Emotional States Of Others Research Articles

Empathy for Distress in Humans and Rodents.

Empathy is traditionally thought to be a unique ability of humans to feel, understand, and share the emotional state of others. However, the notion has been greatly challenged by the emerging discoveries of empathy for pain or distress in rodents. Because empathy is believed to be fundamental to the formation of prosocial, altruistic, and even moral behaviors in social animals and humans, studies associated with decoding the neural circuits and unraveling the underlying molecular and neural mechanisms of empathy for pain or distress in rodents would be very important and encouraging. In this review, the author set out to outline and update the concept of empathy from the evolutionary point of view, and introduce up-to-date advances in the study of empathy and its neural correlates in both humans and rodents. Finally, the author highlights the perspectives and challenges for the further use of rodent models in the study of empathy for pain or distress.

Emotion processing abnormalities in eating disorders: An fMRI pilot study

IntroductionAbnormalities in emotional functioning is one of the key features of eating disorders (ED), such as anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). These patients show increased levels of alexithymia, problems understanding one's own emotion, which has been simultaneously, associated with difficulties in recognizing others emotions.ObjectivesIn this study, we were interested in the neuronal mechanism of emotion processing from both, self and others perspective, and we aimed to compare the underlying brain activations in eating disorder patients and healthy controls.MethodsA sample of 12 women with ED (10 AN, 2 BN) and 11 age and education matched healthy controls (HC) underwent fMRI examination while performing emotion recognition task, which requires either inferring mental states of depicted figures, or assessing participant's own feelings evoked by the pictures.ResultsThe task activated superior temporal sulcus bilaterally, left temporo-parietal junction, and medial prefrontal cortex. Those regions have been consistently identified in literature to be active while thinking about other people. Interestingly, group differences analysis revealed that ED patients group showed higher activations in right supramarginal gyrus, compared to HC group. This structure is critical to overcome egocentricity bias in social judgment. Contrary to ED patients, HC group showed greater activations in cingulate gyrus and insula, regions involved in emotion formation and processing.ConclusionWe hypothesize that ED patients tend to suppress their own perspective while thinking about emotional states of others more strongly than HC, probably due to alexithymia and the lack of awareness of their mental states.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Insula and somatosensory cortical myelination and iron markers underlie individual differences in empathy

Empathy is a key component of our ability to engage and interact with others. In recent years, the neural mechanisms underlying affective and cognitive empathy have garnered intense interest. This work demonstrates that empathy for others depends upon a distributed network of regions such as the insula, parietal cortex, and somatosensory areas, which are also activated when we ourselves experience an empathized-with emotion (e.g., pain). Individuals vary markedly in their ability to empathize with others, which predicts the tendency to help others and relates to individual differences in the neuroanatomy of these areas. Here, we use a newly developed, high-resolution (800 μm isotropic), quantitative MRI technique to better elucidate the neuroanatomical underpinnings of individual differences in empathy. Our findings extend previous studies of the neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive and affective empathy. In particular, individual differences in cognitive empathy were associated with markers of myeloarchitectural integrity of the insular cortex, while affective empathy was predicted by a marker of iron content in second somatosensory cortex. These results indicate potential novel biomarkers of trait empathy, suggesting that microstructural features of an empathy and body-related network are crucial for understanding the mental and emotional states of others.

2. Empathy and Communication through Art

Abstract Art is one of the finest means of shaping the personality, of access to aesthetic and moral values of society. The paper presents some of the elements of communication through art, in the double sense of this process, from the artwork (creator) to the viewer, but also from the viewer to the work of art and creator. The key-element of this dual process is the empathy, the ability to feel the emotional states of others. It develops within a set of personality traits, including: emotional intelligence, emotional feelings diversity, cognitive skills, along with motivation and personal ideals. Art is a medium of communication but also an element of developing a general receptivity to the world and its authentic values.

