Friday class
Monicarodr
Unfortunately, I will have to cancel class this Friday. I had dental
surgery yesterday and assumed I would be OK in a couple of days.
However, I am very swollen and apparently it will get worse in the
next couple of days. I am really sorry. I will miss you this Friday.
We will move everything one week, so we will cover this week's
readings next Friday.
Monica
beka strock
I really liked that Decety and Batson (2007) incorporated multiple disciplines within both the theory as well as the results sections. I was trying to imagine how they might inhibit facial mimicry (p 153)—like Novocain a subject’s entire face, or instruct them to try not to move their facial muscles; involuntary movements seem like they would be hard to control. The challenges ahead section proposes that the role and extent of self-other merging versus distinctiveness still needs to be explored (156) which I think will contribute much more to our understanding.
Schaefer et al (2003) proposed multiple routes of emotional processing, such as “hot” schematic activations versus “cold” rational propositional system of processing, finding support for this hypothesis. The part that I found most interesting, however, were the implications for emotional regulation based on the reverse contrast between propositional and schematic activations. The authors suggest that rational processing requires inhibition of emotional processes, i.e. emotional regulation which may require involvement of the LPFC. They also point out that as of yet there is no evidence to distinguish whether emotional regulation is similar or dissimilar to the self-regulatory processes in general. They also found differential activations by emotion-type.
Eisenberger, Lieberman, Williams (2003) first established the commonality of social and physical pain and then refined their theory to include distinct activations for social pain. (Had to double-check the chronology on this one because I originally read them in reverse order.) Birklund, Eisenberger, Liberman (2007) found that social rejection included increased activations in distinct social distress areas (such as dACC) for those with greater rejection sensitivity although there was no overall activation difference from baseline in this area most likely because subjects observed rejection rather than experiencing it directly. Expected common negative emotion areas such as the amygdala showed activation across emotions (anger, disgust, disapproval).
Kross et al (2007) cited the Eisenberger et al (2003) in their research as well as a Somerville et al (2006) article which examined different aspects of social rejection; Kross and colleagues refine the theoretical explanation for which brain systems were activated, ultimately concluding that more evidence points to failures at regulating the distress caused by social rejection rather than simply the emotional activation of those high in rejection sensitivity. I really liked that this article included a contextual discussion of its own findings in comparison with other related studies and really tried to account for those similarities and differences in using a theoretical approach. One of the better theoretical explanations so far, especially since it was also backed by evidence from multiple studies.
Also of interest, we have previously come across latin square designs but I wanted a clearer concept of what this meant, so I checked out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_square and found that Euler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler) discovered it (amongst many other things). Did you know that’s where Soduku came from? ;) Interesting tidbit… Anyway, in context, latin squares are used for experimental design to create unique combinations, and in the case of Kross et al for presentation of stimuli in a controlled manner.
Relatedly, though not congruently, social exclusion links to self-control failure were examined in 2006 by Campbell and colleagues using a different technique, magnetoencephalography (MEG) to localize reactions temporally in more specific timeframes than fMRI BOLD signals. I’m not sure that I buy their method for measuring self-control with math problems, unless I misunderstood their explanation, this seems like cognitive resources not self-regulatory resources. I also am not entirely clear on the link that they are trying to make between self-regulation and exclusion…just that both require attentional control? While I agree with that hypothesis, I’m not sure that that is what they tested. Is anyone else convinced? Maybe I’m missing something…
Camille Barnes
differential brain functioning for low and high rejection sensitive
individuals when viewing rejection and non rejection oriented
paintings. This article defines rejection sensitivity as “ the
tendency to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to
rejection. I think it is probably important to separate these 3
components of rejection sensitivity when doing brain activation
studies, because they may activate different brain areas, so I thought
it was interesting that I don’t believe any of the studies addressed
the aspect of RS they were looking at. I thought this study was
interesting because of the stimuli used. It is interesting that they
can get at rejection using artwork, and I liked that the stimuli were
readily available via a website, so readers can see the differences
between stimuli. However, in this study, I did think the sample size
was a little small for a between subjects study, having only 9
participants across conditions. The results of this study concluded
that high RS individuals do not see images as more rejecting at the
perception level, but probably fail to regulate the emotional
appraisals properly.
