The following article is an introduction to the Research Topic on Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science: Towards an embodied science of intersubjectivity: Widening the scope of social understanding research.

This is an interesting article and a very cool research area.

Full Citation: 
Di Paolo, EA, and De Jaegher, H. (2015, Mar 2). Toward an embodied science of intersubjectivity: Widening the scope of social understanding research. Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science. 6:234. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00234

Toward an embodied science of intersubjectivity: Widening the scope of social understanding research

Ezequiel A. Di Paolo^* and Hanne De Jaegher

• Logic and Philosophy of Science, IAS-Research Centre, University of the Basque Country, Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain

The study of human social phenomena in their proper scope demands the integrated effort of many disciplinary traditions. This fact is widely acknowledged but rarely acted upon. It is in practice often difficult to cross disciplinary boundaries, to communicate across different vocabularies, research goals, theories and methods. The aim of this Research Topic has been to make some progress in stepping across these borders.

Not attempting this crossing in a subject as multi-faceted as intersubjectivity inevitably binds us to remain within self-enclosed conceptions. By this we mean a bundle of self-reinforcing perspectives, hypotheses, experimental methods, debates, communities and institutions. Traditional ways of thinking about social cognition frame the questions that are deemed worth researching. These all revolve around the issue of how we figure out other minds, assuming that other people's intentional states are hidden, private and internal. The proposed answers rely only on how the perceived indirect manifestations of other people's mental states are processed by individual cognitive mechanisms (Van Overwalle, 2009).

We would like to raise, instead, the question of what an embodied science of intersubjectivity would look like if we were to start from different premises than those that delimit classical approaches to social cognition. For doing this, we thought the time was ripe for bringing together work that crosses disciplinary boundaries and informs us about different conceptions of how people understand each other and act and make meaning together.

The move is timely. The internalist assumptions in social cognition research are beginning to shift. We have more and better tools to explore the role of interactive phenomena and interpersonal histories in conjunction with individual processes (Dumas et al., 2010; Di Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012; Konvalinka and Roepstorff, 2012; Schilbach et al., 2013). This interactive expansion of the conceptual and methodological toolkit for investigating social cognition, we now propose, can be followed by an expansion into wider and deeply-related research questions, beyond (but including) that of social cognition narrowly construed.

Our social lives are populated by different kinds of cognitive and affective phenomena apart from figuring out other minds. They include acting and perceiving together, verbal and non-verbal engagement, experiences of (dis-)connection, relations in a group, joint meaning-making, intimacy, trust, secrecy, conflict, negotiation, asymmetric relations, material mediation of social interaction, collective action, contextual engagement with socio-cultural norms, etc. These phenomena are often characterized by a strong participation by the cognitive agent, in contrast with the spectatorial stance of social cognition (Reddy and Morris, 2004; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). We use the broader notion of embodied intersubjectivity to refer to this wider set of questions.

Forty-two contributions to this Research Topic explore several of these themes. They combine ideas and methods from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, psychiatry and psychotherapy, social science, and language studies. The number of contributions confirms our suspicions that there is a genuine interest in embodied intersubjectivity.

All of the contributions in some way or other move beyond traditional cognitivist perspectives. Here we can simply highlight some of the most interesting ways in which this happens. As already mentioned, there is a recent trend to investigate the dynamics of actual interactive encounters between people. Several empirical studies in this Research Topic continue further along this line. They look at interactive encounters using methods such as thermal imaging, interactive virtual environments, or 1/f noise analysis, or combine existing methods with novel theoretical starting points.

Other work looks at aspects of embodied social understanding which are pertinent even in the absence of ongoing interaction. These include the richness of body kinematics, affect regulation, and life-story analysis. A few contributions focus on how embodied and interactive perspectives impact on developmental research. They study real-life interactions between infants and their care-givers in various contexts (infant pick-up, book sharing, pointing, cooperation, and expressiveness during play in chimpanzees). Aspects of psychopathology are explored also from an embodied intersubjective angle, inspiring research on intra- and inter-personal emotion regulation, social affordances, personal biography, and therapeutic play, and their effects on somatic symptom disorders, autism, and schizophrenia.

Broadening the scope of relevant questions for embodied intersubjectivity inevitably means including research on language. Many of the contributions make headway on this matter, questioning the notion of the common ground, the role of conformity in social understanding, the processes involved in the activity of reading texts, and the links between conversational coordination and meaning-making. Others investigate the participatory nature of understanding narratives, and the role of organizational, temporal, and inter-affective aspects in language. Similar advances can be made in the area of connecting the cognitive and the social sciences. This is a very fruitful but still largely unexplored territory. A discussion is offered along Marxist lines concerning the interaction between categories of understanding and modes of social exchange and production. And the lessons of embodied/enactive approaches to intersubjectivity are summoned to contribute to understanding the phenomenological and social effects of solitary confinement.

Finally, some contributions elaborate theoretical and methodological implications and concepts, and in this way contribute to shaping the core of an embodied science of intersubjectivity. Methodological issues include whether dynamical systems concepts can bridge the multiple scales involved in social understanding, from the biological and neural to the personal, interactive and societal, how second person perspectives in cognitive science can help psychopathology research, and whether techniques used in theater can refine intuitions and theoretical concepts about interactive experience. Theoretical advances include radically embodied accounts of intersubjectivity that bring together conceptions from enactivism and ecological psychology, the notion of intersubjective time, and a socially embodied notion of the human self. Other discussions offer links between interpersonal interaction and phenomenal experience, between social normativity and conceptual abilities, or unearth the importance of opacity, i.e., the secret, silent or hidden aspects of personal experience, for understanding each other.

It is noteworthy, and especially satisfying, that many novel themes and questions emerged, several of them in some way related to personal meaning. To name a few: joy, secrecy, solitude, influence of capitalist mode of production on cognition, book sharing in infancy, the search for comprehensiveness and integrity in interacting, literature, and enactivism, ethics of care, shame in relation to interaction, and the interactive building blocks of culture and institutions.

