april 30th, 2008

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

April 30^th, 2008

Throughout this week’s readings, I noticed that mirror neurons seem to be neuroscience’s current Messiah. The excitement they are causing and the weight scientists are putting on them is remarkable. It seems that mirror neurons just may help bring us a step closer to figuring out the seemingly impossible problem of consciousness.

Social cognition is a way of sharing experiences and a view of the world that depends on the exchange of signals and is highly beneficial to survival. The chameleon effect was mentioned in a couple of the articles, and it was interesting to read about such a common phenomenon being described in such scientific terms. “When we interact with someone we often mirror each other’s movements and mannerisms. We are unaware of this mirroring, but when it occurs it creates the feeling that we have good rapport with each other- the chameleon effect. Interestingly, the rapport associated with the chameleon effect may be destroyed if we become aware that we are being imitated. Instead we may feel we are being mocked”(Frith and Frith, 2007). This reminds me of many occurrences in everyday social life. How many times have you watched or experienced two people getting to know each other, initially mirroring each other to show enthusiasm and engagement, but later on becoming irritated by that person for picking up too many of their mannerisms? This idea also sparked a question in my mind about the innateness of self-absorption. Are humans generally Narcissists? Does mirroring make us feel we have good rapport with another person because they are reminding us of ourselves? Or how much of it is being comforted by the familiar? Lately I’ve been noticing examples of the contagiousness of facial expressions and body postures everywhere I go.

Frith and Frith also bring up social referencing, and reflect on how we use other people’s emotional reactions to learn about novel situations. Infants tend to avoid touching a toy if the mother shows fear, but if she is showing pleasure it will explore it. But there are some reactions that seem to be programmed in the brain. “Infant monkeys who had never met a snake… rapidly acquired fear of snakes when observing a model in a video being afraid of a snake. In contrast, they did not acquire fear of a flower even after 12 trials of observation. By it’s evolutionary history the brain is pre-prepared to learn archaically threatening stimuli.”

I found the apparent innateness of prejudice and racism to be slightly startling. Several of the articles commented on an experiment in which the subjects were shown black faces and the fear reaction that came with it. I found it particularly interesting, though, that “consciously held attitudes about race are often at variance with our implicit prejudices, and there is evidence that we try to suppress these rapid automatic responses” (Frith and Frith, 2006). The amygdala response to these black faces was reduced when the faces were presented for longer, and there was increased activity in the areas of frontal cortex concerned with control and regulation. While I’m not sure about how I feel about this implicit reaction to a face of a certain skin color, I do find it fascinating that making alliances with fortunate groups of people is an evolutionary benefit, thus we may tend to harbor negative feelings toward the disadvantaged. But how does this work with empathy? What is the balance between survival of the fittest and being capable of feeling sorry for a group of people because we can see their point of view and want to help them?

I would love to discuss in class the difference between empathy for those we know and those we don’t know, and the processing for empathy for positive and negative emotions, as well as non-human or robotic empathy. The experiments with eye gaze and robots is crazy. Do we try and access things’ mental states if we know they aren’t the same as we are?

Apparently sometimes we do. Abstract shapes such as triangles can be made to move about in such a way that views will readily attribute emotions, desires, and false beliefs to them. This reminds of a stage in childhood development and magical thinking. I definitely remember giving my forks and spoons personality traits. (Is that weird?)

I also found the idea of awareness of self is really aware of self as others see us intriguing. How much of what we believe about ourselves is internal, and how much is it affected by how others perceive us?

I particularly enjoyed the ending of the “How we predict what other people are going to do” article: “It is likely that almost all our speculations will turn out to be wrong…”

Rejection

Suzanne Ardanowski

Feeling Brain

4-28-08

 

            “Why Rejection Hurts” was really interesting.  The idea of social rejection and physical pain sharing neural mechanisms was intriguing, especially if you consider it in an evolutionary context, as the authors explains.  Eisenberger and Lieberman suggest that human infants are dependent on their mother for an extended time, thus experiencing pain if socially separated from her would be an adaptive mechanism to prevent the negative consequences of maternal separation.

The ACC is involved in the emotionally distressing “components” of physical and social pain. I thought the use of the word “component” was interesting; couldn’t they have used the word “feelings”?  It also was amazing to me that one could feel pain, but not experience the sensory “feeling” of pain.  “Patients who have undergone cingulotomies for chronic pain report that they are still able to feel the pain but that it no longer bothers them [6], highlighting the ACC’s role in the distressing, rather than the sensory, component of physical pain”.