The Schaefer, Collette, et al article focused on looking at different
ways of processing emotional stimuli and brain activation. I liked
this article because It is important to consider the ways in which
individuals are processing stimuli, when looking at brain scans. The
manner in which stimuli are processed can affect the emotional
experience and cognitive appraisal of stimuli. When stimuli are
processed schematically, in a hot way, the VMPFC is active, when they
are processed in a propositional, cold, way the LPFC is active. This
article highlighted another variable that researches need to keep in
mind when designing these emotional processing studies.
The Burlkland, Eisenburger, and Lieberman article tested if RS
affected brain activation while individuals view disapproving faces.
They viewed participants while viewing images of facial expression
that expressed disapproval, anger, or disgust. It would have been
nice to have scans of participants while viewing faces implying social
inclusion, that way you can better parse apart brain areas indicating
social information, and those indicating negative emotional
information. Individuals high in RS show more ACC activation in the
presence of non-approving faces.
The Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams article looked at brain scans
while experiencing social exclusion to see if regions activated by
physical pain are also activated by social pain. Exclusion was either
implicit, where individuals could not play because of extenuating
circumstances, or explicit when other players don’t pass to one player
“on purpose”. Researchers found that the ACC, which is linked the
distressing aspect of pain is activated in both implicit and explicit
exclusion, but that the RVPFC, which plays a role in the regulation or
inhibition of pain distress was only active in response to explicit
exclusion.
Eisenberger, and Lieberman explored literature and evidence on the
similar brain activation between physical and social pain. The
authors suggest that pain is felt through sensory processing and
unpleasant feelings. Individuals who are more pain sensitive seem to
have increased ACC activation. It would be interesting to see the
brain activation of people who seem to enjoy pain to see if they have
equal or less ACC activation. They suggest the ACC is active in both
monitoring discrepancies and distress. Evidence of the similarities
between physical and social pain include enhanced sensitivity to pain
in one area enhances sensitivity to pain in the other and social
support and certain drugs seem to reduce both social and physical
pain.
The McDowell, Twenge, & Slementz article looked at brain scans while
examining the effect of social exclusion on self control. One thing I
was unsure about in the article was the use of MMG technology because
at one point they say that “MEG provides a direct measure of neuronal
activity” and then later they say “locations of sources in the brain
cannot be directly inferred from spatial distribution of MEG
signals.” So they use it for its direct measurement, but it doesn’t
measure directly? Also, I did not like the social exclusion
manipulation. By using a personality measure that will cause future
loneliness, you are looking at a direct aspect of the self causing
exclusion (personality), a future event of exclusion, and with the
passing of time it is possible for an individual to prevent this
future inclusion by altering personality. It seems much different
that excluding someone form playing a game in the present. Also, I
was curious about the math problems as a measure of self-control,
because some studies use math problems as a control group in self-
control studies.
> wanted a clearer concept of what this meant, so I checked out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_squareand found that Euler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler) discovered it (amongst many
Stuart Daman
that made it a little easier to consolidate things as well.
One thing I noticed more this week than in previous weeks was the
tendency of studies to use samples of only one sex or the other. I
think this is a big problem. I understand that they are only using one
sex as a form of control. However, I do not feel that the researchers
are clear enough in their follow-up to emphasize that they should only
generalize their results to that one gender. The critical question
also becomes whether or not there any reason to expect that there
would be gender differences. If not, then why not use a mixed-gender
sample anyways? If so, isn't it going to be empirically important to
know what these differences are? In either case, in my opinion, they
should be using both sexes in their samples and comparing. Much of the
research for this week was related to emotional information/
processing. I feel it is an accepted notion that females are more
emotional and/or differentially emotional than males, at least on
average. Consistent with this would be different expectations for the
sexes, requiring samples of both for comparison and an inability to
generalize from one gender to another when single-sex samples are
employed.
