Tania Singer
Max Planck Foundation, Social Neuroscience Lab, Department Member
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Affektive (Empathie und Mitgefühl) und kognitive (Theory of Mind (ToM)) neuronale Netzwerke liegen unserem Verständnis Anderer zugrunde. Inwieweit diese Netzwerke direkt trennbar sind, ob sie einander bedingen, d.h. ob hohe... more
Affektive (Empathie und Mitgefühl) und kognitive (Theory of Mind (ToM)) neuronale Netzwerke liegen unserem Verständnis Anderer zugrunde. Inwieweit diese Netzwerke direkt trennbar sind, ob sie einander bedingen, d.h. ob hohe Empathie-Fähigkeit auch gute ToM-Fertigkeiten bedeutet, und wie sie zusammenarbeiten ist unbekannt. Im Rahmen der ReSource-Studie, einer 9-Monats-Trainings-Studie mit Modulen zu Achtsamkeit, Affekt und Perspektivübernahme sind wir sowohl diesen Fragen, als auch der differentiellen Plastizität der Netzwerke nachgegangen. Die neu-entwickelte Aufgabe ‚EmpaToM‘ konfrontiert Probanden (N=178) im fMRT mit naturalistischen Videos in denen emotionale oder neutrale Episoden berichtet werden. Auf jedes Video folgt eine Frage zum Inhalt des Videos, die entweder ToM oder logisches Schlussfolgern testet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen klare Trennbarkeit der Netzwerke, die während des Online-Verständnisses Anderer miteinander kommunizieren. Hohe Empathie-Fähigkeit geht dabei nicht automatisch mit guten ToM-Fertigkeiten einher. Besonders bedeutsam für die Psychotherapieforschung sind differentielle Effekte der verschiedenen Module, die zeigen, dass sozio-affektive und -kognitive Fähigkeiten separat trainiert werden können
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Research Interests: Psychology and Plasticity
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Social neuroscience has identified different neural networks, a more affective (empathy and compassion) and a more cognitive route (Theory of Mind (ToM)) to the understanding of others. While the anterior insula (AI) is critically... more
Social neuroscience has identified different neural networks, a more affective (empathy and compassion) and a more cognitive route (Theory of Mind (ToM)) to the understanding of others. While the anterior insula (AI) is critically involved when empathizing with the pain of another person, experiencing compassion for another’s suffering activates a different network including the ventral striatum. ToM tasks, in contrast, engage the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), temporal poles (TP) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). To study the separability and interrelations of these neural networks as well as their plasticity, we developed a novel paradigm, the EmpaToM. In the EmpaToM task, participants were presented with naturalistic video stimuli in which people recount autobiographical episodes that are either emotional or neutral. Each video is followed by empathy and compassion ratings and questions about the content of the video that probe ToM. Participants were tested before and after each training module in a 3T Scanner. At baseline, emotional vs. neutral videos increased activity in bilateral AI, which parametrically modulated with subjective empathy ratings. Compassion ratings, in contrast, covaried with activity in the ventral striatum. ToM activated bilateral TPJ, TP and MPFC. Inter-individual differences in the activity of these networks were uncorrelated, suggesting independence of these socio-affective and -cognitive abilities. Training in the Perspective, but not the Presence or Affective Module, enhanced performance in ToM questions. The compassion ratings, in contrast, increased more after the Affective and Perspective module, not so however after the Presence module. Similarly, differential change was also observed with regards to the neural networks underlying compassion and ToM. The present results confirm that the neural networks underlying empathy, compassion and ToM can be reliably identified within a single task and also demonstrate their independence on an inter-individual level – strong empathizers are not (necessarily) good mentalizers. Most critically, the training-related changes indicate that Theory of Mind can be trained by specific practices implemented in the Perspective Module. Surprisingly, there was an increase in experienced compassion after both, the Affective and the Perspective Modules. As no effect was observed after the Presence Module, which focused on attention and interoceptive awareness, the readiness to experience compassion seems to only increase after modules involving intersubjective exercises focusing on prosocial affect and motivation (Affective) or cognitive perspective taking of self and others (Perspective). In conclusion, these results provide first evidence that we can induce plasticity in socio-affective and socio-cognitive capacities through specifically designed mental training programs
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Introduction: The ability to understand other people's mind and feelings encompasses different abilities such as empathy, the ability to share affective states of others, and mentalizing, the ability to attribute mental states to... more
Introduction: The ability to understand other people's mind and feelings encompasses different abilities such as empathy, the ability to share affective states of others, and mentalizing, the ability to attribute mental states to others. Functional neuroimaging has identified distinct substrates of both empathy and mentalizing. While for example empathizing with the pain or suffering of others consistently involves dorsal anterior insula cortex (dAI), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC), mentalizing relates to activity in a network including dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), posterior temporo-parietal junction (pTPJ), and superior temporal gyrus/sulcus (STG/STS). Whether this divergence is also found at the level of brain structure is unknown. Here, we employ MRI covariance analysis to jointly assess structural network substrates of individual differences in empathy and mentalizing. Methods: We studied 154 healthy participants (94 women, mean±SD age=40.5±9.5 years). We aggregated measures derived from multiple tasks (Samson et al., 2010; Klimecki et al., 2013; Kanske et al., in press) to create constructs of empathy and mentalizing. T1-weighted MRI was obtained using a 3T Siemens Verio scanner. FreeSurfer was used of generate cortical surface models and to measure cortical thickness (Fischl and Dale, 2000). Analysis was performed using SurfStat (Worsley et al., 2009). Based on intersections of task-based functional activations in the same subjects (Kanske et al., in press) and meta-analytical results (Lamm et al., 2011; Mar, 2011), we defined seeds involved in empathy (dAI, aMCC, IFG) and mentalizing pTPJ, STG/STS). We furthermore studied the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG), a region proximal to the pTPJ that has been suggested to play a role in affective perspective taking (Silani et al., 2013). To map structural covariance networks, we correlated thickness of each seed with thickness across the entire cortical mantle. We studied the interaction between seed covariance strength and individual differences in empathy and mentalizing. Findings were corrected for multiple comparisons using random field theory. Results: We observed that individual differences in empathy and mentalizing related to the covariance of non-overlapping networks. Specifically, individuals with high empathy score had increased right dAI covariance to lateral prefrontal regions, whereas importantly, covariance of TPJ, dmPFC, STG/STS were not modulated by individual differences in empathy (Figure 1). On the other hand, individuals scoring high on mentalizing capacity had increased pTPJ and STG/STS network covariance to mPFC and TPJ (Figure 2). And again, no modulation of dAI, aMCC and IFG was observed by individual differences in mentalizing scores. Interestingly and in line with previous work, rSMG was modulated by empathy, but not mentalizing, to regions similar to the covariance network found in right dAI (Figure 3)
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Social neuroscience has identified different neural networks, a more affective (empathy and compassion) and a more cognitive route (Theory of Mind (ToM)), to the understanding of others. While the anterior insula (AI) is critically... more
Social neuroscience has identified different neural networks, a more affective (empathy and compassion) and a more cognitive route (Theory of Mind (ToM)), to the understanding of others. While the anterior insula (AI) is critically involved when empathizing with the pain of another person, experiencing compassion for another’s suffering activates a different network including the ventral striatum. ToM tasks, in contrast, engage the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), temporal poles (TP) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). The separability and interrelations of these two capacities and their related neural networks is, however, little understood. We, therefore, developed a novel task, the EmpaToM. Participants are presented with naturalistic video stimuli in which people recount autobiographical episodes that are either emotional or neutral. Each video is followed by empathy and compassion ratings and questions about the content of the video that probe ToM. Emotional vs. neutral videos increased activity in bilateral AI, which parametrically modulated with subjective empathy ratings. Compassion ratings, in contrast, covaried with activity in the ventral striatum. ToM activated bilateral TPJ, TP and MPFC. These two networks interact during the online understanding of others. However, inter-individual differences in the activity of these networks were uncorrelated, suggesting some independence, such that strong empathizers are not (necessarily) good mentalizers. Separate training of these capacities within the longitudinal ReSource study has differential enhancing effects on ToM performance and compassion, providing some first evidence that we can induce plasticity in socio-affective and socio-cognitive capacities
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, Cognition, Social Cognition, and 15 moreMagnetic Resonance Imaging, Social Neuroscience, Medicine, Empathy, Brain Mapping, Mentalization, Humans, Cerebral Cortex, Female, Neuroimage, Male, Adult, Parietal Lobe, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
The neural networks associated with socio-affective (empathy, compassion) and socio-cognitive processes (mentalizing/Theory of Mind) have been well-characterized over the last years. The goal of the present talk is twofold: (1) To explore... more
The neural networks associated with socio-affective (empathy, compassion) and socio-cognitive processes (mentalizing/Theory of Mind) have been well-characterized over the last years. The goal of the present talk is twofold: (1) To explore the separability of these functions during online social understanding on a subjective, behavioral and on a neural level and (2) to investigate the embedding of the related neural substrates in large-scale task-free neural networks. To this end, we acquired resting state as well as behavioral and neuroimaging data (fMRI) during a social video task in a large sample of participants (N = 178). The videos were short autobiographical narrations of emotionally negative and neutral events that allowed for asking Theory of Mind questions about the thoughts of the narrators and factual reasoning questions about the content of the stories, thereby allowing for independent assessment of socio-affective and socio-cognitive processing. Linking the phenomenological with the neural level, participants reported increased negative affect after emotional stories, which covaried with activity strength in the meta-analytically defined “empathy network”, but not with activity in the “Theory of Mind network”. Vice versa, performance in answering the Theory of Mind questions correlated with “Theory of Mind network”, but not “empathy network” activity. Interestingly, neither behavioral markers of social affect and mentalizing (i.e. emotional valence ratings and Theory of Mind performance) nor activity in the two respective neural networks correlated with each other. Furthermore, resting state functional connectivity to task activation based seed regions for empathy and Theory of Mind yielded distinct networks that strongly overlapped with the respective task activations and correspond to the well-described default mode network (Theory of Mind seeds) and the salience or central executive network (empathy). The data strongly argue for dissociable and independent socio-affective and -cognitive functions that are embedded in large-scale task-unrelated neural circuits
