Neural correlates of using distancing to regulate emotional responses to social situations

This chapter presents a theoretical and empirical review of studies of the neural correlates of emotional responses to music. First, it outlines basic definitions and distinctions of the field of music and affect. Second, it describes an extensive theoretical framework that may serve to organize the domain. Third, the authors review seventy-eight empirical studies (e.g., PET/fMRI, EEG, lesion studies) conducted between 1982 and 2016. They distinguish different empirical approaches to music and emotion in brain research and draw some general conclusions based on the results so far. The review reveals that some brain areas have been more or less consistently reported across studies, with partly distinct patterns for perception and induction of emotions, but that we still do not know what role each brain region plays in the emotion process. This is largely due to a lack of studies that attempt to manipulate underlying psychological mechanisms in a systematic manner. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the results and by making methodological recommendations for future research.

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Neural correlates of cognitive bias modification for interpretation

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience ◽

10.1093/scan/nsaa026 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 247-260

Author(s):

Kohei Sakaki ◽

Takayuki Nozawa ◽

Shigeyuki Ikeda ◽

Ryuta Kawashima

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Bias ◽

Occipital Lobe ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Cognitive Bias Modification ◽

Control Group ◽

Social Situations ◽

Post Intervention ◽

Significant Group ◽

Bias Modification ◽

Somatosensory Areas

Abstract The effectiveness of cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I), a treatment method employed to reduce social anxiety (SA), has been examined. However, the neural correlates of CBM-I remain unclear, and we aimed to elucidate brain activities during intervention and activity changes associated with CBM-I effectiveness in a pre–post intervention comparison. Healthy participants divided into two groups (CBM, control) were scanned before, during and after intervention using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Ambiguous social situations followed by positive outcomes were repeatedly imagined by the CBM group during intervention, while half of the outcomes in the control group were negative. Whole-brain analysis revealed that activation of the somatomotor and somatosensory areas, occipital lobe, fusiform gyrus and thalamus during intervention was significantly greater in the CBM than in the control group. Furthermore, altered activities in the somatomotor and somatosensory areas, occipital lobe and posterior cingulate gyrus during interpreting ambiguous social situations showed a significant group × change in SA interaction. Our result suggests that when facing ambiguous social situations, positive imagery instilled by CBM-I is recalled, and interpretations are modified to contain social reward. These findings may help to suggest an alternative manner of enhancing CBM-I effectiveness from a cognitive-neuroscience perspective.

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Who is to blame? Neural correlates of causal attribution in social situations

Social Neuroscience ◽

10.1080/17470911003615997 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 5 (4) ◽

pp. 335-350 ◽

Cited By ~ 40

Author(s):

Eva-Maria Seidel ◽

Simon B. Eickhoff ◽

Thilo Kellermann ◽

Frank Schneider ◽

Ruben C. Gur ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Causal Attribution ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Social Situations

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Encoding Social Interactions: The Neural Correlates of True and False Memories

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn.2010.21505 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 23 (2) ◽

pp. 306-324 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Benjamin Straube ◽

Antonia Green ◽

Anjan Chatterjee ◽

Tilo Kircher

Keyword(s):

Social Interactions ◽

False Memories ◽

Recognition Task ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Correct Item ◽

Social Situations ◽

Video Clips ◽

Third Person ◽

Communication Context ◽

Context Memory

In social situations, we encounter information transferred in firsthand (egocentric) and secondhand (allocentric) communication contexts. However, the mechanism by which an individual distinguishes whether a past interaction occurred in an egocentric versus allocentric situation is poorly understood. This study examined the neural bases for encoding memories of social interactions through experimentally manipulating the communication context. During fMRI data acquisition, participants watched video clips of an actor speaking and gesturing directly toward them (egocentric context) or toward an unseen third person (allocentric context). After scanning, a recognition task gauged participants' ability to recognize the sentences they had just seen and to recall the context in which the sentences had been spoken. We found no differences between the recognition of sentences spoken in egocentric and allocentric contexts. However, when asked about the communication context (“Had the actor directly spoken to you?”), participants tended to believe falsely that the actor had directly spoken to them during allocentric conditions. Greater activity in the hippocampus was related to correct context memory, whereas the ventral ACC was activated for subsequent inaccurate context memory. For the interaction between encoding context and context memory, we observed increased activation for egocentric remembered items in the bilateral and medial frontal cortex, the BG, and the left parietal and temporal lobe. Our data indicate that memories of social interactions are biased to be remembered egocentrically. Self-referential encoding processes reflected in increased frontal activation and decreased hippocampal activation might be the basis of correct item but false context memory of social interactions.

