Altered neural connectivity in excitatory and inhibitory cortical circuits in autism. The role of body and environment in cognition. In this Research Topic, we aimed to develop our understanding of cognition by considering the diverse and dynamic relationship between the language we use, our bodily perceptions, and our actions and interactions in the broader environment.
We received twenty-six articles that take very different approaches to exploring the question of how our bodies and the environment influence cognition. The ethology of empathy: a taxonomy of real-world targets of need and their effect on observers. The prosocial response has been studied in social, personality, and developmental psychology for decades, revealing largely consistent findings across researchers and populations (reviewed in Eisenberg and Miller, 1987; Preston and de Waal, 2002; Batson, 2011).
In order to reliably elicit prosocial responses in the laboratory, virtually all studies used sympathetic, fictional, single targets of need depicted through written narratives, confederates, or actors featuring blameless young children, orphans, or adults in acute pain (e.g., Mehrabian and Epstein, 1972; Batson et al., 1988; Eisenberg et al., 1991). This approach allowed researchers to successfully predict observers' prosocial response from their trait or state empathic concern (EC), personal distress (PD), perspective taking (PT), emotion regulation, and similarity to the target (among other things; see review in Piliavin and Charng, 1990).
Love Hormone Oxytocin Can Cause Emotional Pain, New Study Says. New research reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience says that oxytocin, a hormone that promotes feelings of love, social bonding and well-being, can cause emotional pain – an entirely new, darker identity for the hormone.
Stylized structural diagram of oxytocin (DARPA). The study is the first to link oxytocin to social stress and its ability to increase anxiety and fear in response to future stress. Oxytocin appears to be the reason stressful social situations, perhaps being bullied at school or tormented by a boss, reverberate long past the event and can trigger fear and anxiety in the future. That’s because the hormone actually strengthens social memory in one specific region of the brain. “ERK causes enhanced fear by stimulating the brain’s fear pathways, many of which pass through the lateral septum.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience - Early Access. December 2013, Vol. 25, No. 12, Pages 2047-2060 Posted Online October 30, 2013.
(doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00453) © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Hebrew University of Jerusalem *The first two authors contributed equally to this study. How do babies learn avoidance of heights? Developing a Model of the Insular Cortex and Emotional Regulation: Part 1. Background to Creating A Blog Model of the Insular Cortex I’ve been reviewing a lot of information on this blog which can be used in lots of ways.
What i’ve wanted to do is to try and put some of this information together to come up with something new and potentially useful. Individual differences in emotion-cognition interactions: emotional valence interacts with serotonin transporter genotype to influence brain systems involved in emotional reactivity and cognitive control. 1Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA2Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA3Department of Integrative Systems Biology, Research Center for Genetic Medicine, Children's National Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA The serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) influences emotional reactivity and attentional bias toward or away from emotional stimuli, and has been implicated in psychopathological states, such as depression and anxiety disorder.
The short allele is associated with increased reactivity and attention toward negatively-valenced emotional information, whereas the long allele is associated with increased reactivity and attention toward positively-valenced emotional information. Awareness of the Functioning of One's Own Limbs Mediated by the Insular Cortex? Hans-Otto Karnath1, Bernhard Baier1, and Thomas Nägele2 +Show Affiliations The Journal of Neuroscience, 3 August 2005, 25(31): 7134-7138; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1590-05.2005 Abstract.
What can we learn about emotion by studying psychopathy? Emotion is the major driver of all human and animal behavior, including social behavior—it is emotion that literally moves us to seek or escape positive and negative consequences (LeDoux, 2012).
Many unanswered questions remain about the nature of human emotion and are the topic of vibrant ongoing debates: are different emotions qualitatively distinct, emerging from separable neurobiological processes, or can emotions be more accurately described dimensionally in terms of arousal and valence (Russell and Barrett, 1999; Barrett et al., 2007; Izard, 2007; Panksepp, 2007; LeDoux, 2012)? If distinct neurobiological events contribute to the generation of different emotions, which brain structures are most relevant to the emergence of these emotions (Panksepp, 2007; Vytal and Hamann, 2010; Lindquist et al., 2012)? Why wonder is the most human of all emotions – Jesse Prinz. When I was growing up in New York City, a high point of my calendar was the annual arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — ‘the greatest show on earth’.