Once again, we notice that the contributions to this Research Topic demonstrate the richness of enquiry and research work that is opened by the combination of novel methods and the bringing together of fields that traditionally work in isolation from each other. It also shows that criticisms of classical approaches as being sometimes too narrow are not just idle but point to genuinely new perspectives on concrete and everyday intersubjectivity that are opened to investigation.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, “TESIS: Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity” (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828).

References

De Jaegher, H., and Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making: an enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 6, 485–507. doi: 10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9

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Konvalinka, I., and Roepstorff, A. (2012). The two-brain approach: how can mutually interacting brains teach us something about social interaction? Front. Hum. Neurosci. 6:215. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00215

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Here are some of the articles posted in this Research Topic so far. If you follow the link, you'll be on page one of four (43 articles going back to the beginning of 2014).

Enactive account of pretend play and its application to therapy

Zuzanna Rucinska and Ellen Reijmers

Perspective: This paper informs therapeutic practices that use play, by providing a non-standard philosophical account of pretence: the Enactive Account of Pretend Play. The EAPP holds that pretend play activity need not invoke mental representational mechanisms; ...

Published on 02 March 2015
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00175

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Embodied intersubjective engagement in mother–infant tactile communication: a cross-cultural study of Japanese and Scottish mother–infant behaviors during infant pick-up

Koichi Negayama, Jonathan T. Delafield-Butt, Keiko Momose, Konomi Ishijima, Noriko Kawahara, Erin J. Lux, Andrew Murphy and Konstantinos Kaliarntas

Original Research: This study examines the early development of cultural differences in a simple, embodied and intersubjective engagement between mothers putting down, picking up, and carrying their infants between Japan and Scotland. Eleven Japanese and 10 Scottish ...

Published on 27 February 2015
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00066 

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Assessing embodied interpersonal emotion regulation in somatic symptom disorders: a case study

Zeynep Okur Güney, Heribert Sattel, Daniela Cardone and Arcangelo Merla

Original Research: The aim of the present study was to examine the intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation of patients with somatic symptom disorders (SSD) during interactions with significant others (i.e. romantic partners). We presented two case couples for ... 

Published on 10 February 2015
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00068

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Navigating beyond “here & now” affordances—on sensorimotor maturation and “false belief” performance

Maria Brincker

Perspective: How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false ... 

Published on 15 December 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01433

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Jointly structuring triadic spaces of meaning and action: book sharing from 3 months on

Nicole Rossmanith, Alan Costall, Andreas F. Reichelt, Beatriz López and Vasudevi Reddy

Original Research: This study explores the emergence of triadic interactions through the example of book sharing. As part of a naturalistic study, 10 infants were visited in their homes from 3-12 months. We report that (1) book sharing as a form of ... 

Published on 10 December 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01390

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Keep meaning in conversational coordination

Elena C. Cuffari

Perspective: Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination ... 

Published on 03 December 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01397

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Toward an expansion of an enactive ethics with the help of care ethics

Petr Urban

Opinion
Published on 27 November 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01354

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Enacting a social ecology: radically embodied intersubjectivity

Marek McGann

Hypothesis & Theory: Embodied approaches to cognitive science frequently describe the mind as “world-involving”, indicating complementary and interdependent relationships between an agent and its environment. The precise nature of the environment is frequently left ... 

Published on 18 November 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01321

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Quantifying long-range correlations and 1/f patterns in a minimal experiment of social interaction

Manuel G. Bedia, Miguel Aguilera, Tomás Gómez, David G. Larrode and Francisco Seron

Original ResearchIn recent years, researchers in social cognition have found the `perceptual crossing paradigm' to be both a theoretical and practical advance towards meeting particular challenges. This paradigm has been used to analyze the type of interactive ... 

Published on 12 November 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01281

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Why call bodily sense making “languaging”?

Giovanna Colombetti

General Commentary
Published on 07 November 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01286

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Pooling the ground: understanding and coordination in collective sense making

Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi, Agnieszka Dębska and Adam Sochanowicz

Hypothesis & Theory: Common ground is most often understood as the sum of mutually known beliefs, knowledge and suppositions among the participants in a conversation. It explains why participants do not mention things that should be obvious to both. In some accounts of ...

Published on 07 November 2014
Front. Psychol. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01233

From Neuroscience's Perspective: Our Brains in Love and The Harmful Effects of Loneliness

This two-part interview with neuroscientists John and Stephanie Cacioppo (conducted by Marin Gazzaniga, daughter of Michael Gazzaniga, the well-known and highly respected neuroscientist) comes from Cafe, a cool online magazine. In the interview they discuss how the brain changes when it's in love, as well as the very negative impact of loneliness on the brain.

[For what it's worth, the image above came up on a search for "loneliness," but to me it feels like peace - but then, I am an introvert.]

Our Brains in Love: From Neuroscience's Perspective

by Marin Gazzaniga

Published on Monday, September 29, 2014

What does a neuroscientist who studies loneliness have in common with a Ph.D. who studies love? For one, they share the same home, office and last name. In Part One of this two-part interview, John and Stephanie Cacioppo discuss how love helps you read minds, and whether you can experience desire without love.

What Qualifies Me to Talk Neuroscience?

I don’t claim to be a science writer; most have advanced degrees in their areas of expertise. But my father, Michael S. Gazzaniga, is well known in his field—one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, and a pioneer in the theory of left and right hemisphere function. I grew up visiting his labs, and I have a basic comfort level with the vocabulary and methodology of neuroscience. One of the perks of being his daughter is that I can convince some of the world's leading neuroscientists to talk to me about their work. They will be patient with my simplistic questions—because some of them used to babysit me. 

He Wrote the Book on Loneliness; She Looks for Love in the Brain

My first call was to John and Stephanie Cacioppo. I met Stephanie when she was doing her post-doctorate work with Scott Grafton at the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara (which is run by my father). She helped me with a plot point in a play I was writing, in which my main character is in an fMRI scanner and a certain area of her brain lights up, which suggests she is in love. My question for Stephanie was: Is this possible? Is there a love area of the brain? Could our brains know we are in love before we do?  The answer was a qualified "yes."