Using Visual Arts to Encourage Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to Communicate Their Feelings and Emotions

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often experience difficulties in identifying their emotions and the emotional states of others, additionally, they also often experience challenges in verbal communication. Together, these characteristics can lead to compromised social and emotional well being and mental health issues. However, children with ASD often have relative strengths in visual processing, and such strengths have been integral to the success of visual supports and video-based interventions for a range of socially significant skills for children with ASD. This preference for visual processing may also rep-resent opportunities for children with ASD in identifying and expressing their emotions. There is a limited but promising body of literature that suggests visual Art therapy can be beneficial for individuals with ASD and provide opportuni-ties for them to develop flexibility, self-esteem, and social communicative behaviour [1]. This presentation reports a study exploring the potential of Art making to assist children with ASD to better communicate their feelings and emotions. Providing an outlet for self-expression may reduce the challenges people with Autism face and in doing so, improve the quality of life for them as well as their families. A qualitative descriptive case study was chosen for this study within the theoretical framework of Art as therapy. Two boys, aged seven and ten years, participated in five and six visual Art as therapy sessions (re-spectively). The sessions developed participants’ skills in Art making and ex-pressing emotion as rapport was built over the study period. A variety of rich data were collected during the study which included: questionnaires, interviews, video-recordings, observation notes and participant Art works. This presentation showcases the Art works of the participating boys, featuring a variety of mediums to communicate their thoughts, feelings, and emotions. A description of the visual Art as therapy experiences and the impacts upon students’ communication, social interaction, and self-esteem are discussed.

Self-esteem and Emotional Development of Young Children in Connection with Mothers’ Parental Attitudes

Abstract The aim of the present study is to examine the quality of mothers’ parental attitudes in connection with the emotional development and self-esteem of their three-year-old children. The results show that young children's self-esteem has a negative correlation with the ability to recognise emotions and does not correlate with the ability to understand the causes of emotions. These aspects of emotional development are connected with differing mother's parental attitudes. The highest level of recognising emotions is developed when a mother has attitudes of power, intrusion, and a dependent child. In such relationships a child has to develop a high ability to recognise emotions to adapt better to the mother's demands and pressure. In relationship with authority, the young child of an intrusive mother can develop the ability to read the emotional states of others accurately as a coping strategy, but at the high price of healthy self-esteem. On the contrary, the mother's democratic attitudes affect the high level of self-esteem, the high level of understanding the causes of emotions, and the average level of recognising emotions.

Empathy in youths: Change in patterns of eye gaze and brain activity with the manipulation of visual attention to emotional faces

Background & aim: Understanding the emotional state of others is fundamental to effective social interaction and the development of empathy. Critical information is conveyed via the eyes, and reduced attention to the eyes is associated with poorer emotion recognition and empathic deficits in individuals with disorders affecting social cognition such as autism or some types of conduct problems. Deliberately redirecting attention to the eyes may be a way of improving behaviour. However, the effects of directing attention on brain activity during emotional processing has not been studied previously. Our aim was to determine whether manipulation of visual attention in youths affects their eye gaze patterns and brain responses to expression of emotions in others. Method: Eighteen typically developing male youths aged 8-16 performed an implicit facial emotion processing task while viewing different facial expressions (fearful, neutral, happy), presented in three separate blocks under three different instructions: undirected, eye-gaze and mouth-gaze. Eye tracking (dwell time) and functional-MRI data were acquired concurrently as measures of visual attention and brain response, respectively. Results: Eye tracking indicated that the youths attended more to the eyes than the mouth in the undirected condition. Redirecting attention to the eyes and mouth significantly increased attention to these areas. Compared to undirected, directing attention to the fearful eyes also produced a greater increase in attention than neutral eyes. Attention directed to eyes elicited greater brain activity in frontal regions than undirected attention. Discussion & conclusions: The undirected eye gaze patterns indicate natural orienting to eyes in healthy youths, which can be effectively altered with instruction. Directing attention to fearful eyes engaged attention relatively longer than neutral, consistent with the threat value of fearful faces. These data also demonstrate that manipulation of visual attention modulates activity in frontal regions, perhaps reflecting greater engagement of executive function due to attentional demands. Understanding attentional manipulation effects in a healthy sample will inform ongoing work addressing potentially perturbed response patterns in a conduct problem cohort.

Stereotypes: A source of bias in affective and empathic forecasting

People’s emotional states often depend on the emotions of others. Consequently, to predict their own responses to social interactions (i.e., affective forecasts), we contend that people predict the emotional states of others (i.e., empathic forecasts). We propose that empathic forecasts are vulnerable to stereotype biases and demonstrate that stereotypes about the different emotional experiences of race (Experiment 1) and sex groups (Experiment 2) bias empathic forecasts. Path modeling in both studies demonstrates that stereotype-biased empathic forecasts regarding how a target individual will feel during a social interaction are associated with participants’ affective forecasts of how they will feel during that interaction with the target person. These affective forecasts, in turn, predict behavioral intentions for the social interaction before it even begins. Stereotypes can therefore indirectly bias affective forecasts by first influencing the empathic forecasts that partly constitute them. In turn, these potentially biased affective forecasts determine social behaviors.