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Introduction: The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in human social cognition. Social neuroscience has differentiated at least two functions and the respective neural networks that support successful interaction: a network that... more
Introduction: The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in human social cognition. Social neuroscience has differentiated at least two functions and the respective neural networks that support successful interaction: a network that allows for affect sharing (empathizing) and underlies the understanding of others’ affective states and a network that enables the inference of thoughts, beliefs, and goals and underlies understanding others’ mental states (Theory of Mind (ToM)). Empathy paradigms have mainly focused on witnessing pain or suffering and have revealed increased activation in the anterior insula (AI) and the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) [1]. ToM tasks typically involve inferring others’ thoughts or intentions and induce increased activation in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the temporal poles and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) [2]. Although these different routes of social cognition show differential time courses during development [3] and are differentially impaired in psychopathology [4], these routes usually interact in healthy brains. So far, fMRI paradigms are lacking, which can reliably dissociate mentalizing and empathizing routes within a single person. The aim of the present study was to develop and validate an fMRI task in which demands on the affective and the cognitive social cognition route are manipulated independently and that therefore allows the investigation of their interaction as well as differential impairment. Methods: We developed the EmpaToM, a 30 minute paradigm presenting participants with naturalistic video stimuli (~15 seconds) in which people recount auto-biographical episodes that are either emotionally negative (e.g. loss of a loved one) or neutral (control condition; e.g., commuting to work). Each video is followed by ratings of affect and of empathic concern. Subsequently, specific questions about the content of the video are probing either ToM (questions about the mental states of people in the video) or no ToM (control condition; factual reasoning). The task, hence, follows a 2 (negative emotional load versus no emotional load) x 2 (ToM requirements versus factual reasoning) factorial design. In a first validation study, 19 participants were tested in the EmpaToM and classical tasks measuring empathy (the Social Video Task (SoVT) [5]) and ToM [2] (3T Siemens Verio Scanner; TR = 2000; TE = ; 37 slices (2 mm)). Results: Viewing negative emotional compared to neutral videos increased activation in a distinct network including the bilateral AI and aMCC. This empathy network overlapped with activity elicited by the SoVT [5] and coordinates derived from a meta-analysis on empathy for pain paradigms [1]. Affect ratings and emotional concern ratings after the emotionally negative videos were correlated with the IRI subscale ‘empathic concern’ and with SoVT concern ratings. Furthermore, activity in the aMCC and right AI was parametrically modulated by the subjective rating of negative emotion experienced after each video. Contrasting ToM- and factual reasoning during the questions activated the well-described network including bilateral TPJ, temporal poles and mPFC. Again, these clusters largely overlapped with a classical false-belief ToM-task [2]. A subsequent study with 200 participants replicated these patterns. Conclusions: The present results confirm that the EmpaTom is able to reliably identify and separate the networks underlying our abilities to empathize (affective route) and to mentalize (cognitive route) within individuals and one task. This makes the EmpaToM a suitable task for the efficient differentiation of empathy and ToM related networks and for investigating their interaction. The EmpaToM could be of tremendous use for both the comprehensive characterization of different types of deficits in psychopathology as well as for the measurement of differential training effects and interventions both on the level of behavior and brain functioning. References [1] Lamm, C., Decety, J., & Singer, T. (2011). ‘Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain’, NeuroImage, vol. 54, pp. 2492-2502. [2] Dodell-Feder, D., Koster-Hale, J., Bedny, M., Saxe, R. (2011). ‘fMRI item analysis in a theory of mind task’, Neuroimage, vol. 55, pp. 705-12. [3] Singer, T. (2006). ‘The neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading: Review of literature and implications for future research’, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 30, pp. 855-863. [4] Bird, G., Silani, G., Brindley, R., White, S., Frith, U., & Singer, T. (2010). ‘Empathic brain responses in insula are modulated by levels of alexithymia but not autism’, vol., 133, pp. 1515-1525. [5] Klimecki, O.M., Leiberg, S., Lamm, C., & Singer, T. 2013). ‚Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect After Compassion Training’. Cerebral Cortex, vol. 23, pp. 1552-1561
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Aggressive, violent behaviour is a major burden and challenge for society. It has been linked to deficits in social understanding, but the evidence is inconsistent and the specifics of such deficits are unclear. Here, we investigated... more
Aggressive, violent behaviour is a major burden and challenge for society. It has been linked to deficits in social understanding, but the evidence is inconsistent and the specifics of such deficits are unclear. Here, we investigated affective (empathy) and cognitive (Theory of Mind) routes to understanding other people in aggressive individuals. Twenty-nine men with a history of legally relevant aggressive behaviour (i.e. serious assault) and 32 control participants were tested using a social video task (EmpaToM) that differentiates empathy and Theory of Mind and completed questionnaires on aggression and alexithymia. Aggressive participants showed reduced empathic responses to emotional videos of others’ suffering, which correlated with aggression severity. Theory of Mind performance, in contrast, was intact. A mediation analysis revealed that reduced empathy in aggressive men was mediated by alexithymia. These findings stress the importance of distinguishing between socio-affecti...
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This chapter focuses on the neuroscience of compassion and related social emotions such as empathy, empathic concern, or empathic distress. First, we review neuroscientific literature on empathy and relate empathy to similar social... more
This chapter focuses on the neuroscience of compassion and related social emotions such as empathy, empathic concern, or empathic distress. First, we review neuroscientific literature on empathy and relate empathy to similar social emotions. We then turn to neuroscientific research on caregiving and social connection before describing cross-sectional studies on the neural signatures of compassion. To investigate whether training of compassion can change neural functions, the neural “fingerprints” of compassion expertise were studied in both expert and inexperienced meditators. The latter included the comparison between functional plasticity induced by empathy for suffering as opposed to compassion training. These studies show that compassion training changes neural functions, and that the neural substrates related to empathy for suffering differ experientially as well as neuronally. This is in line with the observation of distinct behavioral patterns related to feelings of empathic ...
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Meditation can be regarded as a kind of mental training, and may thus be linked to increased effort and physiological arousal. Such definition is in contrast to a widely held belief that meditation mainly leads to relaxation associated... more
Meditation can be regarded as a kind of mental training, and may thus be linked to increased effort and physiological arousal. Such definition is in contrast to a widely held belief that meditation mainly leads to relaxation associated with lower effort and physiological arousal. However, effects of meditation on effort and physiological arousal may vary depending on the type of meditation, degree of mental effort, and amount of training. In the current study, we therefore assessed heart rate (HR), high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) and subjective ratings of effort and likeability during three types of meditation varying in their cognitive and attentional requirements, namely breathing meditation (BM), loving-kindness meditation (LKM) and observing-thoughts meditation (OTM). As part of a one-year longitudinal mental training study called the ReSource project, participants practiced each type of meditation exercise on a daily basis for 3 months. In line with our hypotheses, HR and effort were higher during LKM and OTM compared to BM. With training over time, HR and likeability increased, while HF-HRV and the subjective experience of effort decreased. The increase in HR and decrease in HF-HRV over time was stronger for LKM and OTM as compared to BM. The current study therefore suggests that core meditations aiming at improving compassion (LKM) and meta-cognitive skills (OTM) require effort and are associated with higher physiological arousal as compared to BM. Overall, these findings can be helpful in making more specific suggestions about which type of meditation is most adaptive for a given context and population
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Though prosocial behavior is crucial for societies to function its reliable scientific assessment in the lab is still a challenge. The present study integrated paradigms from diverse disciplines in order to identify the overall structure... more
Though prosocial behavior is crucial for societies to function its reliable scientific assessment in the lab is still a challenge. The present study integrated paradigms from diverse disciplines in order to identify the overall structure and sub-components of prosociality. To this end, participants (N=187) played anonymous one-shot versions of economic games such as the Dictator Game, the Trust Game, and the 2nd and 3rd Person Punishment Game, engaged in the Zürich Prosocial Game, completed a donation as well as social discounting task and filled in trait questionnaires typically employed to assess prosociality. Results of a factor analyses identified four independent factors: a factor ‘Prosocial Motivation’ comprises behaviors as diverse as helping, generosity, donations to NGOs, favoring equal distributions, and trust. Factor 2 ‘Readiness to punish’ reflects the inclination to punish violations of distribution norms and choose monetary distributions independent of social distance. Factor 3 ‘Strategizing’ describes the tendency to make decisions dependent on cost-benefit analyses. Finally, factor 4 “Self-Report Measures” is determined by the method of using trait questionnaires and reflects people’s personal view on their own prosociality. These findings reveal a more differentiated picture of human prosociality involving meaningful sub-components, one of them being clearly determined by the underlying methods. Such findings may have important implications for research on the determinants of prosociality ranging from genetics to development and plasticity research
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The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns have posed unique and severe challenges to our global society. To gain an integrative understanding of pervasive social and mental health impacts in 3522 Berlin residents aged 18 to 65, we... more
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns have posed unique and severe challenges to our global society. To gain an integrative understanding of pervasive social and mental health impacts in 3522 Berlin residents aged 18 to 65, we systematically investigated the structural and temporal relationship between a variety of psychological indicators of vulnerability, resilience and social cohesion before, during and after the first lockdown in Germany using a retrospective longitudinal study design. Factor analyses revealed that (a) vulnerability and resilience indicators converged on one general bipolar factor, (b) residual variance of resilience indicators formed a distinct factor of adaptive coping capacities and (c) social cohesion could be reliably measured with a hierarchical model including four first-order dimensions of trust, a sense of belonging, social interactions and social engagement, and one second-order social cohesion factor. In the second step, latent change score m...
