A Social Consciousness

Tessa Noonan

The Feeling Brain

4/30/08

Having done quite a bit of research on social consciousness, particularly on mirror neurons in relation to autism, I found the back and forth dialogue between the articles to be very interesting. In particular, the different ways in which the authors conceived of self-consciousness in relation to the social world. Frith and Frith (2007) end their paper with a suggestion that "awareness of the self might be more accurately described as awareness of the self as others see us" (p. R730). This idea clearly incorporates strong influences of social signals, as discussed in the paper, and social feedback; the link between social signals and individual consciousness is invaluable here. 

Ramachandran makes a similar evolutionary argument, putting mirror neurons at the forefront of much cognitive development for humans. However, he does bring up an example which seems to reverse the directionality the the Friths propose: in relation to anosognosia patients, Ramachandran supposes that in order to make a judgement about another's movements you must be able to virtually simulate the corresponding movement within your own body and brain. Because people with anosognosia deny their own paralysis, they also subsequently deny the paralysis of others as well. Although mirror neurons still establish a connection between two individuals by assessing the likeness of their situations, Ramachandran's theory originates with the central subject, as opposed to the social world.

I also found Eisenberger and Lieberman's article on physical and social pain to be fascinating in its results and its implications. Not only do physical and social pain overlap in their brain processes, but they can in fact complement or supplement each other. Eisenberger and Lieberman claim that enhanced sensitivity for one type of pain accompanies a similar enhanced sensitivity for the other type, but also that increased social support decreases both social and physical pain (chronic ailments, during cancer, following heart surgery, and during childbirth). Again, the idea that input from the social world can so drastically change our consciousness, even of something so seemingly basic as the pain levels within our own bodies, is truly amazing. 

These ideas began applying themselves in Adolphs article, as he was discussing a woman who had suffered damage to her amygdala and could not properly identify emotions in faces, particularly fear. The experimenters isolated the eyes as the area with which she had the most difficulty, because she did not spend time looking at them. I first wondered if the damage to her amygdala prohibited her from forging emotional connections with others because she had a lowered susceptibility to emotions herself, and thus could not even identify them on another's face. However, once the experimenters told her to look at the eyes of the face, she could easily identify fear, meaning that she had some internal guide for what fear looked like. This example brings up many perplexing questions, including whether or not the amygdala gives us certain proclivities for finding and addressing emotion within the social world, so we are still able to "feel" it to some extent. Adolphs of course also addressed the question of autism, and whether there are similar issues behind the inability to make eye contact and thus lack of emotional identification. The fact that other areas of the brain can compensate for certain disadvantages is certainly incredible as well, and another example of its ability to evolve and adapt. 

Thoughts about Pessimism & ACC

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain Post

4-22-08

 

            I immediately wanted to read the article titled “Is Optimism Always Best?” because it has always bothered me when people criticize others for being “pessimistic.” I’m not saying that it is particularly comfortable to be around pessimistic people, but I have always felt that there must be a reason why one would behave in such a way. The author’s opinion that “optimism and shifts from optimism serve a similar goal: the need for preparedness” offers a logical reason for such behavior.  Preparedness is defined as “a goal state of readiness to respond to uncertain outcomes.”  If one feels pessimistic, then we can deduce that they feel anxious, and feel the need to perhaps minimize to avoid feeling disappointed or caught off guard.  This is not necessarily a “bad” or “negative” thing.  I also thought the idea of pessimism being linked to magical thinking was interesting in a cultural sense.  We do often avoid talking optimistically about something for fear of “jinxing” the outcome. Research also shows that people tend to shift from optimism when the outcome is very personal and/or mostly out of their control. It would be interesting to see if a study like this has been conducted in other countries, because I do think optimism/pessimism is, to some extent, learned. Both are necessary, but balance seems to be the key.