The authors also suggest another way to think about self-esteem.  They suggest that self-esteem is linked to one’s level of social connectedness.  It was particularly interesting how even if one was consciously aware that they were not being excluded, although it did appear that they were, the ACC was activated.  This implicit exclusion highlights the idea that we may have lowered self-esteem, even though we consciously think otherwise.  If a situation resembles rejection, no matter what we may tell ourselves, our self-esteem may suffer (Box p.295).

The studies showed that an enhanced sensitivity to physical pain correlates with sensitivity to emotional pain.  The last few sentences of the article mentions anti-depressants link to alleviating psychological and physical pain. I always thought that prescribing antidepressants for physical pain was due to the idea that if people psychologically felt better, than they would feel better physically in a cause and effect type way. However, this article suggests that the neurology is actually connected, thus providing more neurological support for the practice of prescribing such medication for physical pain.

Social Neuroscience

Kevin Goldstein
Week 13: April 30th: Social Neuroscience

This week’s readings on social cognition illuminate many of the topics we have addressed this semester; as we have already concluded, in charting human emotional life we are charting human social life. Central to these readings is a reorientation of cognitive neuroscience toward the interpersonal, a great example being Rizzolatti’s mirror neurons coupled with the chameleon effect. The notion that there exist neurons which are stimulated equally by actions either performed or observed has immense implications for a species. As Ramachandran argues, this mimetic predisposition could have fueled the big bang in human evolution some 40,000 years ago; at the very least, sudden innovations would have become sustainable very quickly.

More generally, mirror neurons decenter the concept of the autonomous, perceiving subject, placing the emphasis instead on self-in-relation-to others (Frith and Frith). In a sense, perceived action (when the agent is conspecific) is initiated action; this necessarily touches on empathic reasoning—putting oneself in another’s shoes—and similarly, to aesthetic perception—catharsis and other emotions, especially when observing a drama. Naturally our sociality cannot be separated from our creativity, our great capacity to learn and innovate. As Blakemore, Winston, and Frith (2004) explain, “there is increasing evidence that a large portion of the human motor system is activated by the mere observation of action” (217). How extraordinary that perceived events in space can initiate a motor response—indeed, that observation is fundamental in this operation!

In the case of the chameleon effect, we largely unintentionally mimic social partners, unconsciously establishing good rapport. The chameleon effect is representative of a range of human signals which both affirm self-other relationships and sustain a mutually perceived reality. I was reminded of Donald Winnicott’s notion of transitional objects in child development. In short, anything from toys to words can constitute objects of mutual contemplation—very often as play objects—between the developing child (starting at around one year of age) and caregiver, aiding in the process of self-construction. As Frith and Frith (2007) explain, “a major function of social cognition in humans is to allow us to create a shared world in which we can interact” (R727). Both unconscious and conscious gestural and linguistic signals do not merely serve to exchange information, but to establish and sustain human relationships through a mutually understood paradigm.

Frith and Frith (2007) continue their review by delving into the question of consciousness and social cognition: “Rather than being private, conscious experiences are represented in a form that can be shared by others, thereby creating the common ground for culture” (R720). Bringing us back to the discourse of emotions, can we say then that what defines the “feeling” as a phenomenological event is precisely its communicability? Even a linguistic construct built around a nebulous “emotion” has real social value. For example, how we choose to construct social displays and thus manage reputation—to the extent that we can—, what signals we express, can engender palpable affective responses in those around us.

Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) conjecture that the common neural alarm system between physical and social pain, which has its origins in the mammalian youth’s (and especially Homo sapiens) especially long ontogenesis, has produced a lifelong need for social connections and distress when those connections are severed. Such conjecture is intriguing, though ultimately it would seem sociality is evolutionarily advantageous not merely in childhood but throughout one’s lifetime. The need for human connection can arguably be traced back to the concept of reciprocal altruism. Nonetheless, this feature of social behavior is not simply a life-long series of minute business transactions, but as we have seen time and again, is entrenched in an affect-rich network of interpersonal associations.

Empathy

Molly Moody

This week’s readings were startling in clarity and comprehensibility. While doing research for my conference paper, I had decided that empathy was a complicated and controversial subject. However, each of this week’s articles brings forth a refreshing point of view by connecting obvious human social behaviors and empathy. Frith’s “Social Cognition” article is a brilliant guide to a foggy subject. One topic the paper mentioned that I found most interesting was the “chameleon effect”:

When we interact with someone we often mirror each other’s movements and mannerisms. We are unaware of this mirroring, but when it occurs it creates the feeling that we have good rapport with each other.

As I read this quote I become hyper-aware of every fashion trend, every dance move, and every piece of slang I have acquitted myself with in this past year alone. Does this camaraderie-producing effect explain why people love the electric slide so much? Did I start using Northern colloquialisms like “mad” and “wicked” to better bond with my Pennsylvania-raised roommate?