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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad,... more
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.:ge x, F fo empathy and propose several factors that might modulate
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Training Mind and Heart: Effects of Mental Training on Mental and Physical Health, Brain and Prosocial Behavior Emerging fields such as the social- and contemplative neurosciences have focused on the questions of how people relate to and... more
Training Mind and Heart: Effects of Mental Training on Mental and Physical Health, Brain and Prosocial Behavior Emerging fields such as the social- and contemplative neurosciences have focused on the questions of how people relate to and understand each other. Hereby, the ability for cognitive perspective taking is differentiated from concepts of emotion contagion, empathy, and compassion; the former represents a cognitive route to the understanding of others, the latter a motivational and affective route. Recently, neuroscientists have started to investigate the plasticity of the social brain, that is the trainability of capacities such as empathy, compassion or perspective taking through meditation-based mental training and describe its effects on changes in brain functions, subjective well-being, pro-social behavior, and health. One of these studies is a large-scale multi-disciplinary one-year secular mental training study, the ReSource Project, that aims at the daily cultivation of different capacities such as body awareness, perspective taking, empathy, and compassion as well as prosocial motivation and behavior. I will provide first results and evidence for socio-affective as well as socio-cognitive brain plasticity after mental training of empathy or compassion on the one hand and cognitive perspective taking on the other. While empathy training enhanced negative affect and activation in brain networks associated with suffering, compassion training resulted in an increase of positive affect and activation in brain networks associated to affiliation and care. Finally, daily cultivation of taking another’s person perspective lead to an improvement in measures of social intelligence with associated changes in neuronal mentalizing networks. Finally, such intersubjective skill training enhanced prosocial behavior and reduced social stress. These findings will be discussed in the context of how these can help move towards a more caring and balanced society. From the contemplative side, we will consider the difference between altruistic love, empathy and compassion. We will explore the consequences of dealing with the suffering of others only with empathy, which seems to lead to emotional exhaustion and burn-out, and the ways that cultivating altruistic love and compassion through training the mind (meditation) can serve as an antitode to burn out and allow to deal with the suffering of others in more constructive and meaningful ways
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序 思いやりの経済学に向けて １ 利他と向社会的行動に関する科学的研究（利己‐利他論争—心理学的視点から；共感と内受容性皮質；コンパッションの神経基盤；利他に関する仏教的観点；生存のための生物学的要求—利他再考） ２ 利他と向社会的行動に関する経済学的研究（社会的ジレンマ実験；仏教経済学事始め；幸福の経済学；利他的懲罰と公共財の創出） ３... more
序 思いやりの経済学に向けて １ 利他と向社会的行動に関する科学的研究（利己‐利他論争—心理学的視点から；共感と内受容性皮質；コンパッションの神経基盤；利他に関する仏教的観点；生存のための生物学的要求—利他再考） ２ 利他と向社会的行動に関する経済学的研究（社会的ジレンマ実験；仏教経済学事始め；幸福の経済学；利他的懲罰と公共財の創出） ３ 経済システムへの向社会性の導入（目的のある利益；マイクロファイナンスは何を為しうるか？；ベアフット・カレッジ；コンパッションに満ちたリーダーシップ） 結語 コンパッションは贅沢品ではない
With the emergence of the fields of social-affective and contemplative sciences researchers have started thinking about the challenge to integrate first-person subjective reports with the traditional third-person objective measurements of... more
With the emergence of the fields of social-affective and contemplative sciences researchers have started thinking about the challenge to integrate first-person subjective reports with the traditional third-person objective measurements of behavior, brain, and body. A good example for such an integrated approach is plasticity research based on mental training studies. Thus, recent findings have suggested that training of mental capacities such as attention, mindfulness, empathy and compassion is indeed effective and leads to changes in both subjective well-being as well as in brain functions, health, and behavior. As an example for plasticity research, I will introduce the ReSource Project, a large-scale interdisciplinary and multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program that aims at the cultivation of attention, interoceptive awareness, perspective taking on self and others, meta-cognition, compassion, empathy, and prosocial motivation. To achieve these goals, we assessed more than 90 measures in more than 200 subjects including subjective measures and a huge variety of objective data ranging from behavioral, functional and structural brain-, autonomic nervous system- to genetic and hormonal measures. I will present first results of this large-scale study relating to differential pattern of brain plasticity observed after empathy versus compassion versus cognitive perspective taking training respectively. Furthermore I will present training-module specific findings of stress-reduction (i.e. cortisol) and prosocial behavior. Finally, I will use examples of the ReSource Project to highlight challenges related to the appropriate integration of measures of first-person subjective experience and third-person measurements and discuss these in the context of plasticity research in the field of social neurosciences
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A variety of contemplative practices putatively improves the ability to deal with difficult emotions. However, it is unclear how these different types of mental training differentially affect the use of different emotion regulation... more
A variety of contemplative practices putatively improves the ability to deal with difficult emotions. However, it is unclear how these different types of mental training differentially affect the use of different emotion regulation strategies. We addressed this question in a 9-month longitudinal study in which participants (N = 332) took part in three distinct 3-month mental training modules cultivating attentional (the Presence module), sociocognitive (the Perspective module), and socioaffective, compassion-based skills (the Affect module). In addition, the participants completed the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and the Brief COPE Inventory at baseline and after every module. The Presence module did not notably change the use of any emotion regulation strategies, whereas the Perspective and the Affect modules both increased the use of acceptance. Moreover, the Perspective module was especially effective in increasing the use of adaptive, cognitive transformations such as reappraisal, perspective taking, and planning, whereas the Affect module uniquely led to decreases in maladaptive avoidant strategies such as distraction and refocusing. These findings imply that (a) cultivating present-moment focused attention might not be sufficient to change emotion regulation strategies, (b) different types of mental practices focusing on either cognitive perspective taking or sociomotivational capacities lead to adaptive emotion regulation via different strategies, and (c) specifically cultivating positive affect and compassion can decrease avoidance of difficult emotions. This research suggests that different mental training exercises affect the use of specific emotion regulation strategies and that clinical interventions should be designed accordingly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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Research Interests: Psychology, Child Development, Theory of Mind, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Diffusion Tensor Imaging, and 15 moreLanguage Development, Medicine, Multidisciplinary, Prefrontal Cortex, Executive Function, Temporal Lobe, Humans, Female, Male, Parietal Lobe, Functional Neuroimaging, Neural pathways, Nature Communications, Child preschool, and Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging
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Childhood is marked by profound changes in prosocial behaviour. The underlying motivational mechanisms remain poorly understood. We investigated the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood and the... more
Childhood is marked by profound changes in prosocial behaviour. The underlying motivational mechanisms remain poorly understood. We investigated the development of altruistically motivated helping in middle childhood and the neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms driving this development. 127 6-12 year-old children performed a novel gustatory costly helping task designed to measure altruistic motivations of helping behaviour. Neurocognitive and -affective mechanisms including emotion regulation, emotional clarity and attentional reorienting were assessed experimentally through an extensive task-battery while functional brain activity and connectivity were measured during an empathy for taste paradigm and during rest. Altruistically motivated helping increased with age. Out of all mechanisms probed for, only emotional clarity increased with age and accounted for altruistically motivated helping. This was associated with greater functional integration of the empathy-related network with fronto-parietal brain regions at rest. We isolate a highly specific neuroaffective mechanism as the crucial driver of altruistically motivated helping during child development. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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Background The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to a mental health crisis on a global scale. Epidemiological studies have reported a drastic increase in mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, increased loneliness and feelings... more
Background The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to a mental health crisis on a global scale. Epidemiological studies have reported a drastic increase in mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, increased loneliness and feelings of disconnectedness from others, while resilience levels have been negatively affected, indicating an urgent need for intervention. The current study is embedded within the larger CovSocial project which sought to evaluate longitudinal changes in vulnerability, resilience and social cohesion during the pandemic. The current second phase will investigate the efficacy of brief online mental training interventions in reducing mental health problems, and enhancing psychological resilience and social capacities. It further provides a unique opportunity for the prediction of intervention effects by individual biopsychosocial characteristics and preceding longitudinal change patterns during the pandemic in 2020/21. Methods We will examine the differential ...
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Cooperative decisions are well predicted by stable individual differences in social values but it remains unclear how they may be modulated by emotions such as fear and anger. Moving beyond specific decision paradigms, we used a suite of... more
Cooperative decisions are well predicted by stable individual differences in social values but it remains unclear how they may be modulated by emotions such as fear and anger. Moving beyond specific decision paradigms, we used a suite of economic games and investigated how experimental inductions of fear or anger affect latent factors of decision making in individuals with selfish or prosocial value orientations. We found that, relative to experimentally induced anger, induced fear elicited higher scores on a cooperation factor, and that this effect was entirely driven by selfish participants. In fact, induced fear brought selfish individuals to cooperate similarly to prosocial individuals, possibly as a (selfish) mean to seek protection in others. These results suggest that two basic threat-related emotions, fear and anger, differentially affect a generalized form of cooperation and that this effect is buffered by prosocial value orientation.