            I really enjoyed reading the “Fool me once, shame on me-fool me twice, blame the ACC” because it really got me thinking about addictive and compulsive behavior.  The study showed that the monkeys with the ACC lesions could change their behavior on a single trial, but could not sustain their new response, despite the fact that the reward was connected to the new response.  The authors note that changing behavior in response to changing rewards could be a separate process from consolidating behavior to a new strategy.  I can definitely see the correlation to addiction, and helps explain why people continue to do things that they know are not good for them or lack rewards. However, with unhealthy addictions, aren’t there immediate rewards, but long-term losses?  I guess this should still motivate people to change their behavior. However, concepts such as impulse control, pleasure seeking, relieving anxiety, and chemical dependency are also important to consider when discussing addictions and compulsive behavior.  This study clearly speaks to how the brain can continue to behave according to old patterns and illustrates how difficult change is. The specific discovery that the ACC is connected to depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, and addiction opens many doors for treatment.  Have they found that the ACC in humans is impaired in some way, thus contributing to these disorders? If so, in what way is it impaired? 

unconscious "liking" versus emotion

Molly Esp

Key words and themes this week were hedonics, pleasure, pain, reward, optimism, pessimissm, conscious, emotion, unconscious emotion, feeling, behavior, and decision making. This week's readings echoed last week's in references to decision making and emotion, although this week's focus became whether or not emotion can be unconscious and the affects of unconscious "emotion" on consciousness.
I tried to justify this argument on my own as I was reading by thinking of repression and denial as examples of unconscious emotion, but these didn't quite fit because it seems that in both these instances, there has to be a sort of acknowledgement of the emotion at some point in order to repress and deny it. My thoughts then shifted to the "Simple Pleasures" article by Kent Berridge, specifically to the pleasure experiment and whether or not this proved that emotion can be unconscious. I was not convinced since the article's focus was on biological stimulation. I suppose I should lay my bias out there and say that I suspect that I have constructed a view of emotion and feeling that relies on the acknowledgement and internalization of a stimulation. After this week's readings, I have discovered that I am skeptical of the use of "emotion" when talking about unconscious processes.
The readings obviously seemed to go against this view, evident through the experiments used and discussed. The article, "What is an Unconscious Emotion? (A Case for Unconscious "Liking")" summarizes some of the confusion surrounding whether or not emotion can be unconscious. On page 25, the conclusion states,

William James' (1894) theory defined subjective feeling as the essence of emotion. Yet he posited that conscious emotional feeling depended on a unconscious prior case, namely, the bodily reaction to the emotional stimulus. That immediate neurobiological behavior was automatic, but shared certain features with the conscious emotion it enabled, such as elicitiing stimulus and a valenced response. This Jamesian reaction seems to encompass several features of what we have called unconscious core processes of emotion.

I would agree with what is being said here, that unconscious processes are integral to the emotional experience. However, I would disagree that the unconscious processes, or "neurobiological behavior" is an unconscious emotion. It is all part of the experience, but the way I understand it, an emotion is a sequence of processes, including conscious recognition. The second paragraph of the conclusion writes,

Although the contemporary psychology of emotion has tended to emphasise the view of emotion as intrisically conscious, we propose that unconscious emotions also exist. To mediate unconscious emotion, there appears to be a subcortical network available to generate core "liking" reactions to sensory pleasures. In normal adults under some conditions, core "liking" reactions may influence a person's consumption behaviour later, without a person being able to report subjective awareness of the affective reaction at the moment it was caused. When the brain generates an affective response of which the mind is unaware, as we have described here, there exists a truly unconscious emotion.

The use of the word "liking" is very striking to me and I would agree with its use because to use emotion would be to eliminate the difference between unconscious and conscious. I think this is what I have a problem with. The inabiliy to "report subjective awaresness of the affective reaction at the moment it was caused" as an indication of unconscious emotion does not seem to be fair as it seems to me that the authors are signaling out one part of the emotional experience and calling it an entire process. To me, it seems that they are talking about one part of emotion, the unconscious, but in order to call something an emotion I think that there must be a form of conscious recognition, however fleeting and seemingly insignificant.
I found the readings on optimissm and pessimism to be interesting as well, particularly the argument that pessimism makes for more adaptable individuals because they anticipate negative circumstance. However, is it possible to decide your demeanor? Isn't this a combination of personality, environment, and experience? The studies were intriguing because it is generally thought best to be optimistic, but the articles proved that pessimism has its place too and may make someone more readily able to deal with changing circumstance.

unconscious pleasure

Endira Ferrara

The most intriguing aspect of this weeks reading’s is the idea of unconscious emotion, and in particular relation to unconscious pleasure or dislike over a period of time. In examining Berridge and Winkileman’s suggestion that we do possess unconscious emotions, or that certain feelings may be activated by unconscious processes, it is interesting to note that this is clearly evident in our predictions about emotional experience over time.