Now, years later, Stephanie has fallen in love and married one of the founders of Social Neuroscience, John Cacioppo. Apparently their brains lit up when they met at a conference. They are a rom-com "meet cute." He wrote the book on loneliness. Literally. And she studies love.

© Stephanie Cacioppo

 

They spoke to me from their home office, sharing the phone, answering each others’ questions, and praising each others’ work. If they weren’t the researchers, they could be subjects for Stephanie’s studies on love relationships.

How Love Makes You a Mind Reader

MG: Stephanie, can you briefly describe your recent research?

SC: I try to better understand the role of the mirror neuron system in social interactions, and how social interactions, specifically with significant others, can be beneficial and detrimental to our mental and physical health.

(A side note: Mirror neurons were first discovered in monkeys, and later in humans. They are brain cells that are activated when you perform an action, and when you observe others doing the same action—hence the "mirror" name. The exact function of the neurons is still debated, but many believe they are associated with empathy.)

MG: Can you give an example?

SC: I’m interested in how a bond with your spouse, for instance, can make you think better, faster and make you healthier. In terms of thinking faster, one model I’m using is that of embodied cognition. How your social connection with your spouse can help you understand his intention very quickly, even before he’s finished his action. Is that clear?

MG: Can you give me an example of an experiment you do to look at that?

SC: Typically, we ask participants to watch different agents (a stranger, a friend, a family member, a beloved spouse) perform different actions (grasp a cup of coffee, hold a gun, toss a tennis ball in the air) with different intentions (meaningful, harmless, kind, etc.), and we ask the participants to guess what the agents’ intentions are, before they complete the actions. The participants are in an fMRI and we measure their brain activity while they do these tasks. Research suggests the more you feel "in tune" or "bonded" with someone, the faster you can anticipate their intentions. 

MG: What have you found about how love relationships impact this ability to predict behavior?

SC: When it comes to couples, theories of simulation and embodied cognition are in line with a model that is well-known in relationship science: The model of self-expansion. This model suggests that you fall in love with someone to expand yourself or to include the other’s attributes to make you a better person. Altogether, these theories suggest that the more in tune/in love you are with someone, the more time you spend with that someone, the more motor familiarity with them you acquire (unconsciously or not), the more your brain can encode their actions, the more your brain can then re-activate their actions by simple observation of the first step of a movement, and the faster you can understand their actions. In other words, the more you have a joint representation of yourself and the other person, the faster your mirror neuron system will be activated and the faster you can understand him or her.

MG: So somehow with our significant others we become more in tune with the motor processing cues. So, I can tell my husband is reaching for his car keys, say, rather than the mail, before he picks them up.

SC: Yes. And it doesn’t need to be conscious. That’s the beauty of it. It is largely a spontaneous and automatic process.

The Difference between Love and Desire

(At this point, John interrupts.)

JC: Tell her about the—

SC: Go ahead.

JC: (laughs) Steph’s work is brilliant. She’s looked at all of the fMRI studies of love and sexual desire and finds some overlapping brain regions but clearly some very different regions of the brain involved, as well. Importantly, love or desire isn’t represented as a spot in the brain. Each is the result of the collaboration of a set of neural regions operating on perhaps the same input to produce different inferences about and responses to that person. For instance, one distinction is in the insula – a long narrow nucleus on both sides of your head. There’s a front part (anterior) and a back part (posterior), and the distinctions within the insula are that the anterior regions are associated with more abstract representations and thought, and more temporal flexibility (for example, future orientation, mental time travel), whereas the posterior regions are associated with the present sensory, visceral and motoric inputs one is experiencing. This functional organization (concrete representations and operations in the back, abstract representations and operations in the front) is pretty typical of the brain generally.

MG: Uh huh. (At this point I felt my own brain getting a little overloaded.)

JC: What Stephanie found in the fMRI studies is that the back part of the insula, the posterior insula, is associated with desire whereas the front is associated with love. Now from that, Steph has developed a model of love and desire where both can actually occur together but, of course, need not do so. When both are active, the person is more likely to not only love someone but also desire that person.

Can You Love Someone but Not Desire Him? Or Vice Versa?

JC: Imaging research is correlational, though. It tells you these areas are associated, but it doesn’t tell you what they are doing. So the insula is an area of the brain where it’s hard to find lesion patients; because it’s not a richly vascularized region, strokes that compromised just a single part of the insula are uncommon.

(An aside: John spoke earlier about the need to study the "hole in the brain." That means looking for patients with a lesion (injury) to a specific part of the brain in order to learn more about what that area actually does—to see if the damaged area disrupts the behavior. In other words, if your anterior insula is damaged, do you lose the ability to love?)

JC: Steph found such a patient in South America. The front of the insula was damaged. She tested that patient for tasks she has used in her behavioral and neuroimaging research on love and desire. And she also tested other South American men to make sure that it wasn’t a cultural difference. The South American men were like the US men in how they responded to the tasks. Importantly, she also found that the patient whose anterior insula was damaged had trouble with tasks when it involved making judgments about love, but not when it involved making judgments about desire (photos they were looking at). That’s brilliant work showing it’s not just correlational. There’s something causal about what the anterior insula contributes to love. Stephanie is still looking for a patient with a lesion in the posterior insula. But her combination of neuroimaging and lesion research illustrates the kind of rigor that characterizes her research. I just love her mind.

SC: And I love his mind!

MG: I’m curious, what kind of task do you come up with that distinguishes between love and desire?

SC: So we have different tasks. One of them is to present images of single individuals, fully clothed, and we use the same exact stimuli for the love and the desire task. But the instruction is different. For the same set of pictures, the participants are being asked if the person is love material. And in another block, we present the same pictures in different order and ask if they could feel sexual desire for them. And the participants are asked to press keys to tell us their response and we analyze their brain activity based on their behavioral response rather than on the category of the stimuli. During previous studies, researchers have tended to categorize the stimuli ahead of time as being desirable or loveable. But someone who is desirable for you may not be for me. So we thought that it was very important to analyze the brain activity based on the participant's response rather than the experimenters' categorization.