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Playing action video games (AVG) has been associated with benefits in cognition. Nevertheless, AVG are often violent and concerns exist regarding the affective and social profile of frequent action video game players (AVGPs). This... more
Playing action video games (AVG) has been associated with benefits in cognition. Nevertheless, AVG are often violent and concerns exist regarding the affective and social profile of frequent action video game players (AVGPs). This cross-sectional study contrasted individuals who frequently or seldom play AVG on laboratory measures of aggressive and altruistically-motivated behaviors, and self-report measures of aggressive and empathic personalities. Moreover, since previous research highlighted that competitive gaming is linked to aggression, a second goal was to investigate competitive personality in AVGPs. Using multiple regressions, we estimated how competitive personality, together with other personality and mental health factors, may explain individual variance in aggressive and altruistically-motivated behaviors. AVGPs displayed higher levels of competitive personality, aggressive behavior and personality compared with non-gamers, despite no difference in empathic personality ...
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Psychosocial stress is a public health burden in modern societies. Chronic stress-induced disease processes are, in large part, mediated via the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the... more
Psychosocial stress is a public health burden in modern societies. Chronic stress-induced disease processes are, in large part, mediated via the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary system. We asked whether the contemplative mental training of different practice types targeting attentional, socio-affective (for example, compassion), or socio-cognitive abilities (for example, perspective-taking) in the context of a 9-month longitudinal training study offers an effective means for psychosocial stress reduction. Using a multimethod approach including subjective, endocrine, autonomic, and immune markers and testing 313 participants in a standardized psychosocial laboratory stressor, we show that all three practice types markedly reduced self-reported stress reactivity in healthy participants. However, only the training of intersubjective skills via socio-affective and socio-cognitive routes attenuated the physiological stress ...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Individuality, Cognition, Social Cognition, and 15 moreMagnetic Resonance Imaging, Medicine, FMRI, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Emotions, Empathy, Social behavior, Humans, Female, Male, Dynamic Causal Modelling, Middle Aged, Adult, Social Behavior, and Neurosciences
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Narcissism is characterized by a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, and similar values, which has been discussed as intra-individual regulation of a grandiose, but vulnerable self-concept. To explore where... more
Narcissism is characterized by a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, and similar values, which has been discussed as intra-individual regulation of a grandiose, but vulnerable self-concept. To explore where the narcissistic mind wanders, we used an experience-sampling approach in a sample with large variability in pathological narcissism inventory scores. Multilevel modeling revealed (1) more mind-wandering in participants with higher levels of narcissism and (2) a difference in the content of these thoughts (more self- and other-related, past and future oriented, negative content). Critically, (3) in high levels of narcissism, the self-related thoughts were associated with more positive valence and were also more future oriented. The results demonstrate the validity of the assumed grandiose, self-absorbed view of oneself in narcissism, which includes self-indulgent fantasies of future success. We also found additional evidence for negative, past-oriented thoughts in narcissism, a dysfunctional pattern reminiscent of rumination, possibly linked to increased psychopathological vulnerability in narcissism.
Research Interests: Psychology, Personality Disorders, Humans, Female, Narcissism, and 3 moreMale, Self Concept, and Adult
Diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) include instability in identity and interpersonal relationships. Here, we probed whether instability is already present in BPD patients' thoughts about themselves and... more
Diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) include instability in identity and interpersonal relationships. Here, we probed whether instability is already present in BPD patients' thoughts about themselves and others. We tested BPD patients (N=27) and healthy controls (N=25) with a mind-wandering task that assesses content and variability of stimulus-independent self-generated thoughts. Multi-level modeling revealed that while BPD patients and healthy controls mind-wander to a similar extent, BPD patients' thoughts are colored predominantly negatively. Most importantly, although their thoughts concerned the self and others as much as in controls, they fluctuated more strongly in the degree to which their thoughts concerned themselves and others and also gave more extreme ratings. Self- and other related thoughts that were more extreme were also more negative in valence. The increased variability supports current conceptualizations of BPD and may account fo...
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... edu. Page 2. 5 Brain Signatures of Social Decision Making Kevin McCabe1 andTania Singer2 1Center ... Switzerland Abstract Over the last decade much progress has been made in the study of social decision mak-ing. From ...
Pain features centrally in numerous illnesses and generates enormous public health costs. Despite its ubiquity, the psychological and neurophysiological nature of pain remains controversial. Here, we survey one controversy in particular:... more
Pain features centrally in numerous illnesses and generates enormous public health costs. Despite its ubiquity, the psychological and neurophysiological nature of pain remains controversial. Here, we survey one controversy in particular: the relation between nociceptive pain, which is somatic in origin, and empathic pain, which arises from observing others in pain. First, we review evidence for neural overlap between nociceptive and empathic pain and what this overlap implies about underlying mental representations. Then, we propose a framework for understanding the nature of the psychological and neurophysiological correspondence across these types of 'pain'. This framework suggests new directions for research that can better identify shared and dissociable representations underlying different types of distress, and can inform theories about the nature of pain.
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Functional neuroimaging studies have suggested the existence of 2 largely distinct social cognition networks, one for theory of mind (taking others' cognitive perspective) and another for empathy (sharing others' affective... more
Functional neuroimaging studies have suggested the existence of 2 largely distinct social cognition networks, one for theory of mind (taking others' cognitive perspective) and another for empathy (sharing others' affective states). To address whether these networks can also be dissociated at the level of brain structure, we combined behavioral phenotyping across multiple socio-cognitive tasks with 3-Tesla MRI cortical thickness and structural covariance analysis in 270 healthy adults, recruited across 2 sites. Regional thickness mapping only provided partial support for divergent substrates, highlighting that individual differences in empathy relate to left insular-opercular thickness while no correlation between thickness and mentalizing scores was found. Conversely, structural covariance analysis showed clearly divergent network modulations by socio-cognitive and -affective phenotypes. Specifically, individual differences in theory of mind related to structural integration...
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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) shows deficits in self-other distinction during theory of mind (ToM). Here we investigated whether ASD patients also show difficulties in self-other distinction during empathy and if potential deficits are... more
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) shows deficits in self-other distinction during theory of mind (ToM). Here we investigated whether ASD patients also show difficulties in self-other distinction during empathy and if potential deficits are linked to dysfunctional resting-state connectivity patterns. In a first study, ASD patients and controls performed an emotional egocentricity paradigm and a ToM task. In the second study, resting-state connectivity of right temporo-parietal junction and right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) were analysed using a large-scale fMRI data set. ASD patients exhibited deficient ToM but normal emotional egocentricity, which was paralleled by reduced connectivity of regions of the ToM network and unimpaired rSMG network connectivity. These results suggest spared self-other distinction during empathy and an intact rSMG network in ASD.
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The prevalence of psychosocial stress in Western societies is constantly on the rise. Its influence on social decision-making, however, remains poorly understood. Whereas, it is known that stress triggers psychological and physiological... more
The prevalence of psychosocial stress in Western societies is constantly on the rise. Its influence on social decision-making, however, remains poorly understood. Whereas, it is known that stress triggers psychological and physiological defense mechanisms, indications of such patterns in social decisions are ambivalent. We sought to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of stress-induced social decisions. We recruited 145 men, who were individually exposed to either a psychosocial stressor or a control condition, while primed with affiliation by interacting either with members of an in- or an out-group. We found that stressed participants were less trusting and engaged in less costly punishment compared to the non-stressed control group. Interacting with out-group members led to less reciprocity and more spiteful punishment. There was no interaction between stress and the affiliation conditions in any of the used social-decision-making paradigms. Lastly, while stress-reactive cortisol levels had no effect on trust behavior, higher baseline cortisol was correlated with greater trust. Our findings suggest that previous ambiguities in data reported on the influence of stress on social decisions, namely tend-and-befriend behavior may have arisen through critical social confounds in the induction of stress. When controlling for potential social confounds, stress may trigger fight-or-flight behavior as indicated by increased social anxiety. These findings highlight the considerable context-dependence of psychosocial stress and its effects on social behavior.
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The emerging fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have started to investigate the neural foundations of empathy and fairness. Even though not frequently linked, both concepts point to humans as altruistic beings who care for... more
The emerging fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have started to investigate the neural foundations of empathy and fairness. Even though not frequently linked, both concepts point to humans as altruistic beings who care for others. Recently social neuroscientists have measured brain activity associated with different empathic processes and revealed common neural responses when feeling sensations such as disgust, touch or pain in ourselves, and when perceiving someone else being disgusted, touched or in pain. At the same time, research in neuroeconomics has used game theoretical paradigms to study our sense of fairness. Several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show involvement of anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex in response to unfair compared with fair offers during such monetary exchange games. Interestingly, the same brain regions are also involved in empathy for pain or disgust of others. More generally, anterior insula cortex is sugge...