More questions are raised by Qui’s article, “Does it Hurt,” when researchers must use their own empathy to determine a newborn’s susceptibility to pain: How do you measure pain and consciousness in a nonlinguistic creature? As we’ve seen from many of our previous readings, neuroscientists use verbal communication to gauge the intensity of emotions in humans. This specific paper questions methods for gauging pain and consciousness in premature, incommunicative babies.

Sharing is Caring

Molly McDonough
4.30.2008

The readings this week were a great way to sum up some of the things we have been discussing in class and a nice review after Aidan and Oliver’s presentation on aesthetics. They were dealing with the aesthetics of art, but art is a division (or diversion) of everyday life, making aesthetics a central theme in our making of daily decisions. This may be in part why I found the first reading Social Cognition in Humans, Frith and Frith (2007), so fascinating. The way we treat people is based on what they look like and how they present themselves. We are able to know if we find someone trustworthy in less than 100 milliseconds. I found this all very interesting and completely applicable to every day life, but my question is whether or not we are aware of looking untrustworthy? If so why not try to help that reaction? I am not talking about attractive versus unattractive, I’m referring to things we wear or facial expressions we choose to have to put up a certain façade.

We are so aware of others and their affect on us, but what about our affect on ourselves? I think the physical reaction to the way we look affects every aspect of our behavior. This doesn’t seem to coincide with Frith and Frith’s view that the awareness of self is described as awareness of self as others see us. How can we be different enough to be unique, and yet the same enough to be accepted?

This brings me to similar questions I had regarding the Frith and Frith (2006) How we predict what other people are going to do. In this paper they again address trust. Trust is intertwined with verbal and non-verbal communication. In the Hirschfield et al. experiment 2.2.4 (pg. 39) a situation of group stereotypes is conflicted with personal dispositions. It’s hard for me to determine whether or not this is a beneficial experiment because if a lot of young children’s mother’s cook, then they might choose the woman. If their father’s cook; they might choose the man, regardless of the individual question.

Our need for interpersonal relations is strange when it really comes down to it. Frith expresses that when we trust someone we are inclined not only to like their friends, but to dislike their enemies. Do we dislike the enemy because we are experiencing the bad feelings through our friends? I think this is another way of living through observing other’s experiences without having to get as emotionally involved. Then it brings the question of whether or not it can even be referred to as an experience of ours without the emotional attachment.
Although we can predict certain things about others, like whether or not our family will disappoint us by being late to some soccer game, the unpredictability of knowing is what leads to the way we mirror others and the need to share. I sometimes wonder why people can become so physically distraught with grief. Maybe it’s because through that depression, lack of nourishment, or sleep at some level we are trying to become a part of another’s experience.

Emotions are the joker...

Katie Moeller

I’ve been finding that over the past few weeks there’s been a slight shift in our readings which I’ve found quite exciting; it seems that at this later stage in the course, having spent significant time building a base knowledge of emotional processes and the brain systems they involve, we are now in a better place to focus on some of the more “real world” applications of the basic concepts we’ve been piecing together. It’s almost as if many of the “but what about…” questions we’ve been asking as we’ve been looking at the bigger picture of emotions are now being given center stage. I find this to be not only satisfying but also important for my own ability to utilize all of what we’ve learned to help explain the everyday goings-on of our emotions, and what the greater system actually looks like “in action” i.e. when confronted with any of the million situations we might encounter as we move through the world.

This week’s topic of social consciousness provided just such an opportunity to think about how our emotions work in specific circumstances, and since interactions (and relationships) with others occupies a fairly large percentage of most of our daily lives, these seven articles had a lot of ground to cover. One of the concepts that many of the readings touched on, and that seems key to our understanding of social interaction is that of mirroring. In “Social Cognition in Humans,” Frith and Frith (2007) identify the exchange of signals as the essential core of human interaction, and they distinguish between the unconscious, automatic versus the conscious, deliberate processing of these signals. Mirroring illustrates the former; when interacting, both individuals will tend to align their movements and gestures with that of the other person without even noticing this is taking place. Interestingly, in mirroring this not noticing aspect is key, as the feeling of good rapport built by this unconscious alignment can be damaged if one or the other person becomes aware of imitation and ends up feeling mocked.

I find it fascinating to think about all the ways in which we are constantly adjusting ourselves to one another in our social interactions, especially in light of other reading and thinking I’ve done about anxiety. Though I don’t think anxiety came up specifically in any of this week’s materials, I found the ideas about unconscious signal exchange between individuals to be consistent with my own experiences of how anxiety can feel in a social situation. For me, anxiety has at times acted as a kind of (annoying) inner voice that constantly narrates the moments of an interaction with another person, in a sense “calling out” all the signals that perhaps should be taking place unconsciously but in the anxious individual are being deliberated and monitored consciously instead. It’s no wonder that anxiety can be viewed as socially maladaptive – as Frith and Frith (2007) point out, when signal exchanges between two people are brought to awareness, there is the potential to end any feelings of rapport that were in the process of being built.