The Schaefer et al (2003) paper gave a neat look into the whole
differentiation between hot and cool emotional processing. I though it
awkward when the authors described the propositional or cool system as
including processes similar to Baddeley's (1996) executive
functions ... that is a model of working memory--how do you map that
right onto emotion processing? I see the parallel they are trying to
make, but I think a lot more explication is necessary for it to fit. I
was blown away by the amount of money these participants were paid as
well. They also said at some point that HR was self-reported ... what
does that mean? And are there other sources of error to be worried
about with self-reported HR? The overall implications of their
hypotheses do seem to fit, regardless of any other the issues I
pointed out. When they say that the VMPFC might be a convergence/
divergence zone, it simply blew my mind to suggest that a specific
region was exceptionally responsible for the integration of various
sources of information; let alone their emotional nature. It makes me
wonder if this could be more closely researched in lesion studies to
see if this integration would break down in persons with VMPFC damage.
They also raise the question of whether or not propositional emotion
processing is different from more general propositional processing. I
think it would be strange to have two areas for similar types of
processing (not that the brain doesn't, I'm sure it does). I would
sooner expect one part of the brain to dominate propositional
processing, a small sub-region of which may be more specifically
devoted to propositional emotion processing OR two totally separate
areas are responsible for propositional and emotional processing,
respectively. Then, during propositional emotional processing,
activation should occur in both areas with some sort of similarity or
complementarity, suggesting that the two areas are working together.
The research on emotional and/or social exclusion pain as similar to
physical pain in mind numbing alone, if you ask me. To take it a step
further, Nathan DeWall has a paper in press showing that taking a pain
reliever like Tylenol can alleviate the pain of social exclusion, not
only physical pain. I don't know details, but can't wait to read it!
Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) highlighted the similar brain areas
for pain. One thing that occurred to me was the existence of different
types of pain receptors in the body... I am pretty sure that there are
four or five types each specific to different types of pain or damage
the body endures (e.g. heat/burning, prickling/stabbing, pressure/
bruising, etc.). I am pretty sure that these receptors are present out
in the body to detect damage at specific areas (i.e. receptors for
fingers are located in the fingers), but the brain must somehow be
able to distinguish signals coming from the different types of pain
receptors. Might social pain be like another type of pain receptor? It
would also seem to be located in the brain itself, because the damage
is abstract, not physiological.
I thought it was cool to see another type of neuroscientific method
applied, such as in the paper by Campbell and colleagues (2006).
However, the way they explained it raised more questions than answers.
Early on, they claim that MEG has good enough spatial resolution for
the questions they answer. Then, in the methods, it becomes apparent
that the spatial resolution is far more crude than that for fMRI,
sending the reader an inconsistent message. This method also seems to
exhibit similar nonindependence issues and a lot of possible error
introduced (but supposedly reduced) by smoothing procedures. They also
explain their methods as comparing exclusion to a control condition,
without being very specific as to how they are distinguishing their
control condition from an inclusion condition. Then they don't even
provide an example of any manipulation check to give us evidence that
their manipulation was effective. I thought it would have been
interesting to know about the distribution/differences in reaction
times in their task as well. I found it almost humorous and lame that
they comment in their discussion that one shortcoming was the long
duration of their task ... then take the first half of trials and
repeat your analysis to look for differences! The analysis would have
been post-hoc and may introduce family-wise error issues, but
descriptively would provide some information regarding this as a
shortcoming to their research. Their discussion was also basically
just a summary of their results and commenting on a few basic
limitations. I would like to have seen more regarding the implications
of their results and research for other topics/domains; as many
neuroscience papers tend to do very well (convergence/divergence zone
comment above and issue regarding differentiation of propositional and
emotional processing areas mentioned above are a good example of more
in-depth discussion information that this paper lacked).
I've read several papers authored by Jean Twenge before too, and
there's always been an overarching lack of depth in articles she's
authored and methodological issues that I have problems getting past.
By now I think I'm simply biased against her papers more generally, so
I apologize if it seems like I'm coming down hard on this paper in
particular.
