TB4 Lecture 3; Social cognition 2

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  • Created on: 26-05-15 12:46
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  • TB4 Lecture 3; Social cognition 2
    • Theory of mind (mentalising)
      • The ability to infer the mental state of others and attribute the actions of others to their mental states (e.g beliefs, goals, desires, fears)
        • False belief task
          • 3 year old infants fail...whilst 4 year olds pass
            • Potentially linked to right temporo-parietal junction, which is developing into adulthood.
          • Chimpanzee studies
            • In social hierarchies of primate society, there is a dominant and subordinate monkey, with a natural competition over food.
              • If the sub has an advantage other the dom (i.e being able to see food it knows the dom cant see) it will take the 'safe' food rather than the one that the dom can see
                • In this way, chimpanzees show evidence of TOM?
                  • Potentially, but it is not as sophisticated as in humans.
                    • Meta representa-tion
                      • Chimps can go to potentially a second or third order, whilst humans can go 4th or 5th (I think he thinks that I think...)
                    • There is NO EVIDENCE as to if chimps understand false belief, there is a difference between knowledge ignorance and false belief!
      • Brain regions implicated in TOM tasks
        • 1) Medial pFC
        • 2) Temporal pole
        • 3) Temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)
        • 4) Superior temporal sulcus (STS)
        • fMRI studies are typically conducted with people playing a simple game against a human or computer. When pps think they are vs human, these brain areas activate... TOM?
    • Empathy
      • The capacity to comprehend and resonate with anothers emotional experience, 'sharing' their feelings
      • A rudimentary form of empathy is emotional contagion, shown in infant research (e.g 'infectious laughter'
      • A neural model of empathy
        • Empathy is a very complex process
          • (See neural model mindmap)
        • (See neural model mindmap)
        • The main brain areas implicated in empathy (emotion sharing) are...
          • 1) Anterior cingulate cortex
          • 2) Anterior insula
          • 3) Secondary somato-sensory cortex/ limbic system
          • The first fMRI study into empathy (Singer et al, 2004) used female pps who either themselves received painful electro-stimulation or observed their partners receiving it
            • Results showed that regions commonly activated by their own pain were also activated by watching the partner (anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula!)
            • Unfair player studies
              • (Singer et al 2006) found that brain empathetic responses are modulated by affective link between individuals. There was a greater empathy response (insula) from pps for the fair player compared to the unfair player.
                • Infact, the nucleus accumbens, linked to reward activated watching the unfair player receive a pain response according to 'how much they deserved it'
          • Other emotions and areas in empathy
            • Areas of the brain in the 'pain network' (that activate to pain) are also activated in empathy tasks
            • There is also empathetic brain reactions for other emotions e.g the insula and disgust, and the ventral striatum for pleasure
    • Social reward and Social punishment
      • This is a desire to obtain social rewards (such as a good rep and validation) and avoid social punishment (being rejected). Conformity, and pro-social effects are examples of this, these desires affect social behaviours
      • You can use tasks that have abstract social rewards, e.g donating to charity = validation and vice versa. A more concrete task would involve money or food etc.
        • Sadato (2008) found that the striatum was activated for both monetary and abstract reward in a similar experiment to the Iowa gambling task
      • Social pain
        • The experience of pain as a result of interpersonal rejection/loss (e.g bullying, exclusion)
        • Linked to the anterior cingulate cortex, also part of the pain network!
          • This suggests that social rewards/ punishment are processed in the same regions as physical reward/ punishment
            • Not the same neurons though
        • There is also a correlation between personality types and the response to social pain, shown from evidence such as the cyber-ball paradigm
    • Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
      • Characteristics
        • 1) Social impairments
        • 2) Deficit in TOM
        • 3) Lack of empathy
        • 4) Social motivation deficit (social stimuli not rewarding)
      • 4x as many males as females are diagnosed with ASD
      • Also a possible genetic basis
      • Eye tracking studies
        • Used as an early diagnostic tool for ASD
          • Typically developing children make eye contact, whilst children with ASD do not (Jones&Klin 2013)
        • In a study of high functioning adults with ASD, when asked tto identify the emotions portrayed in the face, ASD pps looked at the mouth and body more frequently than the eyes compared to controls who looked at the eyes.
      • Varies on the degree to which it affects people

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