Though not specifically delineated in any of the articles, it seems likely that a hyper-consciousness of the social interaction on the part of one of the participants would in turn have an inhibitory or negative effect on the other person. In “How We Predict What Other People Are Going to Do,” Frith and Frith (2006) describe facial expressions and body postures as “contagious,” (p. 40), and cite evidence that the simple act of watching someone else be touched on the face activates our brain as if we ourselves are being touched. Although I think it might be difficult to tell in the moment that an interaction we are having with someone is being affected by our own or the other person’s anxiety (because everything is happening so quickly and seemingly automatically), the idea of mirroring indicates that when one person is having difficulty relaxing enough for the unconscious alignment and exchange of signals to take place, the interaction itself will not result in the same type of rapport-building as it could.

Somewhat related to the ways in which mirroring enables us to exchange signals and get on the same social “page” as others, the idea that we acquire information and learn about our world through our social interactions with other was raised this week. I find this idea most interesting when applied to children taking emotional cues from their parents or other adult caregivers, as Frith and Frith (2007) point out in “Social Cognition in Humans.” The authors state that “generally speaking, if the mother shows fear, the infants will tend to avoid touching the toy, but if she shows pleasure, they will explore it,” (p. R725).

I found myself discussing just this phenomenon with a fellow preschool teacher recently, as I was pondering over how to help one of the little boys I work with to have an easier time transitioning into school in the morning. He is two and a half, and has been coming to the group since September, but even now, in our eighth month of school, he has mornings where he cries hysterically when his mother drops him off. While this isn’t entirely developmentally inappropriate, I talked a lot to my friend about how anxious his mother seems to be about the whole situation, and how much her mood in the mornings seems to affect him. Some days when she brings him in, she casually chats with other parents and then slowly eases out of the room, but some mornings – and often the times when he has the most trouble – she is very focused on his transition, and does lots of prompting to try and get him involved in school so he won’t be upset. In a basic way, it seems that the more fearful his mother is of the morning transition, the harder time he has, which is entirely consistent with Frith and Frith’s (2007) assessment that people, and especially children, use other people’s emotional reactions as signals or sources of learning about how they themselves should react to a particular stimulus or situation.

While there are dozens of other points of intrigue I could write about from the articles, and real life examples I can think of to go along with them, there were a few questions that came up for me as I moved through the social consciousness materials that I wanted to raise here for possible discussion. Firstly, I am interested but somewhat confused by the definition of self-esteem and the relationship between self-esteem and social rejection posited by Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) in “Why Rejections Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain.” While I am clear on the idea the authors present that social pain may overlap with physical pain in order to help us avoid social isolation (particularly early on in life when we are so physically dependent on the care and attention of others for survival), and while I agree that self-esteem is traditionally linked with “positive psychological health,” (p. 295), I am not sure I agree that self-esteem can be entirely defined by one’s perception of oneself as either included or excluded by a social group. Although social rejection clearly does have an impact on our self-concept, doesn’t our own assessment of self, or more specifically of our performance have something to do with it? In the example given, research participants reported lower self-esteem when they told they were being excluded from a game of catch even by a computer program, not just when there were other human participants involved. I guess my question about this example is whether the reports of lower self-esteem might be linked to being denied to opportunity to perform, or achieve, rather than just to the denial of social inclusion.

A second question I had was regarding prejudice and bias, which also came up in many of the articles. The general consensus seems to be that our top-down processes of social cognition do give us the ability to control and modify the more automatic emotional responses we have to “untrustworthy” or feared categories of people, responses which more than one article argues are in fact adaptive (and unavoidable?), even if they are socially undesirable. What I wonder, I guess, is why so many people are still compelled to express these prejudices and biases outright when in general as human beings we have the capacity to understand that it is not particularly socially acceptable or desirable to do so. Although it seems reasonable that our biases would show up in some of our more automatic behaviors and actions, what Frith and Frith (2006) argue is that we do have the capacity, at least in social situations, to control the expression of our responses when we know our original reactions are prejudiced and unfounded. They write, “Increased amygdala activity is a largely automatic response to people of other races. However, this activity too can be modulated by conscious, controlled processes associated with frontal activity,” (p. 43). So why don’t we always do this? Why do people continue to make racist, sexist, etc. remarks and judgments out loud when they have the capacity not to? I am fully aware there may not be an answer to this question, but it’s a particularly important issue to me and I am always interested in understanding more about why we as humans - as societies - are so capable of making radical, positive change in some aspects of our collective existence, and not in others.