Burklund and colleagues (2007) commented on the ecological validity of
their stimuli as one limitation to their study and recommended future
studies use more realistic dynamic facial expressions. The first thing
that came to my mind after reading this was mobile fMRI units.
Currently, I believe an fMRI machine takes up most of a small room ...
so how long until we can walk around with one in a helmet of some
sort? 5 years? 10? 25+? It took computers only about 10 or 20 years to
go from filling a room to barely consuming a single desk... spooky
stuff.
That's all I'm gonna clog the forum with this week. See you Friday!
Jenny Perella
I started with the Decety and Batson (2007) article this week. Though
I had high hopes for it, I was disappointed with it by the time I was
halfway through the article. I liked in the beginning how the authors
credit each discipline: social psych for providing important theories/
guidelines for studying info processing, and neuroscience for helping
to sort competing theories. I also liked how they proposed to discuss
how we process information about other people by looking at research
on adults, children, genetics, and neuroimaging. The authors start
breaking down the different aspects of interpersonal knowledge and
interpersonal sensitivity… I was unsure where they came up with these
ideas. I also felt like the paper from here on out was lacking many
important details: transitions/connections between ideas, relation of
ideas to the underlying concepts/theories, hard data, etc. The topic
of the paper was definitely interesting, I just wanted more from it.
Kross et al (2007) studied whether the individual differences in
rejection sensitivity (RS) could be found to be mediated by
differential activity of various brain regions involved in emotional
appraisal (ACC) and cognitive control (prefrontal cortex). High and
low RS individuals were scanned while viewing paintings of rejection
and acceptance. They predicted that high RS individuals would show
greater activation of the ACC than low RS individuals because they
presumably experience more distress when exposed to threatening
stimuli, or alternatively because high RS people are not as able to
regulate their emotional appraisals as low RS people in response to
threatening cues. They found that independent of RS, both rejection
and acceptance images were associated with greater activation in the
posterior cingulate and insula (important for emotional processing),
and also in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and medial frontal
cortex (important for cognitive control). They did find differential
effects of RS: low RS individuals showed more activity in the left
inferior and right dorsal frontal regions. I thought it was
interesting that this activation was negatively correlated with
distress ratings, suggesting that low RS individuals are better at
regulating social threat. Both high and low RS showed the same
activation in the areas involved in emotional processing. One thing I
wondered about here was if high RS individuals fail to appropriately
regulate emotional appraisals, and this is the only difference between
high RS and low RS individuals in terms of brain activation to
rejection-relevant stimuli, would it be possible to “train” someone to
become less sensitive to rejection? In particular I was thinking it
could perhaps be similar to the effects of practicing self-control,
which enhances one’s resources and prolongs depletion effects; could
practicing emotional regulation in some way make people less rejection-
sensitive?
I really enjoyed the two Eisenberger articles; I think the idea that
emotional pain is similar to physical pain is fascinating. I also
thought that it added a lot to the Kross article. The authors found
that the ACC was more active during implicit and explicit exclusion
than during inclusion, and that its activation was positively
correlated with self-reported distress. They also found that the right
ventral prefrontal cortex was active only during explicit exclusion
and correlated negatively with self-reported distress. Based on the
Kross reading, I wondered (and thought it was probable) if the rvpfc
would be less active in high RS individuals than low RS individuals
because low RS people are not as able to regulate rejection-related
distress. The authors also found that the activation of the ACC was
mediated by the rvpfc, and argued that this suggests that the rvpfc
regulates the distress of social exclusion by disrupting ACC
activity.
In the Eisenberger et al study, distress ratings were not
obtained for the implicit exclusion group (allegedly excluded because
computers weren’t linked yet) because it didn’t fit in with the cover
story. The authors could have been more creative to think of a way to
get these ratings. I think this is a major flaw in the study, because
the combined results of this study and the Kross study raise some
questions. Results of the Eisenberger et al study found that brain
activation for implicit exclusion was comparable to brain activation
of high RS individuals experiencing exclusion. Kross et al suggest
that distress is caused by activation of the ACC combined with the
inability to properly regulate this emotion (lower activation in the
prefrontal cortex), but we can’t know if that theory holds in this
study because distress was not measured in implicit condition. If the
implicit condition does experience distress, then why is the rvpfc
less active than in the explicit exclusion condition? And if the
implicit condition does not experience distress, then why do they show
the same pattern of results as high RS participants who did experience
distress? What is going on here?
