VL11 Social Brain 1

• contradictory for maximum profict according to subjective expected utility

• evolutionary biology claims survival of the fittest, is contradictory to givimg something away for free

• evolutionary long term reasons —> adaptivity

  
  

• immediate, direct causes of behavior or trait

  —> e.g. neuroscience topics

• what causes the behavior at a specific moment?

• proximate snapshot

• how does behavior develop over the course of an idnividuals life?

• proximate story

• what is the adaptive value of the behavior

• ultimate snapshot

• how has the behavior evolved over the evolutionary history of the species

• mechanism

• ontogeny

• adaptive value

• phylogeny

• empathy altruism hypothesis and warm glow

• if we empathize with others —> we feel bad too and it feels good to help them because then we have less pain too

• empathy esp. personal distress subscale

• inclusion of others in self scale —> protection of those close to you —> survival of genes

• justice sensitivity: how unfair you feel something is from different perspectives

• perceptive sensitivity

• emotional reactions

• intrusiveness —> how much does this limit my autonomy

• feelings of strain

• mirror neurons: shared manifold of intersubjectivity

• monkeys: auditory feedback when the neurons fire

  • firing when monkey takes banana but also when someone else takes the banana

  —> mirror neurons as neural correlate of the state empathy

  • brain regions that are active both when

    • peopole experience an emotion

    • they observe another person experiencing this emotion

• involves affective conponents but not sensory components of pain

• people with higher trait empathy

  • higher activation in left anteriror insula & acc

  • insula = involved in emotion processind

    • receives projections about somatosensory states

    • processes negative embodied cognition + experience

• imagined pain to

  • loved-one

  • stranger

  • self

• ACC & Insula but much less for stranger than loved one

• right temporoparietal junction —> self-other distinction

  • more negative the more self & other are involved

  • importance for theory of mind

• insula

• anterior cingulate cortex

• temporoparietal junction

-  disgust, empathy, morality

o   Posterior: Auditory-somatosensory

o   Dorsal posterior: warmth & pain

o   Central: viscerosensory, gustatory

o   Anterior: olfactory

—> reciprocity, motivational regulation, affect regulation

o   Error detection

o   Conflict monitoring

o   Posterior: spatial, action

o   Anterior: choice outcome prediction & processing

—> deactivation results in lower self-other-distinction

o   Left: wernicke area & angular gyrus

o   Right: distinguishing self-produced from external signals

two conditions:

• reciprocity —> inclined to give so something back

• empathy —> observing of unfairness and helping out of empathy

Identical behavior but different motives lead to functional connectivity changes

—> positive connectivity changes in insula and ventral striatum in reciprocity and not in empathy

• correlation of justice sensitivity with grey matter volume in the insula