How a Doctor of Love Can Help

MG: You mentioned that one of the lessons you learned from Scott Grafton and my father was to always ask the question, "And so what?" What is the "so what" of your research on love?

SC: People wonder why you need a Ph.D. to study love. A lot of people have a lot to say about this topic and they all think they know what love is and why we fall in love, and actually they don’t. We need to understand the brain in love, scientifically. And to bring the psychological model and biologic sciences to this field.  By breaking down love with different scientific and mathematical approaches we can really try to reconstruct it and better understand it in healthy couples and patients who have neuropsychiatric issues with love relationships. We can try to treat jealousy, people with obsessive-compulsive disorders—stalking—autism, patients who have social disorders and difficulty relating to others. By bringing science into this so-called soft science we can help patients in their early life.

NEXT….In Part Two of this series, John explains the brain science of loneliness.

 photo: S. Cacioppo. Modified from NeuroImage, 2008; Vol. 43, no. 2

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The Harmful Effects of Loneliness

by Marin Gazzaniga

Published on Monday, October 6th 2014

In Part 1 of this interview, married neuroscientists John and Stephanie Cacioppo discussed her research on love. Here, John explains his research and some paradoxical behaviors of the lonely.

MG: You are one of the founders of social neuroscience. Can you explain what that is?

JC:  The premise of social neuroscience is complementary to cognitive neuroscience – but distinct. In cognitive neuroscience you look at the brain as if it were a computer. The metaphor stimulates a number of questions. For instance, language is viewed as a way of representing information in the brain. So you ask: What is that representational system? Where is the encoding and decoding? What types of storage and memory systems exist? In social neuroscience, the appropriate metaphor is the cell phone. Brains are viewed as mobile, broadband-connected computing devices. This metaphor raises different questions, such as: Where’s the wifi card? What’s the communication protocol? Language is seen as one of the ways these devices are linked, rather than a way to represent information within the device. Neither cognitive nor social neuroscience is "correct." They are distinct and complementary perspectives on the human brain. 

Why we need grandchildren to survive

MG: So what is the focus of your work?

JC: I’ve been interested in a combination of social and biological perspectives on the human brain for years now. What struck me as interesting about social in the first place was that social species, by definition, create super-organismal structures. These structures evolved hand in hand with neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms because they promote behavior that foster survival, reproduction, and care for offspring sufficiently that they reproduce. For mammals, whose offspring are dependent on parental care, it’s not your ability to reproduce that determines your genetic legacy but your ability to have grandchildren. If you reproduce a great deal but in conditions where there is no care for those offspring, then they perish during infancy, leaving you with no genetic legacy. So one interesting question is, What are the biological mechanisms that help us survive as a social species? The way I’ve been investigating this question for the past twenty years is to determine what happens when an individual is absent social connections. 

MG: Loneliness.

JC: Yes. So you see it’s actually a complement to what Stephanie studies. 

MG: She studies love - how people create deep connections - and you study what happens when they feel isolated.

JC: Yes, the reason I took that approach is very straightforward. If I want to understand what a gene does, I create an animal model where I can compare the responses from an animal that has that gene and an animal that does not. If I want to understand what the orbital frontal cortex does, I look at Phineas Gage before and after his orbital frontal cortex was obliterated. It’s not that I’m interested in the hole in Gage’s brain; I’m interested in what happens before and after that hole existed. Similarly, if I want to know what the effects of meaningful social connections are, I can compare individuals who feel socially connected with those who feel absent meaningful social connections – that is, individuals who feel lonely.

What Robin Williams knew about loneliness

JC: We’ve been doing experiments and longitudinal research on loneliness to determine the effects of loneliness on behavior, brain function, autonomic and neuroendocrine activity, sleep, and gene function. Fairly quickly we found that it isn’t the objective presence or absence of people, it’s whether you feel isolated. The brain is the key organ for forming, monitoring, maintaining, repairing, and replacing salutary connections with others, so the presence of others in many cases is less important than whether one feels connected or isolated. Stephanie gave me a quote from Robin Williams, from 2009. He captured this point better than many scientists: "I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel all alone."

We’ve found that chronic loneliness is associated with early morbidity and mortality as well as a number of psychological disorders. For instance, our longitudinal and experimental research suggests that loneliness increases depressive symptoms. Loneliness also leads to heightened sympathetic tonus of the vasculature.

MG:  What does that mean?

JC:  Loneliness can lead to higher blood pressure. It also disrupts sleep due to an increased number of micro-awakenings over the course of the night. These effects are independent of the amount of sleep, or whether or not you’re actually sleeping with someone. We’ve seen this effect in studies of undergraduates and in the Hutterites (a communal population), and we’ve seen loneliness predict less salubrious sleep longitudinally. If you feel lonely tonight, you are likely to have more micro-awakenings across the course of the night. 

MG: Why is that?

JC: We have an evolutionary theory to account for these findings. If it’s dangerous to fend off wild beasts all day with a stick, imagine how dangerous it is to lay that stick down at night and sleep when predators are out and you don’t have a safe social surround. Going to sleep feeling isolated puts the brain into a state of alert for threats to promote self-preservation. The disruption of sleep has been seen in an experimentally isolated social animal, as well. 

MG: How do you determine the difference between someone who is feeling lonely vs. not feeling lonely? Is it just self-reported?

JC: We have a couple different ways. We have a monkey model and we are developing a rodent model of loneliness. In both of these models, we focus on the behavior of the animals to define loneliness. When working with people, however, we typically use a set of questions to measure loneliness. We don’t ask, "Do you feel lonely?" because men, in particular, tend to under-report. But there are other questions we can ask that relate to loneliness. If you ask, "Do you feel lonely?" there’s a bit of defensiveness that is aroused. But if you ask, "Do you feel socially isolated?" "Do you have others in whom you confide?" Then you start to get a more accurate picture of the extent to which they feel socially connected or isolated. 

Why loneliness can make you negative

JC: You know what the Stroop test is, right?

MG: Uh…I know the name. But…remind me?