Also, the Eisenberger et al suggest that explicit awareness of
exclusion may be required before individuals can make appropriate
attributions and regulate the associated distress; if this is true,
does this suggest that high RS individuals, though experiencing
distress, are not explicitly aware of their perception of rejection
(the perceived threat of rejection is implicit, not explicit)? Or,
does it suggest that HRS individuals lack the ability to appropriately
regulate?
Jennifer Vosilla
As I was reading one of the articles I remembered that Stuart had asked a couple weeks ago what the importance of knowing handedness was and I don’t think anyone actually answered. I knew it affected brain lateralization, but I wanted to find some statistics so I did a little googling. For example, 95% of right-handed people, but only 61.4% of left-handed people, have left-hemisphere dominance for language. 18.8% of lefties have language dominance in the right-hemisphere and 19.8% have bilateral activity for language. Basically, lefties aren’t used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function
Schaefer et al., 2003:
The authors explored the dual-memory model of emotion in which the schematic system involves the “hot” emotional processing, the actual emotion itself, while the propositional system involves high-level processing and emotional self-regulation, or “cold” emotional processing. As hypothesized, there was significant activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) during schematic processing and lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC; specifically the anterolateral prefrontal cortex) during propositional processing (averaging across all emotion conditions). Thinking back to the article last class about Intermittent Explosive Disorder, I liked that the authors first screened possible participants so that no participants used were on medication, had a history of neurological or psychiatric illnesses and had normal scores on the scales for depression, anxiety and alexythymia. According to Wikipedia, alexythymia is defined as having difficulty understanding, processing, or describing emotions and individuals possessing this trait are at greater risk for psychiatric illnesses. As we argued the other week, the participants with IED also met criteria for other psychological disorders, which could have influenced the results. However, as Stuart mentioned the participants are all men.
Kross et al. 2007:
Overall, I thought this article was one of the better ones this week. It was structured well and cited many past studies giving possible explanations for any differences found in results. Paintings were used as the stimulus to convey rejection, acceptance, positive valence and negative valence. Interestingly enough while viewing the rejection themed paintings, there was significantly greater left inferior and right dorsal frontal region activity in participants low in rejection sensitivity. The authors suggest high RS individuals may be unable or fail to regulate emotional appraisals.
Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004:
I was most interested by this article which hypothesized that physical and social pain might share the same underlying neural and computational mechanisms. The distressing aspect of pain thought to be in the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex (dACC), while the sensory discriminative aspect of pain is in the somatosensory cortex and posterior insula. I thought they cited many different studies and explained themselves well, overall. The main thing that caught my attention was that patients that underwent cingulotomies (creating lesions in the ACC) reported “that they are still able to feel the pain but that it no longer bothers them”. It was probably just me, but my first thought upon reading that was super-soldiers. Just me?.....Yep
Burklund, Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2007:
My favorite part of this study was that participants actually saw the video clips during the fMRI with the LCD goggles, but to be honest when I saw the 3 still frame examples on pg. 240 I started to laugh. I understand that the authors want to have clear cut examples of the different emotions; however, I felt that such exaggerated facial expressions could affect their data, though their findings did replicate past research with bilateral amygdala activity for the disapproval, anger and disgust faces and dACC activity for disgust faces but only relative to disapproval faces. Although the authors did find a significant positive correlation between rejection sensitivity scores and activity in the dACC (r=.70, p<.005) as hypothesized, they did not find significant activation of the dACC during the disapproval condition as compared to fixation.
Campbell, 2006:
All I’m going to say is lack of male participants, the long duration of the task, the use of the MEG rather than an fMRI and the social exclusion manipulation (telling participants that based on their level of extraversion or introversion that they would ‘‘end up alone later in life”).