Changes in visual perspective influence brain activity patterns during cognitive perspective-taking of other people's pain

Empathy refers to our capacity to share and understand the emotional states of others. It relies on two main processes according to existing models: an effortless affective sharing process based on neural resonance and a more effortful cognitive perspective-taking process enabling the ability to imagine and understand how others feel in specific situations. Until now, studies have focused on factors influencing the affective sharing process but little is known about those influencing the cognitive perspective-taking process and the related brain activations during vicarious pain. In the present fMRI study, we used the well-known physical pain observation task to examine whether the visual perspective can influence, in a bottom-up way, the brain regions involved in taking others’ cognitive perspective to attribute their level of pain. We used a pseudo-dynamic version of this classic task which features hands in painful or neutral daily life situations while orthogonally manipulating: (1) the visual perspective with which hands were presented (first-person versus third-person conditions) and (2) the explicit instructions to imagine oneself or an unknown person in those situations (Self versus Other conditions). The cognitive perspective-taking process was investigated by comparing Other and Self conditions. When examined across both visual perspectives, this comparison showed no supra-threshold activation. Instead, the Other versus Self comparison led to a specific recruitment of the bilateral temporo-parietal junction when hands were presented according to a first-person (but not third-person) visual perspective. The present findings identify the visual perspective as a factor that modulates the neural activations related to cognitive perspective-taking during vicarious pain and show that this complex cognitive process can be influenced by perceptual stages of information processing.

Imitation of human expressions based on emotion estimation by mental simulation

AbstractHumans can express their own emotion and estimate the emotional states of others during communication. This paper proposes a unified model that can estimate the emotional states of others and generate emotional self-expressions. The proposed model utilizes a multimodal restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) —a type of stochastic neural network. RBMs can abstract latent information from input signals and reconstruct the signals from it. We use these two characteristics to rectify issues affecting previously proposed emotion models: constructing an emotional representation for estimation and generation for emotion instead of heuristic features, and actualizing mental simulation to infer the emotion of others from their ambiguous signals. Our experimental results showed that the proposed model can extract features representing the distribution of categories of emotion via self-organized learning. Imitation experiments demonstrated that using our model, a robot can generate expressions better than with a direct mapping mechanism when the expressions of others contain emotional inconsistencies.Moreover, our model can improve the estimated belief in the emotional states of others through the generation of imaginary sensory signals from defective multimodal signals (i.e., mental simulation). These results suggest that these abilities of the proposed model can facilitate emotional human–robot communication in more complex situations.

Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species.

Empathy reflects the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, coupled with a motivation to care for their well-being. It has evolved in the context of parental care for offspring, as well as within kinship bonds, to help facilitate group living. In this paper, we integrate the perspectives of evolution, animal behaviour, developmental psychology, and social and clinical neuroscience to elucidate our understanding of the proximate mechanisms underlying empathy. We focus, in particular, on processing of signals of distress and need, and their relation to prosocial behaviour. The ability to empathize, both in animals and humans, mediates prosocial behaviour when sensitivity to others' distress is paired with a drive towards their welfare. Disruption or atypical development of the neural circuits that process distress cues and integrate them with decision value leads to callous disregard for others, as is the case in psychopathy. The realization that basic forms of empathy exist in non-human animals is crucial for gaining new insights into the underlying neurobiological and genetic mechanisms of empathy, enabling translation towards therapeutic and pharmacological interventions.

An evolutionary behaviorist perspective on orgasm.

Evolutionary explanations for sexual behavior and orgasm most often posit facilitating reproduction as the primary function (i.e. greater rate of fertilization). Other reproductive benefits of sexual pleasure and orgasm such as improved bonding of parents have also been discussed but not thoroughly. Although sex is known to be highly reinforcing, behaviorist principles are rarely invoked alongside evolutionary psychology in order to account for human sexual and social behavior. In this paper, I will argue that intense sexual pleasure, especially orgasm, can be understood as a primary reinforcer shaped by evolution to reinforce behavior that facilitates reproductive success (i.e. conception through copulation). Next, I will describe an evolutionary account of social shaping. In particular, I will focus on how humans evolved to use orgasm and sexual arousal to shape the social behavior and emotional states of others through both classical and operant conditioning and through both reproductive and non-reproductive forms of sexual behavior. Finally, I will describe how orgasm is a signal of sensitivity to reinforcement that is itself reinforcing.

