Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Some human emotions are so unloved that few people admit to feeling them. In Western cultures, these include self-pity, resentment, spite, hate, envy, and grudge-bearing. Metaphors for these “banned” emotions reveal their grounding in bodily sensations and postures. At the same time, religious and political beliefs have shaped the ways that these unsavory emotions are represented. To offer insight into the merging forces of culture and physiology, this presentation examines metaphors for “banned” emotions in a tradition that links religious allegories, such as The Inferno and Pilgrim’s Progress, with self-help books such as Emotional Intelligence and Who Moved My Cheese? The families of metaphors used to represent unloved emotions play roles in classic literary works like Great Expectations and Notes from the Underground, but they can also be seen in scientific studies of emotions and in popular films like Bridesmaids. The representation of emotions is a political issue, since not everyone agrees about which

Self-consciousness and self-conscious emotions are hallmark characteristics of human psychology, a gift and curse from Nature. It is a gift because it allows us to be incomparably creative. It is a curse because it determines uncanny conscious experiences such as the inescapable awareness of impending self-disappearance (death).  I will argue that the fear of separation and the basic affiliation need we share with other animals is for us combined with unmatched preoccupations with reputation, self-preoccupation, and the constant gauging of the self through the evaluative eyes of others. This combination leads to an uncanny capacity for self-delusions, misunderstandings, lies, and other duplicities that are also the trademark of human self-conscious psychology.   I illustrate the emergence of such psychology by presenting some empirical observations collected in recent years on the uncanny mirror self-experience of young children across cultures, social conformity and the emerging sense of sharing as well as m

Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture

Scholarship taking place in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have begun to illuminate the complex relationship between the emotional and intellectual contributions to our moral thought and behavior.  However, the assumptions often made in the West – that ethical decision-making should be primarily an intellectual exercise, and that emotional contributions are suspect at best and corrupting at worst should be questioned.  The Dalai Lama, for example, has proffered a system he calls “secular ethics” founded on an emotional platform that he believes can be cultivated for better ethical decisions.  Other faiths, such as Judaism, see a rational ethical method as more reliable.  We need to understand the nuances of both means of moral decision making to be able to untangle their mutual, important contribution to ethical expression. (February 12, 2016)

In a now classic 1971 paper, Robert Trivers proposed that many human social emotions evolved in response to the need to negotiate relationships based on reciprocal altruism, which were likely crucial to the survival of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In the same paper, he argued that the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game could serve as a model for relationships based on reciprocal altruism. Over the past 15 years, our lab has utilized the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game paradigm in combination with fMRI to investigate the neural bases of human social emotions. We have described 1) neural responses to both reciprocated and unreciprocated cooperation, 2) sex differences in these responses, 3) modulation of these responses by psychopathic personality, 4) modulation of these responses by the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin, and 5) modulation of these responses by oxytocin receptor genotypes. In this talk, I will summarize and synthesize the above research, while also integrating findings from other research

Emotions suffuse much of the language employed by students of animal behavior --from "social bonding" to "alarm calls" -- yet are often avoided as explicit topic in scientific discourse. Given the increasing interest of human psychology in the emotions, and the neuroscience on animal emotions such as fear and attachment, the taboo that has hampered animal research in this area is outdated. We need to recall the history of our field in which emotions and instincts were mentioned in the same breath and in which neither psychologists nor biologists felt that animal emotions were off limits. The main point is to separate emotions from feelings, which are subjective experiences that accompany the emotions. Whereas science has no access to animal feelings, animal emotions are as observable and measurable as human emotions. They are mental and bodily states that potentiate behavior appropriate to both social and nonsocial situations. The expression of emotions in face and body language is well kn

Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture

Konner will argue, as he did at length in Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (Norton, 2015), that a current consensus of neural and neuroendocrine research, in the context of neodarwinian sexual selection and phylogenetic, cross-cultural, historical, and psychological perspectives, now suggests that sex differences in some behaviors (notably violence and driven sexuality) and their underlying emotions and motivations require a partly biological explanation. There are no sex differences in general intelligence, or in many measures of cognitive function, skill, motivation, or emotion. Other measures of emotion (for example, the intensity of publicly expressed grief) are strongly influenced by cultural models and show marked cross-cultural variation in the character and degree of gender differences. But the current scientific consensus is that culture (including upbringing, education, models, and media) cannot explain all gender differences in behavior, emotion, and motivation, althou

In this presentation, I describe a feminist sociocultural model of autobiographical memory that provides a framework for understanding how gender and emotion are mutually constructed within everyday reminiscing about the personal past. Autobiographical narratives both reflect and create representations of what happened and what it means for the individual in terms of understanding self, others, and relationships.  In particular, emotional expression within autobiographical narratives carries information about what Bruner has called the “internal landscape of consciousness,” focusing on subjective evaluative meaning.  It is therefore especially interesting that females express more emotion in their autobiographical reminiscing than do males and do so across a wide developmental age span and a variety of contexts. Here, I focus on studies of family reminiscing that demonstrate how parents and children discuss emotions within narratives about their shared past and within intergenerational narratives about the pa

Emotional Regulation Discussion

Emotions Conference 2016 (6 of 20) | Andrea Scarantino | A New Perspective on Basic Emotions: No Selection without Regulation