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Human civilization is based on the successful pursuit of long-term goals, requiring the ability to forego immediate pleasure for the sake of larger future rewards. This ability improves with age, but the precise cognitive and neural... more
Human civilization is based on the successful pursuit of long-term goals, requiring the ability to forego immediate pleasure for the sake of larger future rewards. This ability improves with age, but the precise cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying its development remain elusive. The developmental changes could result either from younger children valuing immediate rewards more strongly or because older children become better at controlling their impulses. By implementing 2 tasks, a choice-independent valuation task and an intertemporal choice task, both behaviorally and using fMRI in twenty 6- to 13-year old children, we show developmental improvements in behavioral control to uniquely account for age-related changes in temporal discounting. We show further that overcoming temptation during childhood occurs as a function of an age-related increase in functional coupling between value signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and brain regions dedicated to behavioral contro...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Reinforcement Learning, Fear, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and 15 moreSocial Perception, Facial expression, Adolescent, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Emotions, Temporal Lobe, Humans, Galvanic Skin Response, Male, Amygdala, Skin conductance response, Adult, Fusiform Gyrus, Reference Values, and Neurosciences
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Pain, Individuality, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Group Processes, and 15 moreSocial Identification, Helping Behavior, Empathy, Brain Mapping, Brain, Humans, Male, Interpersonal Relations, Questionnaires, Oxygen, Adult, Neuron, Individual Difference, Neurosciences, and Predictive value of tests
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Social comparison can elicit emotions such as envy, which can affect social interactions. The emergence and development of such social emotions through ontogeny, and their influence on social interaction, are unknown. We tested 182... more
Social comparison can elicit emotions such as envy, which can affect social interactions. The emergence and development of such social emotions through ontogeny, and their influence on social interaction, are unknown. We tested 182 children from 7 to 13 years of age with a novel monetary reward-and-punishment task measuring envy and Schadenfreude (i.e., gloating or taking delight in someone else's misfortune). Children were either rewarded or punished in a trial-by-trial evaluation of their performance on a speeded reaction time task. In a social condition, feedback of their own and a competitor's performance was given for each trial. Afterward, children rated how they felt about the outcome. The ratings suggest that when children won, they felt better if the competitor lost instead of winning (i.e., Schadenfreude). Conversely, when children lost, they felt worse if the competitor won instead of losing (i.e., envy). Crucially, levels of envy and Schadenfreude decreased with age. We also studied how these emotions relate to social decisions made separately during three resource allocation paradigms. In each, children chose between two options that differed in the distribution of valuable tokens between themselves and an anonymous other. The combination of choices allowed the measurement of inequity aversion (i.e., equality for all) and spite (i.e., self-profit to maximal disadvantage of the other). We found an age-related increase in inequity aversion and decrease in spite. Crucially, age-related changes in both envy and Schadenfreude predicted the developmental change in equity-related decisions. These findings shed light on the development of social emotions and demonstrate their importance in the development of prosocial behavior in children.
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Extensive animal and recent human research have helped inform neuroendocrinological models of social cognition, motivation and behavior. In this review, we first summarize important findings regarding oxytocin, arginine vasopressin and... more
Extensive animal and recent human research have helped inform neuroendocrinological models of social cognition, motivation and behavior. In this review, we first summarize important findings regarding oxytocin, arginine vasopressin and testosterone in the domains of affiliation, social cognition, aggression and stress/anxiety. We then suggest ways in which human research can continue to profit from animal research, particularly by exploring the interactive nature of neuromodulatory effects at neurochemical, organismic and contextual levels. We further propose methods inspired by the animal literature for the ecologically valid assessment of affiliative behavior in humans. We conclude with suggestions for how human research could advance by directly assessing specific social cognitive and motivational mechanisms as intermediate variables. We advocate a more comprehensive look at the distinct networks identified by social neuroscience and the importance of a motivational state, in add...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Emotion, Anger, Emotions, and 8 moreMotivation, Humans, Judgment, Moral Judgment, Approach, Female, Male, and Morals
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Research Interests: Autism, Neuroimaging, Emotional intelligence, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and 15 moreInteroception, Alexithymia, Empathy, Brain, Humans, Cerebral Cortex, Mentalizing, Middle Aged, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Hand, Diagnostic Tests, Autistic disorder, Affective symptoms, and Medical and Health Sciences
Difficulties in reflecting on inner experience and identifying subjective feelings (alexithymia) have been recognized as characteristic of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). To date, these difficulties have only been investigated with... more
Difficulties in reflecting on inner experience and identifying subjective feelings (alexithymia) have been recognized as characteristic of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). To date, these difficulties have only been investigated with behavioural and self-report measures. This study is the first explicit attempt to investigate the neural activity associated with attention to subjective emotional responses in high-functioning adults with ASD. 15 individuals with ASD and 15 matched control (CTRL) participants completed two tasks ...
Meditation-based mental training interventions show great benefits for physical and mental health. However, it remains unclear how different types of mental practice differentially affect emotion processing at both the neuronal and the... more
Meditation-based mental training interventions show great benefits for physical and mental health. However, it remains unclear how different types of mental practice differentially affect emotion processing at both the neuronal and the behavioural level. In the context of the ReSource project, 332 participants underwent an fMRI scan while performing an emotion reactivity task before and after three 3-month training modules cultivating 1) attention and interoceptive awareness (Presence); 2) socio-affective skills, such as compassion (Affect); 3) socio-cognitive skills, such as theory of mind (Perspective). Only the Affect module led to a significant reduction of experienced negative affect when processing images depicting human suffering. This decrease in emotion reactivity was associated with increased activation in cognitive control and emotion-regulation regions such as lateral parietal and prefrontal brain regions. We conclude that socio-affective, but not attention- or meta-cogn...
Mindfulness- and, more generally, meditation-based interventions increasingly gain popularity, effectively promoting cognitive, affective, and social capacities. It is unclear, however, if different types of practice have the same or... more
Mindfulness- and, more generally, meditation-based interventions increasingly gain popularity, effectively promoting cognitive, affective, and social capacities. It is unclear, however, if different types of practice have the same or specific effects on mental functioning. Here we tested three consecutive three-month training modules aimed at cultivating either attention, socio-affective qualities (such as compassion), or socio-cognitive skills (such as theory of mind), in three training cohorts and a retest control cohort (N = 332). While attentional performance improved most consistently after attention training, compassion increased most after socio-affective training and theory of mind partially improved after socio-cognitive training. These results show that specific mental training practices are needed to induce plasticity in different domains of mental functioning, providing a foundation for evidence-based development of more targeted interventions adapted to the needs of dif...
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To gain a comprehensive understanding of the multidimensional complex systems structure of the stress response and related health outcomes, we utilized network analysis in a sample of 328 healthy participants in two steps. In a first... more
To gain a comprehensive understanding of the multidimensional complex systems structure of the stress response and related health outcomes, we utilized network analysis in a sample of 328 healthy participants in two steps. In a first step, we focused on associations between measures of basal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functioning and subjective stress perceptions. In a second step, we linked these diverse stress-related measures to biomarkers and self-reports of health and sleep. Overall, measures clustered depending on their method of assessment, with high correlations between different saliva-based indices of diurnal cortisol regulation, between cortisol and cortisone levels in hair, between different biological health indicators (systemic inflammatory activity and body mass index), between state (experience sampling) and trait (questionnaire-based) self-reports of stress and wellbeing, and between different self-reports of sleep. Bridges between clusters suggested that i...
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Research from psychology, neurobiology and behavioral economics indicates that a binary view of motivation, based on approach and avoidance, may be too reductive and that at least seven crucial motives are likely to affect human... more
Research from psychology, neurobiology and behavioral economics indicates that a binary view of motivation, based on approach and avoidance, may be too reductive and that at least seven crucial motives are likely to affect human decisions, such as "consumption/resource seeking", "care", "affiliation", "achievement", "status-power", "threat approach" (or anger), and "threat avoidance" (or fear). As a preliminary investigation of the conceptual distinctness and relatedness of these motives, we conducted a semantic categorization task, in which participants were to assign provided words to one of the motives. Results suggest that, for each motive, subjects converge on how to make these differential assignments. Moreover, principal component analysis of these assignments suggests that the semantic inter-relations of the motives can be represented on a two dimensional space, or a “semantic atlas”. This atlas suggests t...
Global challenges such as climate change or the refugee crises emphasize the necessity of altruism and cooperation. In a large-scale 9-month intervention study, we investigated the malleability of prosociality by three distinct mental... more
Global challenges such as climate change or the refugee crises emphasize the necessity of altruism and cooperation. In a large-scale 9-month intervention study, we investigated the malleability of prosociality by three distinct mental trainings cultivating attention, socio-affective, or socio-cognitive skills. We assessed numerous established measures of prosociality that capture three core facets: Altruistically motivated behaviours, norm motivated behaviours, and self-reported prosociality. Results of multiple time point confirmatory factor analyses support the validity and temporal stability of this model. Furthermore, linear mixed effects models reveal differential effects of mental trainings on the subcomponents of prosociality: Only training care and compassion effectively boosted altruistically motivated behaviour. No effects were revealed for norm-based behaviour. Self-reported prosociality increased with all training modules; this increase was, however, unrelated to changes...
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Our goal was to assess the effects of long-term mental training in socio-affective skills on structural brain networks. We studied a group of long-term meditation practitioners (LTMs) who have focused on cultivating socio-affective skills... more
Our goal was to assess the effects of long-term mental training in socio-affective skills on structural brain networks. We studied a group of long-term meditation practitioners (LTMs) who have focused on cultivating socio-affective skills using loving-kindness and compassion meditation for an average of 40k hours, comparing these to meditation-naïve controls. To maximize homogeneity of prior practice, LTMs were included only if they had undergone extensive full-time meditation retreats in the same center. MRI-based cortical thickness analysis revealed increased thickness in the LTM cohort relative to meditation-native controls in fronto-insular cortices. To identify functional networks relevant for the generation of socio-affective states, structural imaging analysis were complemented by fMRI analysis in LTMs, showing amplitude increases during a loving-kindness meditation session relative to non-meditative rest in multiple prefrontal and insular regions bilaterally. Importantly, fu...
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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a severe, lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder with early onset that places a heavy burden on affected individuals and their families. Due to the need for highly specialized health, educational and... more
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a severe, lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder with early onset that places a heavy burden on affected individuals and their families. Due to the need for highly specialized health, educational and vocational services, ASD is a cost-intensive disorder, and strain on health care systems increases with increasing age of the affected individual. The ASD-Net will study Germany's largest cohort of patients with ASD over the lifespan. By combining methodological expertise from all levels of clinical research, the ASD-Net will follow a translational approach necessary to identify neurobiological pathways of different phenotypes and their appropriate identification and treatment. The work of the ASD-Net will be organized into three clusters concentrating on diagnostics, therapy and health economics. In the diagnostic cluster, data from a large, well-characterized sample (N = 2568) will be analyzed to improve the efficiency of diagnostic procedures. Patt...