JC: Stroop developed a test in which you show people the names of colors, but they appear in an incongruent color or ink, such as the word "blue" printed in red.

MG: Yes, yes.

JC: In the Stroop task, you ask a participant to identify what color the ink is. To people’s surprise, this is a difficult task because, whether they want to or not, people automatically read the words. Because you’ve read "blue" but it’s written in red, it takes you longer to say "red." And in fact often you make an error and say, "blue."

MG: Right.

JC: The Stroop task illustrates how information can be processed by the brain even when we did not intend to do so and are unaware of having done so. We used a version of this task to investigate how individuals who felt lonely or non-lonely preattentively (automatically) processed positive and negative social and nonsocial information. We presented social and nonsocial words in different colors and instructed participants to identify the color of ink in which the word was presented.

MG: What’s a social or nonsocial word?

JC: A negative nonsocial word is "vomit." A negative social word is "reject." As you can see, both are very negative words. What we found is that the lonelier you feel, the longer it takes to name the color of the negative social words. 

MG: Huh.

John can tell I’m not completely following…

JC: That’s evidence that if you feel lonely, your brain is especially paying attention to negative social stimuli because we did not find this interference effect when we contrasted positive social and positive nonsocial words. 

So, the idea is, you aren’t just being a Negative Nancy, you are actually on the lookout for things—or more specifically, people—that could hurt you because there’s no one around you feel would protect you.

How depression may actually be a way to connect

JC: Whether a fish or a herd animal on the social perimeter, the attack of another member is not only sad but also a threat to your survival. So the brain is more likely to focus on self-preservation than on the welfare of others. In fish, for example, an attack increases the tendency for each of the fish to swim to the middle (as far from the social perimeter as possible). We see similar behavior in herd animals. And we see something similar in the brains of humans. In brain imaging studies we have also found that the lonelier you are, the less brain activation found in the temporal parietal junction when viewing a negative social scene—for example, a photo of someone being hurt. Activation of the temporal parietal junction occurs when you take the perspective of another person, empathize with that person, or think about what they are thinking or experiencing. The fact that loneliness is related to less activation of this brain region is interpretable in terms of the lonely brain emphasizing self-preservation rather than concern for others.

The interesting part of this story is that people do not have conscious access to what their brain is doing. You don’t know your brain is in self-preservation mode because the brain was selected to do this long before humans walked the earth. The absence of accurate insight into what our brains are doing increases the likelihood that lonely individuals engage in self-protective—but paradoxically self-defeating—behavior. They are motivated to reconnect, but they engage in defensive, sometimes downright prickly behavior. When you feel lonely, you are more likely to be negative and disagreeable. Although this seems dysfunctional, it actually can promote survival in a potentially hostile social environment while an individual seeks to reconnect. We actually think that the depressive postures, vocalizations, and behavior that result from loneliness is adaptive—specifically, they may be ways to connect at a distance. I don’t have to push my way back into the group. I can sit there and cry, and look very sad, and if there are others in the setting who are willing to reconnect they are more likely to do so. If you’ve ever put your child in "time-out," you know what a strong force the child’s sadness can exert on you. These depressive behaviors, then, may have the positive effect of being a safe way to reconnect when you’ve been socially isolated. 

The paradox of loneliness

JC: I didn’t even mention all of the biologic effects that have been seen in human and animal studies. The lonelier you feel at the end of a day, the greater rise in cortisol we see the next morning. We see a change in gene expression, one of the most robust being increased inflammatory responses. In animal studies, an animal who is isolated from others and subjected to an experimental stroke shows three times greater brain cell death than normally housed animals who are subjected to the same experimental stroke. The differences in cell death appear to be due to differences in neuro-inflammation. Although there is more to do, these findings appear to be fitting together to tell an interesting story of how loneliness can lead to earlier dementia and earlier mortality through a variety of specific biologic processes which, from an evolutionary perspective, occur to increase your likelihood of short-term survival when you find yourself on the social perimeter.

Final Pop Quiz

Stephanie has rejoined the conversation, and I decide to let them go with an easy question. 

MG: If you weren’t neuroscientists what would you be?

Long pause. 

JC: Probably a mathematician.

MG: So not so far afield.

SC: Same. A physician.

JC: Steph likes to help. I don’t. I like taking things apart.

MG: Sounds like you’re doing exactly like what you want to be doing.

Situated Affective and Social Neuroscience (Topic Overview)

 

This editorial from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience is part of (and introduction to) a special topic on Interactions between emotions and social context: Basic, clinical and non-human evidence.

The whole article is presented below, along with the 22 articles in the topic - all of which have their DOIs so that they can be easily accessed.

Situated affective and social neuroscience

Agustin Ibanez [1,2,3,4,5] Sonja A. Kotz [6,7] Louise Barrett [8] Jorge Moll [9] and Maria Ruz [10]

1. Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neurology (INECO), Favaloro University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
2. National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
3. UDP-INECO Foundation Core on Neuroscience, Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile
4. Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Barranquilla, Colombia
5. Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australian Research Council (ACR), Sydney, NSW, Australia
6. Cognitive Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology Section, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
7. Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
8. Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, AB, Canada
9. Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Unit, D'Or Institute for Research and Education, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
10. Department of Experimental Psychology, Brain, Mind and Behavior Research Center, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

This Research Topic features several papers tapping the situated nature of emotion and social cognition processes. The volume covers a broad scope of methodologies [behavioral assessment, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), structural neuroimaging, event-related potentials (ERPs), brain connectivity, and peripheral measures], populations (non-human animals, neurotypical participants, developmental studies, and neuropsychiatric and pathological conditions), and article types (original research, review papers, and opinion articles). Through this wide-ranging proposal, we introduce a fresh approach to the study of contextual effects in emotion and social cognition domains.