Regulation of emotion is important for adaptive social functioning and mental well-being.  It involves the ability to inhibit or modulate primary emotions to produce contextually appropriate emotions and behaviors. The neural networks underlying this regulatory process will be reviewed and discussed.  Particularly, interactions between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex are becoming of major interest in understanding the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and depression. (February 11, 2016)

Theories and Models of Emotion Discussion (February 11, 2016)

Is love a judgment, a body process, or a cultural interpretation? Emotion theorists dispute whether emotions are cognitive appraisals, responses to physiological changes, or social constructions. That emotions are all of these can be grasped by identifying brain mechanisms for emotions, including representation by groups of spiking neurons, binding of representations into semantic pointers, and competition among semantic pointers. Semantic pointers are patterns of firing in groups of neurons that function like symbols while incorporating sensory and motor information that can be recovered. Emotions are semantic pointers that bind representations of situations, physiology, and appraisal into unified packages that can guide behavior if they outcompete other semantic pointers. Social and linguistic information is incorporated into cognitive appraisal. This view of emotions is supported by computer simulations (using Chris Eliasmith’s Semantic Pointer Architecture) that model dynamic appraisal, embodim

Neuroimaging and other neuroscience approaches have generated a wealth of new findings about the brain correlates of emotion, for example, changes in brain activity patterns corresponding to variations in emotion intensity and type. Such evidence is playing an increasingly important role in debates about the nature and organization of emotion, for example, whether emotions are best represented by a discrete set of emotions such as fear and anger, and the extent to which dedicated, evolutionarily-shaped neural circuits exist for emotion. The talk will focus on exploring new perspectives that neuroimaging has provided on the brain basis of human emotion and psychological emotion theories. Emotion views which propose that individual emotions or affective dimensions map directly onto the function of specific brain regions have long been influential in neuroscience and psychology, yet there is mounting neuroscience evidence that such one-to-one correspondences between structure and function are illusory and that e

Research on Pavlovian fear conditioning has been very successful in revealing what has come to be called the “fear system” of the brain.  The field has now matured to the point where a sharper conceptualization of what is being studied could be very useful as we go forward. Terms like “fear conditioning” and “fear system” blur the distinction between processes that give rise to conscious feelings of fear and non-conscious processes that control defense responses elicited by threats. These processes interact but are not the same. This is an important distinction because symptoms based on conscious and non-conscious processes may be vulnerable to different predisposing factors and may also be treatable with different approaches in people who suffer from uncontrolled fear or anxiety. Using terms that respect the distinction will help focus future animal research on brain circuits that detect and respond to threats, and should also help clarify the implications of this work for understanding how normal and pathol

Broadly speaking, empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” (Iacoboni). More narrowly, an emotion is usually deemed empathic only when “the agent is aware that it is caused by the perceived, imagined, or inferred plight of another, or it expresses concern for the welfare of another” (Maibom). In the broad sense, the tender reciprocal relationship that develops between mother and infant when the mother sings to the baby and the baby responds is a species of empathy through music. In the narrower sense listeners may empathize with the music itself when they are affected by music via emotional contagion – a kind of low-level empathy – to adopt the musical gestures they experience and thereby share the emotion expressed by the music. If, in addition, it’s possible for music to express the emotions of a persona – the performer, the composer or simply a “character” in the music – then listeners can engage in high-level empathy for the persona, imagining feeling the emotions of the per

The widely held belief that the diagnosis of mental disorder is a matter exclusively for value-free science has been much reinforced by recent dramatic advances in the neurosciences. In this lecture, I will use a detailed case study of delusion and spiritual experience to indicate to the contrary that values come into the diagnosis of mental disorders directly through the language of the diagnostic criteria adopted in such scientifically–grounded classifications as the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Various competing interpretations of the importance of values in psychiatric diagnosis will be considered. Interpreted through the lens of the Oxford tradition of linguistic-analytic philosophy, however, diagnostic values in psychiatry are seen to reflect the complex and often conflicting values of real people. This latter interpretation has the direct consequence that there is a need for processes of assessment in psychiatry that are equally values-based as evidence-ba

Normal self-consciousness typically includes the compelling sense that my own experiences belong to me – one person, one whole and unified center of consciousness. That common and compelling feature of wholeness and distinctness often is lost or broken in certain experiences in schizophrenia as well as in mystical or religious experiences. The experience of self-consciousness or self-awareness in schizophrenia often is constituted by dramatic breakdowns in the experience of the self or “I”. Many so-called mystical or religious experiences include similar breakdowns. Such similarities have long been recognized in the literatures on mental illness and mysticism. The question is, ‘What to do about them?’ It would be a mistake to equate mysticism with psychosis but helpful to examine whether the two sorts of experiences are similar in their cognitive foundations. Ecumenical Naturalism (EN) claims that experiences of self in schizophrenia and in mysticism share some of the same cognitive foundations. Various relig

Neuromechanical principles define the properties and problems that shape neural solutions for movement. Although the theoretical and experimental evidence is debated, I will present arguments for consistent modular structures in motor patterns that are neuromechanical solutions for movement particular to an individual and shaped by evolutionary, developmental, and learning processes. NEUROSCIENCE WORKSHOP: Dimensionality Reduction Friday, October 30, 2015 Saturday, October 31, 2015