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Our various daily activities continually require regulation of our internal state. These regulatory processes covary with changes in High Frequency Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV), a marker of parasympathetic activity. Specifically,... more
Our various daily activities continually require regulation of our internal state. These regulatory processes covary with changes in High Frequency Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV), a marker of parasympathetic activity. Specifically, incidental increases in HF-HRV accompany positive social engagement behavior and prosocial action. Little is known about deliberate regulation of HF-HRV and the role of voluntary parasympathetic regulation in prosocial behavior. Here, we present a novel biofeedback task that measures the ability to deliberately increase HF-HRV. In two large samples, we find that a) participants are able to voluntarily upregulate HF-HRV, and b) variation in this ability predicts individual differences in altruistic prosocial behavior, but not non-altruistic forms of prosociality, assessed through 14 different measures. Our findings suggest that self-induction of parasympathetic states is involved in altruistic action. The biofeedback task may provide a measure of delibera...
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A classical model of human attention holds that independent neural networks realize stimulus-driven reorienting and executive control of attention. Questioning full independence, the two functions do, however, engage overlapping networks... more
A classical model of human attention holds that independent neural networks realize stimulus-driven reorienting and executive control of attention. Questioning full independence, the two functions do, however, engage overlapping networks with activations in cingulo-opercular regions such as anterior insula (AI) and a reverse pattern of activation (stimulus-driven reorienting), and deactivation (executive control) in temporoparietal junction (TPJ). To test for independent versus shared neural mechanisms underlying stimulus-driven and executive control of attention, we used fMRI and a task that isolates individual from concurrent demands in both functions. Results revealed super-additive increases of left AI activity and behavioral response costs under concurrent demands, suggesting a common bottleneck for stimulus-driven reorienting and executive control of attention. These increases were mirrored by non-additive decreases of activity in the default mode network (DMN), including post...
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Animal models and human studies using paradigms designed to stimulate endogenous oxytocin release suggest a stress-buffering role of oxytocin. We here examined the involvement of stress-induced peripheral oxytocin secretion in reactivity... more
Animal models and human studies using paradigms designed to stimulate endogenous oxytocin release suggest a stress-buffering role of oxytocin. We here examined the involvement of stress-induced peripheral oxytocin secretion in reactivity and recovery phases of the human psychosocial stress response. Healthy male and female participants (N=114) were subjected to a standardized laboratory stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test. In addition to plasma oxytocin, cortisol was assessed as a marker of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA-) axis activity, alpha-amylase and heart rate as markers of sympathetic activity, high frequency heart rate variability as a marker of vagal tone and self-rated anxiety as an indicator of subjective stress experience. On average, oxytocin levels increased by 51% following psychosocial stress. The stress-induced oxytocin secretion, however, did not reduce stress reactivity. To the contrary, higher oxytocin secretion was associated with greater cortisol reacti...
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Autism spectrum disorders are neurodevelopmental conditions with severe impairments in social communication and interaction. Pioneering research suggests that oxytocin can improve motivation, cognition and attention to social cues in... more
Autism spectrum disorders are neurodevelopmental conditions with severe impairments in social communication and interaction. Pioneering research suggests that oxytocin can improve motivation, cognition and attention to social cues in patients with autism spectrum disorder. The aim of this clinical trial is to characterize basic mechanisms of action of acute oxytocin treatment on neural levels and to relate these to changes in different levels of socio-affective and -cognitive functioning. This clinical study is a randomized, double-blind, cross-over, placebo-controlled, multicenter functional magnetic resonance imaging study with two arms. A sample of 102 male autism spectrum disorder patients, diagnosed with Infantile Autistic Disorder (F84.0 according to ICD-10), Asperger Syndrome (F84.5 according to ICD-10), or Atypical Autism (F84.1 according to ICD-10) will be recruited and will receive oxytocin and placebo nasal spray on two different days. Autism spectrum disorder patients wi...
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The ability to represent the mental states of other agents is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). A developmental breakthrough in ToM consists of understanding that others can have false beliefs about the world. Recently, infants younger... more
The ability to represent the mental states of other agents is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). A developmental breakthrough in ToM consists of understanding that others can have false beliefs about the world. Recently, infants younger than 2 years of age have been shown to pass novel implicit false belief tasks. However, the processes underlying these tasks and their relation to later-developing explicit false belief understanding, as well as to other cognitive abilities, are not yet understood. Here, we study a battery of implicit and explicit false belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children, relating their performance to linguistic abilities and executive functions. The present data show a significant developmental change from failing explicit false belief tasks at 3 years of age to passing them at the age of 4, while both age groups pass implicit false belief tasks. This differential developmental trajectory is reflected by the finding that explicit and implicit false belief ...
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Research Interests: Neuroscience, Decision Making, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Attention, Altruism, and 15 moreFMRI, Prosocial Behavior, Empathy, Motivation, Germany, Brain Mapping, Brain, Humans, Cerebral Cortex, Female, Male, Adult, Multivariate Pattern Analysis, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
Humans have the ability to reflect upon their perception, thoughts, and actions, known as metacognition (MC). The brain basis of MC is incompletely understood, and it is debated whether MC on different processes is subserved by common or... more
Humans have the ability to reflect upon their perception, thoughts, and actions, known as metacognition (MC). The brain basis of MC is incompletely understood, and it is debated whether MC on different processes is subserved by common or divergent networks. We combined behavioral phenotyping with multi-modal neuroimaging to investigate whether structural substrates of individual differences in MC on higher-order cognition (MC-C) are dissociable from those underlying MC on perceptual accuracy (MC-P). Motivated by conceptual work suggesting a link between MC and cognitive perspective taking, we furthermore tested for overlaps between MC substrates and mentalizing networks. In a large sample of healthy adults, individual differences in MC-C and MC-P did not correlate. MRI-based cortical thickness mapping revealed a structural basis of this independence, by showing that individual differences in MC-P related to right prefrontal cortical thickness, while MC-C scores correlated with measures in lateral prefrontal, temporo-parietal, and posterior midline regions. Surface-based superficial white matter diffusivity analysis revealed substrates resembling those seen for cortical thickness, confirming the divergence of both MC faculties using an independent imaging marker. Despite their specificity, substrates of MC-C and MC-P fell clearly within networks known to participate in mentalizing, confirmed by task-based fMRI in the same subjects, previous meta-analytical findings, and ad-hoc Neurosynth-based meta-analyses. Our integrative multi-method approach indicates domain-specific substrates of MC; despite their divergence, these nevertheless likely rely on component processes mediated by circuits also involved in mentalizing. Hum Brain Mapp, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Decision Making, Individuality, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and 15 moreMetacognition, Social Neuroscience, Confidence, Prefrontal Cortex, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Emotions, Memory, Humans, Judgment, Female, Male, Middle Aged, Adult, Functional Neuroimaging, and Neurosciences
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... if one has been hurt “intentionally” is felt more intensely than if the same mischief has been caused by this person's negligence ( Falk et al. ... it seems to convey a sense of the mental state required,... more
... if one has been hurt “intentionally” is felt more intensely than if the same mischief has been caused by this person's negligence ( Falk et al. ... it seems to convey a sense of the mental state required, as this passage from the well-known jurist Justice Lemuel Shaw ( Commonwealth ...
Self-generated thoughts (SGTs), such as during mind wandering, occupy much of our waking life. Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) are less in the "here and now" and prone to rumination. Few studies have looked at... more
Self-generated thoughts (SGTs), such as during mind wandering, occupy much of our waking life. Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) are less in the "here and now" and prone to rumination. Few studies have looked at SGTs in depression using experience sampling methods and no study has so far investigated the specific contents of depressive SGTs and how they vary from one time point to another. MDD patients (n=25) and matched healthy controls (n=26) performed an established mind wandering task, involving non-demanding number discriminations. Intermittent probe questions ask for participants' current SGTs, that is, how off-task the thoughts are, how positive or negative, self- or other-related, and past- or future-oriented. Multi-level modelling revealed that MDD patients engaged in more mind wandering than healthy controls. Their SGTs were predominantly negative and less positive, more self-related and past-oriented. Strongest predictor of depressive SGT was ...
Research Interests: Clinical Psychology, Experimental Psychology, Depression, Mindfulness, Endophenotypes, and 13 moreThinking, Humans, Affective Disorders, Major Depressive Disorder, Female, Male, Ecological momentary assessment, Young Adult, Adult, Mindwandering, Case Control Studies, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
The emerging fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have started to investigate the neural foundations of empathy and fairness. Even though not frequently linked, both concepts point to humans as altruistic beings who care for... more
The emerging fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have started to investigate the neural foundations of empathy and fairness. Even though not frequently linked, both concepts point to humans as altruistic beings who care for others. Recently social neuroscientists have measured brain activity associated with different empathic processes and revealed common neural responses when feeling sensations such as disgust, touch or pain in ourselves, and when perceiving someone else being disgusted, touched or in pain. At the same time, research in neuroeconomics has used game theoretical paradigms to study our sense of fairness. Several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show involvement of anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex in response to unfair compared with fair offers during such monetary exchange games. Interestingly, the same brain regions are also involved in empathy for pain or disgust of others. More generally, anterior insula cortex is suggested to subserve neural representations of feeling and bodily states in the self and may play a crucial role for the emergence of social emotions related to others.
