' ¤Lots of 'preprocessing' to prepare data ¤Brains need to be normalized to compare across subjects ¤Different analyses for different questions (contrast, ANOVA, brain-behavior correlation) ¤Multi-voxel pattern analyses
The subcortex: limbic system
¨Important for relating the organism to its environment based on current needs and the present situation, and based on previous experience ¨Implicated in emotions, learning, and memory (episodic and emotional memory)
Benefits of emotion in social dimension
•Emotions do not need a social dimension (snake=fear, feces=disgust) •However, living cooperatively in a group also increases survival. Emotions in social species have been recruited as a 'social glue' -e.g. love, empathy, fear of rejection, moral disgust, anger at unfair behavior •social species communicate emotions to each other (facially, vocally) **social learning reduces individual discovery risks**
Components of emotion
•Emotions have an **hedonic value**, i.e. they are subjectively liked or disliked •Emotions have a particular 'feeling state' in terms of an *internal* bodily response (e.g. sweating, heart rate, hormone secretion) •Emotions elicit particular *external* motor outcomes in the face and body (expressions) •Emotions trigger **action responses** (e.g. fight-or-flight) and **cognitive responses** (e.g. increased attention) (approach or avoid)
Papez-Maclean theory of emotion
•Fails to differentiate among emotions or different contributions of regions •Historically interesting but involvement since its on of the first neurological approach to emotions, but not well supported and leaves out key players like the amygdala
Sensory cortices and amygdala
•Fast and slow routes to the amygdala from sensory cortices (LeDoux) •Amygdala activity may lead to enhanced visual cortex activity, as well as activity in regions such as hypothalamus and ACC (involved in preparing bodily responses), and OFC (evaluating context) **certain things we know are dangerous (ex. spiders, snakes, bears, etc...) your amydala might activate quickly to let your body know even faster than normal that something is up