We report four levels of evidence. First, we present studies examining how cognitive and neural functions are influenced by basic affective processes (interoception, motivation and reward, emotional impulsiveness, and appraisal of violent stimuli). A second set of behavioral and neuroscientific studies addresses how performance is modulated by different emotional variables (categorical and dimensional approaches to emotion, language-as-context for emotion, emotional suppression of the attentional blink, and reappraisal effects on the up-regulation of emotions). The studies in our third selection deal with different influences in social cognition (SC) domains (human and non-human comparative studies, long-term effects of social and physical stress, developmental theory of mind, neural bases of passionate love for others, social decision making in normal and psychopathic participants, and frontal lobe contributions to psychosocial adaptation models). Finally, the fourth set of papers investigates the blending of social and emotion-related processes (valence and social salience in amygdala networks, emotional contributions to identification of genuine and faked social expressions, emotional predispositions and social decision making bias, valence of fairness and social decisions, structural neuroimaging of emotional and social impairments in neurodegenerative diseases, and subjective reactivity to emotional stimuli and their association with moral cognition). A brief summary of all these studies is offered in the following sections.

Basic Affective Modulation

Body signals, especially of the interoceptive cardiac type, have been recently claimed to modulate emotion and decision-making processes. Leone et al. (2012) used chess decisions to analyze heart rate (HR) modulations in specific cognitive events. HR signals predicted the conception of a plan and the likelihood to blunder by fluctuations (e.g., performing random errors or bad moves). Such signals also reflected reactions, such as a blunder made by the opponent or fluctuations after a move. These data suggest that body signals are rich enough to reveal relevant episodes of inner decisions.

In another study, the affective motivational dimension of behavioral inhibition was assessed through the manipulation of reward magnitudes during a classical inhibitory task (Herrera et al., 2014). The effect of reward magnitude and context on behavioral inhibition in humans showed that dynamical behavioral inhibition depends on contextual parameters (reward magnitude modulation and initial reward history).

Torres et al. (2013) tested whether emotional and non-emotional dimensions of impulsiveness were differentially predictive of decision-making and addictive behavior in cocaine-dependent individuals (CDIs), pathological gamblers (PGs), and healthy controls. They used several instruments, including a Go/No-go paradigm assessed with ERPs and a delay-discounting task. Among the dimensions of trait impulsiveness, negative urgency was unique at independently covarying with gambling in PGs. Relative to these subjects, CDIs performed more poorly and showed ERP abnormalities. The effects of impulsiveness in negative emotion processing played a key role in decision-making and addiction.

Using fMRI, Porges and Decety (2013) evaluated the appraisal of violent stimuli and their relation with self-report measures of pleasure/displeasure. Participants watched video-clips depicting Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Capoeira videos were used as a baseline. Pleasurable ratings of MMA predicted increased functional connectivity (FC) seeded in the nucleus accumbens, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and anterior insular cortex (AIC). These structures are related with positive/negative outcomes as well as feelings and somatic representations. Instead, displeasure ratings of MMA were related to increased FC among regions of the prefrontal cortex and superior parietal lobule (areas involved in cognitive control and executive attention). The results suggest that FC indexed the relationship between subjective feelings and anticipation of positive and negative outcomes.

Emotional Appraisal

Matsuda et al. (2013) tested the hypothesis that separate neural loci might intrinsically encode categorical and dimensional facial emotion perception. Participants were scanned with fMRI while they passively viewed emotional faces and performed unrelated tasks. Activity in the right fusiform face area (FFA) was dependent on the categorical ambiguity of facial expressions. The amygdala, insula, and medial prefrontal cortex evidenced dimensional (linear) processing, which correlated with physical changes in expressions. The results suggest that distinct neural loci process the physical and psychological aspects of facial emotion perception in a region-specific and implicit manner.

Herbert et al. (2013) used words as contextual cues for emotion processing in two ERP experiments. They focused on self- vs. sender-related emotional pronoun-noun pairs (e.g., my fear vs. his fear) as cues for emotional face processing. Participants performed automatic (Experiment 1) and intentional (Experiment 2) affect labeling tasks. ERP patterns varied as a function of the label's reference (self vs. sender) and the intentionality of the labeling task (Experiment 1 vs. Experiment 2). Emotion decoding from facial expressions was not fully determined by sensory facial information, but proved sensitive to contextual factors and the perceiver's experience. These findings support a differentiated view of language-as-context for emotion processing.

The study conducted by Kanske et al. (2013) evaluated whether the attentional blink effect in rapid serial visual presentations is modulated by the emotionality of the stimuli (emotional and neutral images depicting social scenes as target). To this end, the authors used ERP recordings and offline self-reports of empathy. The results revealed enhanced performance for emotional stimuli and increased P3 amplitudes, which correlated with individual differences in empathy. These data suggest that empathy is associated with enhanced emotional processing in social contexts, even during unconscious target detection.

Peng et al. (2013) examined description-based reappraisal effects on the up-regulation of positive emotions. They measured ERP fluctuations as Chinese participants viewed erotic and neutral images shown after either a neutral or positive description. Further data was obtained through self-reported ratings. The results demonstrate that description-based reappraisal significantly modulated the emotional experience and ERP responses to erotic as well as neutral images.

Social Cognition

The review by Van Den Bos et al. (2013) considers animal and human studies tapping the influence of social context on decision-making. From a causal and functional perspective, the authors advance methodological considerations to improve the experimental assessment of social factors in decision-making.

In a study with rats, Chaby et al. (2013) investigated how exposure to social and physical stress during adolescence affects adult decision-making, coping response, cognitive bias, and exploratory behavior. Compared to control animals, rats exposed to chronic unpredictable stress (e.g., isolation, crowding, cage tilt) evinced long-term behavioral and cognitive changes, including negative cognitive bias, altered coping response, and accelerated decision-making. The results showed that stress during adolescence has a long-term impact on behavior and cognition. The most salient effects concern ambiguous stimulus interpretation, behavioral response to adverse events, and decision-making strategies.

Calero et al. (2013) propose a novel approach to quantifying the scaling property of theory of mind (ToM). Focusing on children between 6- and 8-years-old, they consider a scaling complexity of skills and their modulation by varied factors, such as gender, number of siblings, and personality traits.