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Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been associated with empathy deficits. The exact nature of these deficits and their relation to concurrent alexithymia remain unknown. Here we tested under which conditions MDD patients with high and... more
Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been associated with empathy deficits. The exact nature of these deficits and their relation to concurrent alexithymia remain unknown. Here we tested under which conditions MDD patients with high and low alexithymia show deficient empathy, particularly investigating empathic abilities when inhibition of self-related emotional states is needed and when it is not. Healthy controls (low: n=28, high: n=14) and currently depressed MDD patients (low: n=11, high: n=18) with low or high alexithymia performed an emotional egocentricity paradigm based on tactile stimulation. This task measures empathic judgements, when emotional states of self and other differ and inhibition of self-related emotional states is needed, and when they do not and thus empathic judgments can be based on simple projection mechanisms. Only alexithymia but not depression decreased empathy, in situations when simple projection sufficed. However, when inhibition of self-related emotional states was needed, MDD patients showed an egocentric bias during empathic judgments and an altercentric bias during self emotion judgments, the latter suggesting heightened emotional contagion, both independent of alexithymia. Across the entire sample, alexithymia decreased the size of the egocentric bias. This study was based on a relatively sample size. These results suggest that MDD patients show intact empathic judgments, when simple projection is required and no concurrent alexithymia is present. In situations when incongruent emotional states of self and other have to be resolved, MDD patients are prone to egocentric and altercentric biases.
Research Interests: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology, Experimental Psychology, Empathy (Psychology), Depression, and 15 moreSocial Perception, Emotions, Empathy, Affect, Humans, Judgment, Affective Disorders, Female, Male, Middle Aged, Adult, Morals, Affective symptoms, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Most instances of social interaction provide a wealth of information about the states of other people, be it sensations, feelings, thoughts, or convictions. How we represent these states has been a major question in social neuroscience,... more
Most instances of social interaction provide a wealth of information about the states of other people, be it sensations, feelings, thoughts, or convictions. How we represent these states has been a major question in social neuroscience, leading to the identification of two routes to understanding others: an affective route for the direct sharing of others' emotions (empathy) that involves, among others, anterior insula and middle anterior cingulate cortex and a cognitive route for representing and reasoning about others' states (Theory of Mind) that entails, among others, ventral temporoparietal junction and anterior and posterior midline regions. Additionally, research has revealed a number of situational and personal factors that shape the functioning of empathy and Theory of Mind. Concerning situational modulators, it has been shown, for instance, that ingroup membership enhances empathic responding and that Theory of Mind performance seems to be susceptible to stress. Personal modulators include psychopathological conditions, for which alterations in empathy and mentalizing have consistently been demonstrated; people on the autism spectrum, for instance, are impaired specifically in mentalizing, while spontaneous empathic responding seems selectively reduced in psychopathy. Given the multifaceted evidence for separability of the two routes, current research endeavors aiming at fostering interpersonal cooperation explore the differential malleability of affective and cognitive understanding of others.
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It is commonly assumed that threatening expressions are perceptually prioritised, possessing the ability to automatically capture and hold attention. Recent evidence suggests that this prioritisation depends on the task relevance of... more
It is commonly assumed that threatening expressions are perceptually prioritised, possessing the ability to automatically capture and hold attention. Recent evidence suggests that this prioritisation depends on the task relevance of emotion in the case of attention holding and for fearful expressions. Using a hybrid attentional blink (AB) and repetition blindness (RB) paradigm we investigated whether task relevance also impacts on prioritisation through attention capture and perceptual salience, and if these effects generalise to angry expressions. Participants judged either the emotion (relevant condition) or gender (irrelevant condition) of two target facial stimuli (fearful, angry or neutral) imbedded in a stream of distractors. Attention holding and capturing was operationalised as modulation of AB deficits by first target (T1) and second target (T2) expression. Perceptual salience was operationalised as RB modulation. When emotion was task-relevant (Experiment 1; N = 29) fearfu...
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Psychologists have long studied links between physiology and subjective feelings, but little is known about how those links are preserved in memory. Here we examine this question via arousal, a subjective feeling with strong physiological... more
Psychologists have long studied links between physiology and subjective feelings, but little is known about how those links are preserved in memory. Here we examine this question via arousal, a subjective feeling with strong physiological correlates. Using virtual reality, we immersed participants in a threatening scene (Room 101) where they confronted a variety of disturbing events. Later, participants watched the scene on a desktop computer while continuously rating how aroused they remembered feeling. Analyses of those time series revealed that retrospective reports were coherent with participants' unique patterns in physiological arousal (skin conductance and heart rate) during the original events. Analyses further revealed that coherence did not depend on simulating physiological arousal and that it was particularly strong among individuals high in interoceptive accuracy. These data demonstrate that memory encodes physiological information during emotional episodes such that individuals' recall of arousal reliably reflects physiological signals as they unfolded over time.
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Meditation is often associated with a relaxed state of the body. However, meditation can also be regarded as a type of mental task and training, associated with mental effort and physiological arousal. The cardiovascular effects of... more
Meditation is often associated with a relaxed state of the body. However, meditation can also be regarded as a type of mental task and training, associated with mental effort and physiological arousal. The cardiovascular effects of meditation may vary depending on the type of meditation, degree of mental effort, and amount of training. In the current study we assessed heart rate (HR), high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) and subjective ratings of effort and likeability during three types of meditation varying in their cognitive and attentional requirements, namely breathing meditation, loving-kindness meditation and observing-thoughts meditation. In the context of the ReSource project, a one-year longitudinal mental training study, participants practiced each meditation exercise on a daily basis for 3months. As expected HR and effort were higher during loving-kindness meditation and observing-thoughts meditation compared to breathing meditation. With training over time HR and likeability increased, while HF-HRV and the subjective experience of effort decreased. The increase in HR and decrease in HF-HRV over training was higher for loving-kindness meditation and observing-thoughts meditation compared to breathing meditation. In contrast to implicit beliefs that meditation is always relaxing and associated with low arousal, the current results show that core meditations aiming at improving compassion and meta-cognitive skills require effort and are associated with physiological arousal compared to breathing meditation. Overall these findings can be useful in making more specific suggestions about which type of meditation is most adaptive for a given context and population.
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Emotion regulation research has primarily focused on techniques that attenuate or modulate the impact of emotional stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that this mode regulation can be problematic in the context of regulation of emotion... more
Emotion regulation research has primarily focused on techniques that attenuate or modulate the impact of emotional stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that this mode regulation can be problematic in the context of regulation of emotion elicited by the suffering of others, resulting in reduced emotional connectedness. Here, we investigated the effects of an alternative emotion regulation technique based on the up-regulation of positive affect via Compassion-meditation on experiential and neural affective responses to depictions of individuals in distress, and compared these with the established emotion regulation strategy of Reappraisal. Using fMRI, we scanned 15 expert practitioners of Compassion-meditation either passively viewing, or using Compassion-meditation or Reappraisal to modulate their emotional reactions to film clips depicting people in distress. Both strategies effectively, but differentially regulated experienced affect, with Compassion primarily increasing positive and ...
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Nonverbal behavior expresses many of the dynamics underlying face-to-face social interactions, implicitly revealing one's attitudes, emotions, and social motives. Although research has often described nonverbal behavior as approach... more
Nonverbal behavior expresses many of the dynamics underlying face-to-face social interactions, implicitly revealing one's attitudes, emotions, and social motives. Although research has often described nonverbal behavior as approach versus avoidant (i.e., through the study of proxemics), psychological responses to many social contexts are a mix of these two. Fairness violations are an ideal example, eliciting strong avoidance-related responses such as negative attitudes, as well as strong approach-related responses such as anger and retaliation. As such, nonverbal behavior toward unfair others is difficult to predict in discrete approach versus avoidance terms. Here we address this problem using proxemic imaging, a new method which creates frequency images of dyadic space by combining motion capture data of interpersonal distance and gaze to provide an objective but nuanced analysis of social interactions. Participants first played an economic game with fair and unfair players an...
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This study investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying age-related differences in emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) between children (aged 7-12 years, n = 30) and adults (aged 20-30 years, n = 30) using a novel paradigm of... more
This study investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying age-related differences in emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) between children (aged 7-12 years, n = 30) and adults (aged 20-30 years, n = 30) using a novel paradigm of visuogustatory stimulation to induce pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Both children and adults showed an EBB, but that of children was larger. The EEB did not correlate with other measures of egocentricity. Crucially, the developmental differences in EEB were mediated by age-related changes in conflict processing and not visual perspective taking, response inhibition, or processing speed. This indicates that different types of egocentricity develop independently of one another and that the increased ability to overcome EEB can be explained by age-related improvements in conflict processing.
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Humans often project their own beliefs, desires and emotions onto others, indicating an inherent egocentrism. In five studies we investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) and specifically an... more
Humans often project their own beliefs, desires and emotions onto others, indicating an inherent egocentrism. In five studies we investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) and specifically an offline EEB, defined as the projection of one's own tendency to react with a certain emotional response pattern in a given situation onto other people. We used a competitive reaction time game associated with monetary gains and losses that allowed inducing feelings of envy and Schadenfreude. While we found evidence for the first hand experience of envy and Schadenfreude, we also observed an offline bias, that is participants on average projected feelings of envy and Schadenfreude when having to judge others. Importantly the extent of experienced and projected social emotions were highly correlated. This bias was observed when participants were both directly involved and also as an uninvolved party, suggesting the offline bias to be independent o...