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Rethinking Feelings: An fMRI Study of the Cognitive Regulation of Emotion

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/089892902760807212 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 14 (8) ◽

pp. 1215-1229 ◽

Cited By ~ 1446

Author(s):

Kevin N. Ochsner ◽

Silvia A. Bunge ◽

James J. Gross ◽

John D. E. Gabrieli

Keyword(s):

Subjective Experience ◽

Emotional Responses ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Neural Systems ◽

Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽

Resonance Imaging ◽

Aversive Events ◽

Fmri Study ◽

Regulation Of Emotion ◽

Mental And Physical Health

The ability to cognitively regulate emotional responses to aversive events is important for mental and physical health. Little is known, however, about neural bases of the cognitive control of emotion. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the neural systems used to reappraise highly negative scenes in unemotional terms. Reappraisal of highly negative scenes reduced subjective experience of negative affect. Neural correlates of reappraisal were increased activation of the lateral and medial prefrontal regions and decreased activation of the amygdala and medial orbito-frontal cortex. These findings support the hypothesis that prefrontal cortex is involved in constructing reappraisal strategies that can modulate activity in multiple emotion-processing systems.

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Neural correlates of emotional responses to music: An EEG study

Neuroscience Letters ◽

10.1016/j.neulet.2014.05.003 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 573 ◽

pp. 52-57 ◽

Cited By ~ 59

Author(s):

Ian Daly ◽

Asad Malik ◽

Faustina Hwang ◽

Etienne Roesch ◽

James Weaver ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotional Responses ◽

Neural Correlates

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Neural correlates of economic game playing

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2008.0165 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 363 (1511) ◽

pp. 3859-3874 ◽

Cited By ~ 44

Author(s):

Frank Krueger ◽

Jordan Grafman ◽

Kevin McCabe

Keyword(s):

Mental States ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Trust Game ◽

Social Strategies ◽

Strategic Choices ◽

Social Situations ◽

Neuronal Mechanisms ◽

Mathematical Formalization ◽

Human Actors ◽

The Brain

The theory of games provides a mathematical formalization of strategic choices, which have been studied in both economics and neuroscience, and more recently has become the focus of neuroeconomics experiments with human and non-human actors. This paper reviews the results from a number of game experiments that establish a unitary system for forming subjective expected utility maps in the brain, and acting on these maps to produce choices. Social situations require the brain to build an understanding of the other person using neuronal mechanisms that share affective and intentional mental states. These systems allow subjects to better predict other players' choices, and allow them to modify their subjective utility maps to value pro-social strategies. New results for a trust game are presented, which show that the trust relationship includes systems common to both trusting and trustworthy behaviour, but they also show that the relative temporal positions of first and second players require computations unique to that role.

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Serotonin depletion amplifies distinct human social emotions as a function of individual differences in personality

10.1101/789669 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Jonathan W Kanen ◽

Fréderique E Arntz ◽

Robyn Yellowlees ◽

Rudolf N Cardinal ◽

Annabel Price ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Impulse Control ◽

Emotional Processing ◽

Emotional Responses ◽

Emotional Reactions ◽

Social Situations ◽

Social Emotions ◽

Double Blind ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range

AbstractSerotonin is involved in a wide range of mental capacities essential for navigating the social world, including emotion and impulse control. Much recent work on serotonin and social functioning has focused on decision-making. Here we investigated the influence of serotonin on human emotional reactions to social conflict. We used a novel computerised task that required mentally simulating social situations involving unjust harm and found that depleting the serotonin precursor tryptophan – in a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled design – enhanced emotional responses to the scenarios in a large sample of healthy volunteers (n = 73), and interacted with individual differences in trait personality to produce distinctive human emotions. Whereas guilt was preferentially elevated in highly empathic participants, annoyance was potentiated in those high in trait psychopathy, with medium to large effect sizes. Our findings show how individual differences in personality, when combined with fluctuations of serotonin, may produce diverse emotional phenotypes. This has implications for understanding vulnerability to psychopathology, determining who may be more sensitive to serotonin-modulating treatments, and casts new light on the functions of serotonin in emotional processing.

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