The meta-analysis by Juan et al. (2013) considers a decade worth of fMRI studies to identify differential brain areas and cortical networks involved in (i) passionate love for others and (ii) understanding the intention of others' actions. Thus, this approach goes beyond classical experimental studies regarding individuals as strictly isolated entities. Both overlapping and distinct cortical and subcortical regions were identified for intention and love, respectively. By targeting these brain regions in future research, scientists and clinicians could promote breakthroughs in the neuroscience of pair-bonding.

Radke et al. (2013) investigated fairness considerations in psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders as well as healthy controls. In a modified Ultimatum Game (UG) involving opposing intentionality constraints (intentional vs. unintentional), unfair offers were paired with different unselected alternatives, thereby establishing the context of a proposal. Psychopathic offenders resembled healthy controls in their rejection pattern—i.e., they took the unselected alternative into account. In contrast, non-psychopathic delinquents failed to adjust their decisions to an offer's alternatives, suggesting stronger impairments in social decision-making. Crucially, the mechanisms and processes underlying rejection decisions might differ in both groups, particularly in terms of cognitive vs. emotional competencies.

In an ERP experiment, Moser et al. (2014) investigated the levels of processing at which positive and negative descriptions of other people bias social decision-making. Participants played a game in which they had to accept or reject economic offers. Other variables manipulated were the fairness of the assets' distribution, the offers' advantageousness, and the game context's uncertainty. Negative description of the interaction partner enhanced medial frontal negativity (MFN) in an additive manner with fairness evaluations. The description of the partner interacted with personal benefit considerations, showing that this positive or negative information biased the evaluation of offers only when they did not favor the participant. P300 amplitudes were enhanced by advantageous offers, suggesting their heightened motivational significance at later stages of processing. In all phases of the study, processing of the offer was increased in the certain, as compared to the uncertain, contexts. These results provide new evidence that decision-making is influenced by interpersonal information and considerations of one's own interests relative to those of others.

Finally, Huepe and Salas (2013) set forth a new conceptualization of the prefrontal cortex for psychosocial adaptation. Their review of the evidence suggests that cognitive functions related to this lobule include fluid intelligence (FI), SC, and perspective changing abilities (PCA). These domains are crucial in adapting to social contexts and solving problems in new situations. Moreover, they appear to depend on contextual keys, thus requiring flexibility—yet another function associated with the frontal lobe. The model proposed integrates these components (FI, SC, and PCA) as indicators of psychosocial adaptation in contexts of social vulnerability or impoverished social/cultural conditions.

Contextual Blending of Social and Emotion-Related Processes

Vrtička et al. (2013) assessed whether the human amygdala preferentially responds to both emotionally and socially significant information, and whether these factors might display interactive encoding properties. Through an fMRI study, they demonstrated that amygdala activation is (1) greater for neutral social vs. non-social information, (2) similar for positive and negative social images, and (3) sensitive to a valence effect (negative vs. positive) for non-social images. The valence × social content interaction was also found in the right fusiform gyrus, right anterior superior temporal gyrus, and medial orbitofrontal cortex. Overall, these findings suggest that valence and social contents possess distinct kinds of relevance that interact within the human amygdala and throughout a more extensive cortical network.

The ability to discriminate between felt and faked expressions is a crucial social skill. Manera et al. (2013) investigated whether individual differences in smile authenticity recognition are explained by distinct predispositions to experience other people's emotions (susceptibility to emotional contagion). Susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions increased smile authenticity detection. Instead, susceptibility to emotional contagion for positive emotions worsened detection performance, because it led to categorize most faked smiles as sincere. It follows that susceptibility to emotional contagion plays a key role in complex social emotions.

The study by Klapwijk (2013) examined the effects of three different emotional responses (anger, disappointment, and happiness) on social decision-making in adolescents. In a version of the Dictator Game, unfair offers by the participants received emotional responses from peers. Relative to angry and happy reactions, expressions of disappointment prompted more generous offers. Older adolescents were better than younger adolescents at differentiating among the three emotions. In addition, individual differences in social value orientation played a role in decisions after happy reactions to unfair offers. Thus, adolescents take into account the emotions of their peers when making social decisions and are affected by social value orientation and age.

Couto et al. (2013) report selective behavioral impairments of face recognition, emotion recognition, and ToM in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA). Voxel-based morphometry revealed fronto-temporo-insular atrophy in both patient groups. SC deficits were differentially associated to fronto-insular-temporal atrophy in bvFTD and PNFA, respectively. While SC impairments were similar in both groups, they seem to reflect intrinsic ToM affectation in bvFTD and more basic deficits (face and emotion recognition) in PNFA.

Carmona-Perera et al. (2013) examined subjective reactivity to emotional stimuli and its possible association with moral decision-making. Healthy adult participants responded to a set of moral and non-moral dilemmas. The researchers focused on emotional experience in valence, arousal, and dominance dimensions in response to different types of pictures (neutral, pleasant, unpleasant non-moral, and unpleasant moral). Significant correlations emerged between less unpleasantness to negative stimuli, more pleasantness to positive stimuli, and a higher proportion of utilitarian choices. Also, a positive association was found between higher arousal ratings to negative moral laden pictures and more utilitarian choices. Low dominance was associated with greater perceived difficulty over moral judgment. These results evidenced a contextual role of emotional experience in moral choice.

Conclusions

Despite the diversity of their topics, research questions, and methodologies, most of these studies highlight the contextual situatedness of emotional and social cognition processes (Garrido-Vasquez et al., 2011; Ruz and Tudela, 2011; Ibanez and Manes, 2012; Melloni et al., 2014). Moreover, they provide new evidence for the interaction among low and high-level cognition, emotion, and social domains (Moll and Schulkin, 2009; Pessoa, 2009; Alguacil et al., 2013; Ibanez et al., 2013, 2014; Ruz et al., 2013; Baez et al., 2014b). In the same vein, part of the evidence presented shows that our emotional arousal biases our decisions in the social world (Beauregard, 2007; Heatherton, 2011). More generally, this Research Topic indicates that a brain network approach to social and emotional processes (Moll et al., 2005, 2008; Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012; Baez et al., 2014a) seems more adequate than simple approximations ascribing such complex domains to a single region. This integrated approach to embedded emotional and social processes provides exciting new avenues into the growing field of social neuroscience.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

Agustin Ibanez is supported by CONICET, CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular (1130920 and 1140114), FONCyT-PICT 2012-0412/2012-1309, and INECO Foundation. Maria Ruz is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, “Ramón y Cajal” fellowship (RYC-2008-03008) and grant PSI2013-45567-P. Jorge Moll is supported by intramural grants, D'Or Institute for Research and Education, and FAPERJ (Rio de Janeiro State Foundation for Research). Sonja A. Kotz is supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR: 62867) and German Science Foundation (KO-2268/6-1).