For example, the Gilbert et. all study looked at feelings of distress or contempt and the researchers concluded that “people may sometimes recover more quickly from truly distressing experiences than from slightly distressing ones.” Participants expected that their feelings at the time of a distressful moment would be a clear indicator of the extent to which they would experience similar feelings some time later. Therefore, the longer these feelings would last is dependent upon the intensity of the feeling when it first occurred. However, results showed that in fact five minutes later participants felt less contempt, and for the partner rather than the nonpartner. When it comes to future events, we generally do not succeed in predicting how we feel. Berridge refers to the notion of implicit emotion with the possibility that “unconscious emotion is most generally expressed as an unconsciously caused emotion that is nonetheless consciously felt. (p.186)” In the case of predicted intensity of emotion, it is clear that participants in Gilbert’s study were not conscious of the cause of their feelings even though they were conscious of the feelings themselves.

Loewenstein discusses the knowledge of information about future events as directly related to how they will experience them. The idea is that information about an event itself causes either pleasure or pain before the event has actually happened. These anticipatory feelings that occur in this waiting process prove to have a huge impact on decisions that are made over a period of time. While economic theory states that generally people want to experience pleasant events more immediately while wanting to delay the experience of unpleasant ones, Loewenstein proposes that with the knowledge of information, people should want to prolong the pleasant event so as to make the pleasurable outcome more desirable or because the period of anticipation itself is pleasurable. They might want to experience distress sooner in order to get it over with.
In terms of the article concerning the benefits of optimism, it is also interesting to note our unawareness in the predictions for the emotional experience of future events. We experience more pleasure in anticipating future events when they are farthest in the future, possibly due to the fact that we unconsciously enjoy the period of anticipation and therefore adopt a hopeful outlook. Finally when the event is closer to occurring, we feel more pessimistic because we gain realization that we must prepare for it, and thus we adopt a more realistic outlook.

If it is true that we are not always aware of the fact that we find pleasure in the anticipation of future events nor are we aware of the extent to which we feel intensity of emotion in the future, then this may prove the fact that as Berridge concludes, “we do not have direct conscious access to core psychological processes that occur within pleasure.”

hedonics/reward

Maggie Fenwood

Week 12

This week’s readings were particularly interesting because they address subtle distinctions between unconscious and conscious processes of assessing the amount of pleasure that we experience and how we perceive these experiences concretely. I thought that the Gilbert article addressed this issue and I was also surprised at his findings. It seems that the perception we have of the relationship between intensity of emotion and duration is not in actuality what happens. It is interesting to put this in a neural context because it seems to explain a lot. Because our brains have a mechanism for dealing with ‘intense hedonistic states’ that can relieve some of the intensity we can recover more quickly from them but we are not consciously aware of it. As such, Gilbert’s studies showed that people “mistakenly expect more intense states to last longer than less intense states” (p. 12). That was unexpected for me but it makes sense when considering the idea of holding a grudge for something minor or even harboring resentment for something big, the reaction doesn’t last as long as we expect because our body regulates for it. Similarly, Berridge and Winkielman (2003) emphasize the unconscious process of emotion in their article that explores the way in which ‘liking’ is mediated by specific brain systems. It is true that even something as simple and liking something can sometimes arise without any conscious effort. Berridge and Wikielman reference Zajonc’s work on unconscious emotions in that are activated independently of consciousness.

This also seems to connect to an unconscious element that is addressed in the Sweeny et al. article. The idea that people shift from optimism and adopt a negative expectation in order to prepare themselves for an unfavorable outcome doesn’t seem to be something that we are totally conscious of. Rather, as they describe in the paper, “a shift from optimism best serves the goal of preparedness by directing thoughts and actions toward assessing and responding to changes in the local environment.” (p. 302). Thus, our changing outlook is influenced by our environment and perhaps a superstitious belief that we can actually “jinx” ourselves by having too much of an optimistic outlook. This points to another important aspect of optimism which is the amount of control that we can have of an undesirable outcome. In other words, we are more likely to adopt an optimistic attitude if we feel like we have more control over the outcome. This is similar to the idea of ‘incentive salience’ in Berridge and Robinson’s article which is a motivational rather than an affective component of reward, in the sense that the sensory information about an outcome within the environment can determine our motivations.