Emotional Maturity of Internet Users

Internet has been emerged as a most powerful tool for communication and exchange of information all over the world. More recently the web 2.0 tools has provoked a revolution and unlocked a new dimension in the field of communication and technology; this ongoing digital revolution has touched and turned almost every sphere of life of its users whether its physical, social, emotional, moral or ethical. For internet users it is the need of hour to be emotionally mature to manage and monitor their own emotions, to assess the emotional state of others, to deal with the situations accordingly and purposefully. Quite often it has been observed that young internet users get emotionally involved in this virtual world and act in that emotional flow which sometimes results in an emotional trauma leaving its impression for long. The purpose of this study was to investigate about the emotional maturity of internet users and to find out that is there any gender difference in their emotional maturity. Findings revealed that the young internet users are not emotionally mature. Results showed that there is significant gender difference in emotional stability, independence and total emotional maturity of internet users under study. Females who use emailing along with chatting are more emotionally stable in comparison to males.

Measuring Emotional Contagion in Social Media.

Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of others. A recent experiment performed on Facebook hypothesized that emotions spread online, even in absence of non-verbal cues typical of in-person interactions, and that individuals are more likely to adopt positive or negative emotions if these are over-expressed in their social network. Experiments of this type, however, raise ethical concerns, as they require massive-scale content manipulation with unknown consequences for the individuals therein involved. Here, we study the dynamics of emotional contagion using a random sample of Twitter users, whose activity (and the stimuli they were exposed to) was observed during a week of September 2014. Rather than manipulating content, we devise a null model that discounts some confounding factors (including the effect of emotional contagion). We measure the emotional valence of content the users are exposed to before posting their own tweets. We determine that on average a negative post follows an over-exposure to 4.34% more negative content than baseline, while positive posts occur after an average over-exposure to 4.50% more positive contents. We highlight the presence of a linear relationship between the average emotional valence of the stimuli users are exposed to, and that of the responses they produce. We also identify two different classes of individuals: highly and scarcely susceptible to emotional contagion. Highly susceptible users are significantly less inclined to adopt negative emotions than the scarcely susceptible ones, but equally likely to adopt positive emotions. In general, the likelihood of adopting positive emotions is much greater than that of negative emotions.

Emotion categorization of facial expressions: Age differences in the utilization of diagnostic features

The ability to accurately determine the emotional state of others is critical for successful social functioning. However older adults can demonstrate selective difficulties in identifying negative emotions from faces while the ability to identify positive emotional faces is preserved. In younger adults the categorization of facial expressions of emotion has been shown to rely on the processing of specific subsets of visual information (e.g. broadly smiling mouth in happiness, wide open eyes in fear)1,2. However it remains unclear whether healthy older adults process the same specific visual cues as younger adults in a less efficient manner when processing negative expressions, or if they attend to and encode qualitatively different information. We investigated whether the diagnostic information underlying the correct emotion categorization of five basic facial expressions (happy, fear, disgust, anger and sadness) changes as a function of observer age (young vs. older adults) and facial age (young vs. middle-aged vs. older faces). We applied the bubbles reverse correlation methodology with two groups of participants: younger (N=15, 18-35 years) and older adults (N=15, 65+ years). Results revealed that younger and older adults used qualitatively equivalent information to accurately categorize happy and fearful faces, but that the information used by both groups differed when they categorized fear in younger vs. older adult face stimuli. Older adults generally experienced more difficulty with the remaining negative emotions (disgust, anger and sadness) and exhibited a sub-optimal use of the diagnostic facial features. These results constitute a novel, highly detailed account of the specific visual features underlying the classification of facial expressions as across observer and transmitter of the emotional expressions stimulus age. 1Smith Cottrell, Gosselin & Schyns, 2005, Psychological Science 2Smith & Merlusca, 2014, Emotion Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.

MISINTERPRETATION OF EMOTIONAL FACIAL EXPRESSIONS IN PATIENTS DIAGNOSED WITH DISSOCIATIVE SEIZURES: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

ObjectiveResearch has shown that individuals with Dissociative Seizures (DS) disproportionately allocate attention to angry faces. Behavioural avoidance of such stimuli has also been reported. Previous studies have included emotional faces...