My parents endured the green-haired clowns, sequinned acrobats and festooned elephants as a kind of garish pageantry. For me, though, it was a spectacular interruption of humdrum reality – a world of wonder, in that trite but telling phrase. Wonder is sometimes said to be a childish emotion, one that we grow out of. But that is surely wrong. As adults, we might experience it when gaping at grand vistas. First, let’s be clear what we’re talking about.
Why wonder is the most human of all emotions – Jesse Prinz. Unpleasant words and pictures make us move more slowly. In much the same way that an animal freezes or slows at the sight of a predator, humans are automatically slowed down when they see or read something unpleasant.
That’s according to Benjamin Wilkowski and Michael Robinson at North Dakota State University. They presented 38 students with a series of pictures that were either positive (e.g. a passionate couple), negative (e.g. a gun placed to someone’s head) or neutral (e.g. a basket). After the presentation of each picture, the students had to identify whether the screen was showing one or two dots, and then press the appropriate number on a button box as quickly as possible.
They had to do this three times after each picture to ensure any effects weren’t simply due to difficulty disengaging their attention from the last picture. A final experiment featuring a joystick, showed negative words slowed the speed with which participants moved the joystick up and down, but did not slow the actual onset of their movement. HOW ARE YOU FEELING. Feeling A Little Blue May Mask Our Ability To Taste Fat. Feeling down? It could be messing with your ability to taste the fat in that carton of ice cream. (NPR) So, here's the scenario: You're feeling a little blue, then you watch an emotional movie and dig into a bowl of ice cream. Are You Happy? You Might Have Hypocretin to Thank. Move over dopamine, there’s a new “pleasure” molecule that could broaden our understanding of the chemistry of joy, laughter, addiction and even anger. As prolific as the recent research on dopamine has been, neuroscientists have long recognized that all of the subtle varieties of human happiness couldn’t possibly be embodied in a single brain chemical, especially one that is also released under severe stress.
Enter hypocretin. Hypocretin is a brain chemical with neurons that are located in the same areas where dopamine acts to influence feelings of pleasure and reward, so the two agents probably work together. Also known as orexin because two different groups discovered it simultaneously, for years it was primarily associated with sleep and appetite. Emotional memory retrieval. rTMS stimulation on left DLPFC increases the positive memories. A suggestive hypothesis proposed that the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) may be identified as the site of emotion-memory integration, since it was shown to be sensitive to the encoding and retrieval of emotional content. In the present research we explored the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in memory retrieval of positive vs. negative emotional stimuli. This effect was analyzed by using an rTMS paradigm that induced a cortical activation of the left DLPFC.
Subjects were required to perform a task consisting of two experimental phases: an encoding phase, where some lists composed by positive and negative emotional words were presented to the subjects; a retrieval phase, where the old stimuli and the new stimuli were presented for a recognition performance. The rTMS stimulation was provided during the retrieval phase over the left DLPFC.
On the distinction of empathic and vicarious emotions. Introduction The human ability to infer others' emotions, thoughts or intentions is a central mechanism in creating meaningful social interactions. Accordingly, the question of how we develop a representation of our interaction partners' minds and emotions has been the focus of various disciplines such as social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and biology.
In the last decade the social neurosciences, specifically, have put tremendous efforts into disentangling the neural networks involved in this ability. Paul Bloom: The Case Against Empathy. Emotion regulation choice: selecting between cognitive regulation strategies to control emotion. Consider the anger that arises in a heated argument with your romantic partner, or the dreadful anxious anticipation in the dentist's waiting room prior to a root canal procedure. The ‘unnamed feeling’ named ASMR. Here’s my BBC Future column from last week. Study Finds Brain System for Emotional Self-Control.
Different brain areas are activated when we choose to suppress an emotion, compared to when we are instructed to inhibit an emotion, according a new study from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Ghent University. Listening to your heart. How interoception shape... [Psychol Sci. 2010. Positive Emotions Preferentially Engage an Auditory–Motor “Mirror” System. Neural Evidence That Human Emotions Share Core Affective Properties. Affective judgement about information relating to competence and warmth: An embodied perspective - Freddi - 2013 - British Journal of Social Psychology. New stuff: Predicting pain from the brain! What we did (a.k.a.