The experiments that Berridge talks about concerning ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’ in which people are shown happy and angry faces and then offered a beverage to drink. There was a subliminal manifestation of their emotion shown through their desire to drink even though they did not exhibit any conscious emotional reaction when they were shown the pictures themselves. So, Berridge comes the conclusion that this “dissociation of emotional reaction from conscious feelings suggests that unconscious dissociations among underlying pleasure ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’ components might also occur without being felt” (p. 2). This seemed to be a big part of this week’s reading, the idea that we can feel without being aware of the emotion that is creating the feelings. So, while we are conscious of our perception of a situation this does not always mean that we are conscious of our emotional reaction to it.

Amy Fleischer
Hedonics/Reward

A theme of a previous class discussion was that we must understand consciousness in order to understand feeling. We ended that class with the idea that gaining greater cognitive control over our emotional processes allows us to make better decisions, and therefore it should be our collective aim. The following week, we discussed the implications of these findings for neuroeconomics– as well as evidence for the value of somatic feedback during decision-making. This week, we have come across another possibility that adds extra dimension to our understanding of how decisions are made: hedonics and reward. These theories dance around the assumption that we are motivated by complex emotions to experience pleasure.

Among other things, this week’s readings presents us with a case for non-conscious emotional experiences that may not be felt but serve to guide our behavior in powerful ways. Coincidentally, the very last article that I read, What is an unconscious emotion? The case for unconscious “liking”), served as a type of umbrella for the others. Below, I will try to draw out the themes of each paper as they relate to the one above.

In Parsing Reward, by Barridge and Robinson, the effects of subliminal messaging is used to illustrate the differences between affective “liking” and motivational “wanting” (507). The authors suggest breaking down what seems to be a single experience (seeking pleasure) in order to examine various consequences and dissociable neural substrates. The paper states, “if implicit reward is separable from its subjective feelings, […] then core reward processes might be more amenable to objective measurement” (508). This language echoes a type of mechanistic metaphor of the brain, wherein a human organ is made of isolated, interchangeable parts like the modern car. Of course, the picture is not entirely bleak because motivation is further complicated by attention, learning, and cognition.

The Pleasures and Pains of Information describes the veritable Information Age in which we live– where scientists assert that abstract information has very concrete values in terms of how it is perceived in the brain. This article also points to a topic that was raised at the end of our last class: the relationship between language and materiality. A related question might be: at what level/s do we extract utility from information? Is it while we predict what could occur as a result of new knowledge or is it only after we have experienced the effect of what we’ve learned? What follows is the ability to form “motivated” beliefs or to process information in a biased way (705). Here, we are faced with many implications of presenting information.

In the Peculiar Longevity piece by Gilbert et al., the amazing thing about people is that we can imagine or “envision” alternatives to the present situation, enabling us to discover consequences of an event without actually having to experience it (3). This interesting article is about the region-b paradox, which concludes that intense states abate more quickly than mild ones (2). Among several things, it points to the fact that outside observers may feel more intensely negative than a victim for reasons that exceed logic; this finding is especially relevant to the discussion of unconscious emotion.

Another major issue raised in this week’s readings is, again, how we categorize emotional events in tandem with sophisticated neuroimaging techniques. Using more and more detailed information, we make maps of the brain in order to know more than we can feel. Various levels of awareness combine to form interactive systems that demonstrate how we process information and make decisions based on that information. We also act
on what we feel, but how much do we really know about our motivation?

In The Optimistic Brain, Schacter and Addis attempt to sketch out specific locations (or routes) for optimism and, by default, provide another possible physical correlate to depression (1346).

Within almost all of the readings, framing emerges as a device that is used to color information. [As an aside, I recommend “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know your values and frame the debate” (a guide for progressives) by cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff– just to see how he explains why conservatives in America are controlling dialogue when they frame the issue of the estate tax as “the death tax”, for example.] Several other articles also reintroduce valence as means to categorize emotion. The paper that asks, in its title, “Is Optimism Always Best?” draws some seemingly obvious conclusions. That people should hope for the best and prepare for the worst is an old adage; and although it may not provide the same degree of complexity attempted in this theoretical discussion, it is often used to suggest the virtue of being prepared. Again, this article re-frames a familiar topic (optimism) in a way that shakes up the divide between positive and negative expectations. Among the “future directions” listed at the end of this study is whether or not children learn about the utility of shifting from optimism through experience or “increased cognitive abilities”; however, these two are not such separate options because the former can clearly cause the latter (305).

