Lecture 6 Flashcards
(16 cards)
Why are humans social?
- Predict and influence others’ action
- Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis: how to keep and control power
- We have bigger brains to be better at social cognition = not just to control our bodies
What is empathy?
- Used for influence, recent term in English translated by psychologists
- I feel or act them in the mind’s muscles
- Suggests empathy involves an aspect of the recreation or modelling of the state of the actor undergoing the emotion
What are the different definitions of empathy?
1) Coming to feel as another person feels = can match an emotion but can also catch it = can feel the emotion someone else is = emphathiser need not exactly the same emotion, but a similar one
- If you have never been in that state, you will not have a very similar empathic response = what determines the similarity of emotion is never clear enough
2) Projecting oneself into anothers situation
- Aesthetic projection = what it would be like = different to neuroscientific ideas of empathy and its mechanisms
3) Adopting the posture or matching the neural responses of an observed observer
- Has common things on body schema and proprioception = mimicking neural representations rather than motor activity
- Matched neural representation which need not produce either matched motor activity or awareness = one comes to feel something of what the other feels, and understanding internal state
What is pain?
- Our subjective experiences are individual unique = one texture may be pleasant and uncomfy to another inc flavour
- Pain occupies a unique place in both studies of sensory processing and empathic ideation = we feel differences subjectively to the same physical stimulus so ow can we empathise
What are modern theories of pain?
- Pain system in animals is nociceptive but pain itself is subjective feeling as a consequence of this process
- Specificity theory: non-linear where it does not fire vs when it does and it turns noxious
- Intensity theory: system firing but there is a level from when it goes from innocuous to noxious, system knows that even if you have
- Pattern theory: three diff cells have three diff patterning of intensity
- All about afferent pathways: climber got arm stuck between boulder and canyon wall: amputated his own arm = walked another 7 miles until he was rescued = pain needed to be modulated by an internal state
What are the three kinds of pain?
- Physical: heat/electricity/cold
- Social: rejected/excluded/dumped
- Vicarious: video/stills/text
What is the afferent pain matrix?
- Meta-analysis on areas activated in neuroimaging studies of pain processing
- SI/SII - sensory areas
- Anterior cingulate cortex
- Anterior insula cortex
- For normal pain processing
How do we experience pain of others?
- fMRI study of visual stimuli - matched for pain/ no pain = facial expressions not seen, just the damage caused = afferent = knowledge of painful state through visual system
- Activation contrast overlaps with actual pain matrix
- Someone observing pain in unambiguous situations = you are kind of experiencing it
- If you take their subjective pain index and their individual changes in Anterior cingulate activity correlates
How do we experience vicarious abstract pain?
- Participants in a pre-existing relationship
- Person saw a green arrow = painful stimuli applied, red arrow = painful stimuli applied to partner outside scanner = cannot see partner = just see abstract representation
- Overlap between pain = areas that show overlap are in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex AND sensory areas (when you get pain but not when partner is in pain) = affective aspect of pain is processed by the ACC does not need afferent input to produce subjective state
How do we experience disgust and simulated pain?
- fMRI study in which participants inhaled odorants producing strong feeling of disgust = same ppt observed video clips showing the emotional facial expression of disgust
- Overlap with the recognition of disgust in other and the self-experiencing disgust in insula cortex
Can we link pain and empathy causally?
- Has to show a bidirectional (up and down) relationship
- Causality is hard to recognise
What is the relationship between pain and analgesia? (IV)
- CIP patients have abnormal pain fibres = do not have any sensory activation = does this mean the other regions will be activated
- Congenital insensitivity to pain exists and is a rare genetic disorder = problem with nociception in the periphery e.g individuals can have badly broken bones but unless seen you cannot sense the damage
- Can you have emotional pain if you have never had the experience of physical pain
- Used fMRI to record the responses of viewing body parts in painful situations and responses to facial expressions of pain in group of patients with congenital insensitivity to pain and controls
- Some activations overlap, but some only in CIP
How do painkillers change our ability to feel the world?
- Paracetamol is commonly used
- Found that daily use of paracetamol reduced reports of social pain and reduced fMRI indexes of activation in overlapping pain/empathy regions
- 114 ppts were either given 1000mg of paracetamol or placebo - double blind
- After an hour, ppt looked at four scenarios describing two men and women having a positive experience
- While looking at each scenario, had to rate positive they thought scenario was, how the people in the scenario felt, how much pleasure ppts reading, and empathy for people in scenario
- While paracetamol reduced personal pleasure and empathic feelings = no effect on perceptions of pleasure and positivity
- Can still feel it, but disconnect = how it evokes empathy
What is the mirror network in the motor area?
- When recording, neurons fire when monkey moves toward food would fire when experimenter did the same
- TO do with experimenter moving intentionally
- About imitation
- To do with frontal cortex, temporal cortex and parietal cortex
Is this mirror network nature or nurture?
- Innate system for social interaction: infants mimicking adults responses
- BUT can be learnt from sensorimotor experience = built up from small amounts of time dependent on experience rather than categorical thing that comes out from nature
- Can match different muscle movements to different stimuli = no network designed for imitation
How does this link back to body schema?
- Spatial perception of one’s body is updated online by successive changes in position
- Empathy requires experience, movement, modelling, perception and action
- Imitation system could be to understand, predict and respond/interacting = mug example