On the valence of surprise. - PubMed Mobile. The Golden Rule: Theirs and Ours by Paul Street. Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century : Shots - Health News. Envy is a stronger motivator than admiration. Emotional memory study reveals evidence for a self-reinforcing loop. Communal and agentic behaviour in response to facial emotion expressions - aan het Rot - 2013 - British Journal of Psychology. Ruminating About Stressful Events May Increase Inflammation In The Body.
Cognition - To push or not to push? Affective influences on moral judgment depend on decision frame. Abstract. ARTNATOMY/ARTNATOMIA. NeuroImage - Distinct brain mechanisms for conscious versus subliminal error detection. Abstract Metacognition, the ability to monitor one's own cognitive processes, is frequently assumed to be univocally associated with conscious processing.
However, some monitoring processes, such as those associated with the evaluation of one's own performance, may conceivably be sufficiently automatized to be deployed non-consciously. Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism. [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011. Biological Psychology - The impact of emotion on the perception of graded magnitudes of respiratory resistive loads. Toxic Emotional Experiences: What they are, How they affect us, How to avoid them. Stephen T Asma – The evolution of emotion. Laughter Among Deaf Signers. How Mark Changizi conquered colorblindness with glasses.
The unsexy truth about dopamine. Extreme fear experienced without the amygdala. Consciousness and Cognition - The perception of visual emotion: Comparing different measures of awareness. The 'smell' of other people's anxiety makes us take more risks. There's More to Life Than Being Happy - Emily Esfahani Smith. The 5-HT1D/1B receptor agonist sumatriptan... [J Psychopharmacol. 2013. On embodied cognition and the problem of mental representation. 21 Emotions For Which There Are No English Words [Infographic] Disgust Sensitivity Extends to Visual Perception.
Victory Or Defeat? Emotions Aren't All In The Face. Could boredom be curable? - Ideas. Docs.autismresearchcentre.com/papers/2006_Golan_etal_AdultCAMbattery.pdf. Brain circuits run their own clocks - life - 30 October 2012. Fear really does have a smell. Feelings of Disgust and Disgust-Induced Avoidance Weaken following Induced Sexual Arousal in Women. 'Psychopaths' have an impaired sense of smell. Express your emotions and feel less fear.
3 Pillars of Motivational Psychology. Facial emotional expressions are not universal. Oxytocin induces preservation of social - PubMed Mobile. Do Emotions Lie? 10 Things Every Teacher Needs to Know About Emotions and Learning. Harnessing the Power of Awe to Change Your Life. Study finds how stress, depression can shrink the brain. Guilt and Leadership. Worldwide, pride and shame are expressed in the same way. A Single Brain Structure May Give Winners That Extra Physical Edge. PsycNET - Direct Products. “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula”: Mirror Neuron Theory and Emotional Empathy. When Psychologists Take Things Too Literally. A physiological marker for false memories. Rare Genetic Mutations Linked To Bipolar Disorder. Brain’s Natural Marijuana-Like Chemical Could Lead to New Meds. Blending Fear and Pleasure: What is Awe and What Causes it? Fears of compassion and happiness in relation to alexithymia, mindfulness, and self-criticism - Gilbert - 2011 - Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice.
Gratitude As An Antidote To Aggression. Can Depression Stop Hate? Low GABA Levels Hinder Teens from Experiencing Pleasure. Depression May Weaken Brain Circuits Tied to Hate, Reward. Eat Your Guts Out: Why Envy Hurts and Why It's Good for Your Brain. Some of us experience bigger 'emotional hangovers', whether from fun activities or hurricanes. Doctor Disruption » The Evolution of Emotion. Why Dignity Matters. 'Why Should We Care?'—What to Do About Declining Student Empathy - Commentary.
Are You Empathic? 3 Types of Empathy and What They Mean. Fuller Picture of Oxytocin’s Role Emerging. The Thing Inside You That's Holding You Back. Scared to Move Forward or Change? A Surprising Revelation About Fear. The Allure of Anger and the Entitlement-Mindset Trap. The amygdala - not command central for our fear reactions? Shock and recall: Negative emotion may enhance memory, study finds. Those Darned Emotions! They can't be out-talked. Is Fear Deficit A Harbinger Of Future Psychopaths? That anxiety may be in your gut, not in your head. Study: Botox and Perceiving Emotions – Feelgood Style.
Guilt, cooperation linked by neural network. Sharing in sorrow might make us happier, study shows.