References available at the Frontiers site.

* * * * *

 There are 22 articles in this series so far.

Original Research Article, Published on 08 Oct 2012
The tell-tale heart: heart rate fluctuations index objective and subjective events during a game of chess
María J. Leone, Agustín Petroni, Diego Fernandez Slezak and Mariano Sigman
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00273

Original Research Article, Published on 18 Mar 2013
Susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions improves detection of smile authenticity
Valeria Manera, Elisa Grandi and Livia Colle
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00006

Original Research Article, Published on 10 Jan 2013
Description-based reappraisal regulate the emotion induced by erotic and neutral images in a Chinese population
Jiaxin Peng, Chen Qu, Ruolei Gu and Yue-Jia Luo
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00355

Original Research Article, Published on 18 Jan 2013
Lateralized interactive social content and valence processing within the human amygdala
Pascal Vrtička, David Sander and Patrik Vuilleumier
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00358

Original Research Article, Published on 21 Feb 2013
Emotional and non-emotional pathways to impulsive behavior and addiction
Ana Torres, Andrés Catena, Alberto Megías, Antonio Maldonado, Antonio Cándido, Antonio Verdejo-García and José C. Perales
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00043

Mini Review Article, Published on 27 Mar 2013
Beyond human intentions and emotions
Elsa Juan, Chris Frum, Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli, Yi-Wen Wang, James W. Lewis and Stephanie Cacioppo
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00099

Original Research Article, Published on 23 Jul 2013
Your emotion or mine: labeling feelings alters emotional face perception—an ERP study on automatic and intentional affect labeling
Cornelia Herbert, Anca Sfaerlea and Terry Blumenthal
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00378

Original Research Article, Published on 17 Jun 2013
Age and gender dependent development of Theory of Mind in 6- to 8-years old children
Cecilia Ines Calero, Alejo Salles, Mariano Semelman and Mariano Sigman
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00281

Review Article, Published on 26 Jun 2013
Social modulation of decision-making: a cross-species review
Ruud Van Den Bos, Jolle Jolles and Judith Homberg
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00301

Original Research Article, Published on 04 Jul 2013
Long-term changes in cognitive bias and coping response as a result of chronic unpredictable stress during adolescence
Lauren Chaby, Sonia Cavigelli, Amanda White, Kayllie Wang and Victoria Braithwaite
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00328

Original Research Article, Published on 13 Aug 2013
Violence as a source of pleasure or displeasure is associated with specific functional connectivity with the nucleus accumbens
Eric C Porges and Jean Decety
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00447

Opinion Article, Published on 18 Jun 2013
Fluid intelligence, social cognition, and perspective changing abilities as pointers of psychosocial adaptation
David Huepe and Natalia Salas
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00287

Original Research Article, Published on 26 Sep 2013
The implicit processing of categorical and dimensional strategies: an fMRI study of facial emotion perception
Yoshi-Taka Matsuda, Tomomi Fujimura, Kentaro Katahira, Masato Okada, Kenichi Ueno, Kang Cheng and Kazuo Okanoya
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00551

Original Research Article, Published on 26 Sep 2013
Valence of emotions and moral decision-making: increased pleasantness to pleasant images and decreased unpleasantness to unpleasant images are associated with utilitarian choices in healthy adults
Martina Carmona-Perera, Celia Marti, Miguel Pérez-García and Antonio Verdejo-García
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00626

Original Research Article, Published on 12 Nov 2013
Emotional reactions of peers influence decisions about fairness in adolescence
Eduard T. Klapwijk, Sabine Peters, Robert R. J. M. Vermeiren and Gert-Jan Lelieveld
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00745

Original Research Article, Published on 26 Jul 2013
Unfair offers, unfair offenders? Fairness considerations in incarcerated individuals with and without psychopathy
Sina Radke, Inti A. Brazil, Inge Scheper, Berend H. Bulten and Ellen R.A. De Bruijn
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00406

Original Research Article, Published on 16 Aug 2013
Structural neuroimaging of social cognition in progressive non-fluent aphasia and behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia
Blas Couto, Facundo Manes, Patricia Montañes, Diana Matallana, Pablo Reyes, Marcela Velázquez, Adrián Yoris, Sandra Baez and Agustin Ibanez
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00467

Original Research Article, Published on 11 Oct 2013
Emotional modulation of the attentional blink and the relation to interpersonal reactivity
Philipp Kanske, Sandra Schönfelder and Michèle Wessa
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00641

Original Research Article, Published on 12 May 2014
Monetary rewards modulate inhibitory control
Paula Marcela Herrera, Mario Speranza, Adam Hampshire and Tristan A Bekinschtein
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00257

Original Research Article, Published on 06 Feb 2014
Social information and personal interests modulate neural activity during economic decision-making
Anna Moser, Celia Gaertig and Maria Ruz
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00031

General Commentary Article, Published on 13 Feb 2014
Erratum: Valence of emotions and moral decision-making: increased pleasantness to pleasant images and decreased unpleasantness to unpleasant images are associated with utilitarian choices in healthy adults
Martina Carmona-Perera, Celia Marti, Miguel Perez-Garcia and Antonio Verdejo-García
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00050

Editorial Article, Published on 28 Jul 2014
Situated affective and social neuroscience
Agustin Ibanez, Sonja A E Kotz, Louise Barrett, Jorge Moll and Maria Ruz
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00547