At the very least, common themes of feeling-as-information (186) and the interrelationship of affect and cognition (190) are latent within the longer paper by Berridge and Winkielman concerning unconscious emotion. There are many more relevant connections as this text raises so many questions about emotional processes in the brain. Luckily, the authors recognize that it is not an all or none situation- and that emotions can occur consciously and unconsciously in various parts of the brain- even if normal structures/functioning is disturbed.

Finally, I really liked the Peculiar article because it approaches the complexity of emotions and shows how love and hate can go hand-in hand– even if just for a brief moment. It also provides some interesting questions for how to manage crisis intervention, such as when to intercede.

Hedonics

Oliver Edwards

            I noticed a very strong connection, both between the readings for the last two weeks, and between this subject matter and that of my conference project. In studying the neural substrates of addiction and their correlative explanations in the realm of philosophy and neuroeconomical theory, I have come to some interesting but slightly chilly conclusions. Much of what governs what we ‘want’, and thus how we behave, is severely detached from what gives us pleasure and from how we want to behave. I think Berridge and Robinson, two authors who have provided much of my conference material, do a very nice job of outlining this somewhat counter-intuitive notion. First of all, they have to demonstrate that it is possible to experience an unconscious, or implicit, emotion.

            Beginning, as we did in our own course, with James, Berridge questions the Jamesian assertion that all emotions are consciously felt. He runs us through a series of arguments that support the notion that unconscious emotions do not exist. He then proceeds, however, to demonstrate through an elegantly simple experiment, that our affective states can indeed change our behavior without conscious awareness. I had trouble with the experiment at first, but have decided that I think he makes his point quite strongly. The subliminal exposure to happy faces seems to have undeniably caused a Jamesian, physiological, change in the body that, although not explicitly recognized by the subject, subsequently changed the subject’s behavior. I wonder, was everyone else convinced as strongly as I was by the experiment?

In the end, Berridge gives James the credit he deserves by recognizing that James perhaps just had a different definition of emotion. He was referring more specifically to the ‘feeling’ of emotion, a distinction that we have learned to make over and over throughout our course discussions. More and more, with the advent of much more sophisticated understanding of the neural substrates of ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’, we need to examine the many facets of hedonics and ‘parse’ them out as Berridge says. He stresses that there are at least three psychological processes involved in hedonics: learning, subjective pleasure, and the motivation to act. Though we normally conflate the three, Berridge demonstrates well the need to understand them separately. Perhaps understanding the neural substrates of the three, something we cannot quite do in detail yet, will contribute to a more clear-cut distinction in our minds.

 

I found the article on perceived hedonic duration fascinating, but also shocking in a way I don’t quite understand. It demonstrated in a more concrete, everyday manner, the phenomenon that Berridge describes. In much of our daily lives, especially in the social realm, we are governed by our implicit desires and motivations. I think much of the inadequacy some of us have felt in attempting to describe emotions like love speaks to this phenomenon. Why are we more likely to forgive those that we love. While the study seems to demonstrate that they hurt us less because we love them, couldn’t it also be that we ignore the hurt because implicitly we ‘want’ them even when we don’t love them.

We also see a similar phenomenon in the two discussions of optimism. While instinctually we all probably feel that optimism is the healthy, beneficial response to all of life’s variegated situations, the first paper especially demonstrated that is common and also beneficial for a person to become more pessimistic directly before an expected event. This shed a lot of light for me on the question of why these implicit emotional responses seem to be evolutionarily selected. Do we have a prejudice towards conscious emotions simply because we are aware that they give us pleasure. Just as we have seen with LeDoux’s assessment of fear responses, organisms may need to experience ‘wanting’ subconsciously simply because it is more efficient. Similarly, although pessimism is certainly unpleasant, it may cause us to behave advantageously in certain situations. It is sometimes disturbing, especially in the field of addiction research, to think how strongly our drives and pleasures may be below the surface of our conscious awareness.