Brain activity correlates with emotional perception induced by dynamic avatars

An accurate judgment of the emotional state of others is a prerequisite for successful social interaction and hence survival. Thus, it is not surprising that we are highly skilled at recognizing the emotions of others. Here we aimed to examine the neuronal correlates of emotion recognition from gait. To this end we created highly controlled dynamic body-movement stimuli based on real human motion-capture data (Roether et al., 2009). These animated avatars displayed gait in four emotional (happy, angry, fearful, and sad) and speed-matched neutral styles. For each emotional gait and its equivalent neutral gait, avatars were displayed at five morphing levels between the two. Subjects underwent fMRI scanning while classifying the emotions and the emotional intensity levels expressed by the avatars.Our results revealed robust brain selectivity to emotional compared to neutral gait stimuli in brain regions which are involved in emotion and biological motion processing, such as the extrastriate body area (EBA), fusiform body area (FBA), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the amygdala (AMG). Brain activity in the amygdala reflected emotional awareness: for visually identical stimuli it showed amplified stronger response when the stimulus was perceived as emotional. Notably, in avatars gradually morphed along an emotional expression axis there was a parametric correlation between amygdala activity and emotional intensity.This study extends the mapping of emotional decoding in the human brain to the domain of highly controlled dynamic biological motion. Our results highlight an extensive level of brain processing of emotional information related to body language, which relies mostly on body kinematics.

Borderline personality features and associated difficulty in emotion perception: An examination of accuracy and bias.

Research on borderline personality disorder (BPD) has consistently found that those with the disorder often experience volatile interpersonal interactions, and several areas of research have been dedicated to the understanding of the mechanisms behind these interpersonal struggles. One of the most common theories is that the emotional dysregulation that is characteristic of BPD may adversely impact these interpersonal interactions, perhaps through a resulting misperception of emotional states in others. The purpose of the current study was to examine perception of negative affect in those with borderline personality features using a signal detection paradigm, a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task. Results support the hypothesis of atypical perception of negative emotions in BPD, but with disinhibitory aspects of the disorder demonstrating the largest potential influence. This finding was obtained even after controlling for gender differences that were also observed on this task. These results suggest that an examination of trait components of BPD may be necessary for a complete understanding of the emotion perception abilities of those with the disorder.

Theory of mind impairment in patients with behavioural variant fronto-temporal dementia (bv-FTD) increases caregiver burden.

Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to infer the intention, beliefs and emotional states of others, is frequently impaired in behavioural variant fronto-temporal dementia patients (bv-FTDp); however, its impact on caregiver burden is unexplored. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health. bv-FTDp (n = 28), a subgroup of their caregivers (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 32). we applied a faux-pas (FP) task as a ToM measure in bv-FTDp and healthy controls and the Zarit Burden Interview as a measure of burden in patients' caregivers. Patients underwent structural MRI; we used voxel-based morphometry to examine relationships between regional atrophy and ToM impairment and caregiver burden. FP task performance was impaired in bv-FTDp and negatively associated with caregiver burden. Atrophy was found in areas involved in ToM. Caregiver burden increased with greater atrophy in left lateral premotor cortex, a region associated in animal models with the presence of mirror neurons, possibly involved in empathy. ToM impairment in bv-FTDp is associated with increased caregiver burden.

Exploration of a new tool for assessing emotional inferencing after traumatic brain injury

Objective: To explore validity of an assessment tool under development—the Emotional Inferencing from Stories Test (EIST). This measure is being designed to assess the ability of people with traumatic brain injury (TBI) to make inferences about the emotional state of others solely from contextual cues.Methods and procedures: Study 1: 25 stories were presented to 40 healthy young adults. From this data, two versions of the EIST (EIST-1; EIST-2) were created. Study 2: Each version was administered to a group of participants with moderate-to-severe TBI—EIST 1 group: 77 participants; EIST-2 group: 126 participants. Participants also completed a facial affect recognition (DANVA2-AF) test. Participants with facial affect recognition impairment returned 2 weeks later and were re-administered both tests.Main outcomes: Participants with TBI scored significantly lower than the healthy group mean for EIST-1, F(1,114) = 68.49, p < 0.001, and EIST-2, F(1,163) = 177.39, p < 0.001. EIST scores in the EIST-2 group were significantly lower than the EIST-1 group, t = 4.47, p < 0.001. DANVA2-AF scores significantly correlated with EIST scores, EIST-1: r = 0.50, p < 0.001; EIST-2: r = 0.31, p < 0.001. Test–re-test reliability scores for the EIST were adequate.Conclusions: Both versions of the EIST were found to be sensitive to deficits in emotional inferencing. After further development, the EIST may provide clinicians valuable information for intervention planning.