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Humans often judge others egocentrically, assuming that they feel or think similarly to themselves. Emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) occurs in situations when others feel differently to oneself. Using a novel paradigm, we investigated... more
Humans often judge others egocentrically, assuming that they feel or think similarly to themselves. Emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) occurs in situations when others feel differently to oneself. Using a novel paradigm, we investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the developmental capacity to overcome such EEB in children compared with adults. We showed that children display a stronger EEB than adults and that this correlates with reduced activation in right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) as well as reduced coupling between rSMG and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) in children compared with adults. Crucially, functional recruitment of rSMG was associated with age-related differences in cortical thickness of this region. Although in adults the mere presence of emotional conflict occurs between self and other recruited rSMG, rSMG-lDLPFC coupling was only observed when implementing empathic judgements. Finally, resting state analyses comparing connectivity pattern...
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Stress is a major health burden in today's society. Research shows that negative cognitive... more
Stress is a major health burden in today's society. Research shows that negative cognitive styles are associated with increased stress reactivity, low mood and accelerated cellular aging. Our study sought to unravel the relationship between the content of self-generated thoughts and psychosocial stress measured in terms of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic activity. Features of self-generated thoughts were assessed using thought sampling while participants performed cognitive tasks following a stress induction or in a baseline condition. More negatively toned emotional thoughts and more social temporal thoughts with a past focus were associated with increased cortisol and alpha-amylase levels, both after stress and at baseline. More social temporal thoughts with a future focus, on the other hand, had an overall attenuating effect on the levels of both stress markers. Our results indicate a fundamental link between the thoughts and stress levels we experience. Understanding the mechanisms governing this mind-body association may have important implications for understanding and counteracting the high incidence of stress-related disorders in today's society.
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In spite of considerable progress in the understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the experience of empathy, the majority of previous investigations have focused on how we share negative affective states (and in particular pain)... more
In spite of considerable progress in the understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying the experience of empathy, the majority of previous investigations have focused on how we share negative affective states (and in particular pain) of others, whereas only few studies have targeted empathy for positive emotions. This bias has precluded addressing one of the central tenets of the shared representations account of empathy, which is that different networks should be engaged when empathizing with emotions that are represented on different neural levels. The aim of the present study was to overcome this limitation and to test whether empathy for pleasant and unpleasant affective touch is underpinned by different neural networks. To this end we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), with two independent replication experiments (N = 18, N = 32), and a novel paradigm enabling the joint investigation of first-hand and vicarious responses to pleasant and unpleasant affect induced via visuo-tactile stimulation. This revealed that empathy is subserved by distinct neural networks, with those regions recruited in the first-hand experience of positive or negative affective states also being specifically recruited when empathizing with these respective states in others. More specifically, the first-hand and vicarious experience of pleasant touch commonly recruited medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), while unpleasant touch was associated with shared activation in the right fronto-insular cortex. The observation that specifically tailored subsystems of the human brain are engaged to share positive versus negative touch of others brings fresh evidence to one of the major goals of the social neuroscience of empathy: to identify which specific aspects of the affective states of others are shared, and what role this plays in enabling the understanding of the emotions of others.
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Interoceptive body awareness (IA) is crucial for psychological well-being and plays an important role in many contemplative traditions. However, until recently, standardized self-report measures of IA were scarce, not comprehensive, and... more
Interoceptive body awareness (IA) is crucial for psychological well-being and plays an important role in many contemplative traditions. However, until recently, standardized self-report measures of IA were scarce, not comprehensive, and the effects of interoceptive training on such measures were largely unknown. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire measures IA with eight different scales. In the current study, we investigated whether and how these different aspects of IA are influenced by a 3-months contemplative intervention in the context of the ReSource project, in which 148 subjects engaged in daily practices of "Body Scan" and "Breath Meditation." We developed a German version of the MAIA and tested it in a large and diverse sample (n = 1,076). Internal consistencies were similar to the English version (0.56-0.89), retest reliability was high (rs: 0.66-0.79), and the MAIA showed good convergent and discriminant vali...
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Research Interests: Biological Psychology, Emotion, Communication, Depression, Face Recognition, and 15 moreAttention, Language, Face perception, Dance, Episodic Memory, Default Network, Anatomy, Attentional Blink, Insula, Morality, Fear conditioning, Arousal, Fusiform face area, Facial Action Coding System, and Flashbulb Memory
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Research Interests: Communication, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Emotions, Empathy, Motivation, and 15 moreBrain Mapping, Social behavior, Brain, Automatism, Humans, Cerebral Cortex, Cues, Female, Male, Interpersonal Relations, Neurons, Social Behavior, Cooperative Behavior, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Research Interests: Neuroscience, Autism, Cognition, Facial expression, Visual Cortex, and 15 moreAffect, Social behavior, Oxytocin, Temporal Lobe, Humans, Male, Neural Circuitry, Amygdala, The, Adult, Social Behavior, Neuropsychological Tests, photic stimulation, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Autism, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Modulation, Emotions, and 15 moreHigh Functioning Autism, Humans, Cerebral Cortex, Female, Functional Imaging, Male, Feelings, Amygdala, Awareness, Middle Aged, Adult, Asperger Syndrome, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Neurosciences, and Autistic disorder
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Social Cognition, Visual perception, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and 15 moreSocial Perception, Facial expression, Social Cognitive Theory, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Autonomic Nervous System, Empathy, Affect, Humans, Female, Male, Emotional Expression, Adult, Edinger-Westphal, Neurosciences, and Pupil size
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, Learning, and 15 moreEmpathy, Affect, Brain Mapping, Brain, Humans, Female, Cognitive Therapy, Neuronal Plasticity, Longitudinal Studies, Adult, Neural pathways, Self report, Neurosciences, Neuropsychological Tests, and photic stimulation
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Stress disorders are among the most commonly occurring of all mental disorders. In this context, the question arises whether the stress inevitably unfolding around us has the potential to... more
Stress disorders are among the most commonly occurring of all mental disorders. In this context, the question arises whether the stress inevitably unfolding around us has the potential to "contaminate" and compromise us. In the current multi-center study, we investigate the existence of such empathic stress (defined as a full-blown physiological stress response that arises solely by observing a target undergo a stressful situation), and whether empathic stress permeates to the core of the stress system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Additionally, we investigate whether empathic stress responses may be modulated by the familiarity between observer and target (partners vs. strangers), the modality of observation (real-life vs. virtual) and observer sex (female vs. male). Participants were tested in dyads, paired with a loved one or a stranger of the opposite sex. While the target of the dyad (n=151) was exposed to a psychosocial stressor, the observer (n=211) watched through a one-way mirror or via live video transmission. Overall, 26% of the observers displayed physiologically significant cortisol increases. This empathic stress was more pronounced in intimate observer-target dyads (40%) and during the real-life representation of the stressor (30%). Empathic stress was further modulated by interindividual differences in empathy measures. Despite the higher prevalence of empathic stress in the partner and real-life observation conditions, significant cortisol responses also emerged in strangers (10%) and the virtual observation modality (24%). The occurrence of empathic stress down to the level of HPA-axis activation, in some cases even in total strangers and when only virtually witnessing…
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognition, Aging, Episodic Memory, and 15 moreEvidence-Based Practice (Psychology), Learning, Memory, Brain, Humans, Old Age, Female, Male, Neuronal Plasticity, Follow-up studies, Crystallized Intelligence, Aged, Age Factors, Individual Difference, and Neuropsychological Tests
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Research Interests: Bioinformatics, Life Sciences, Research, Multidisciplinary, Humans, and 14 moreBiomedical Research, Male, Heart rate, Young Adult, Diagnostic Imaging, PLoS one, Saliva, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Physiological Stress Markers, Psychological Stress, Infrared Rays, hydrocortisone, and Stress Physiological
Research Interests: Decision Making, Mirror Neurons, Cognition, Social Cognition, Theory of Mind, and 14 moreNeural Network, Biological Sciences, Joint Action, Social behavior, Brain, Humans, Mirror Neuron System, New Economic Models, Mirror Neuron, Framing effect, Economic Models, Social Behavior, Philosophical Transactions, and Medical and Health Sciences
Research Interests: Research Design, Theory of Mind, Social Perception, Research, Perspective Taking, and 12 moreEmpathy, Brain Mapping, Temporal Lobe, Brain, Humans, Insula, Mental processes, Interpersonal Relations, Self Concept, Review Literature As Topic, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Research Interests: Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Adolescent, Linear models, Empathy, Humans, and 15 moreCerebral Cortex, Cues, Adaptive behavior, Female, Male, Meta Analysis, Action Understanding, Adult, Analysis of Variance, Insular Cortex, Core Network, Medial Prefrontal Cortex, Anterior cingulate cortex, Cingulate cortex, and Medical and Health Sciences
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... Therefore we will need to be careful to take the mental attitudes of our participants into account when studying empathy for pain. ... François Guillemot and Carlos Parras are at the Division of Molecular Neurobiology of the National... more
... Therefore we will need to be careful to take the mental attitudes of our participants into account when studying empathy for pain. ... François Guillemot and Carlos Parras are at the Division of Molecular Neurobiology of the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London ...
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Genetic interventions will improve the genome, but they will never make a human being out of the human animalUsing research on the ageing mind, support is offered for the concept of bio-cultural sciences. The bio-cultural sciences... more
Genetic interventions will improve the genome, but they will never make a human being out of the human animalUsing research on the ageing mind, support is offered for the concept of bio-cultural sciences. The bio-cultural sciences highlight the notion that human behaviour is the joint and co-constructive expression of biological–genetic and cultural–societal processes and conditions. The genome determines the ontogeny of the brain; however, so does the cultural–social environment and individual behaviour. The study of the ageing mind illustrates this principle of bio-cultural co-construction. One fertile theory distinguishes between the declining biology-driven cognitive mechanics and the maintained or even increasing culture-driven cognitive pragmatics. Beginning in early adulthood, the plasticity of the cognitive mechanics decreases with advancing age, but the cognitive pragmatics exploit the opportunities of culture and the experiential and interpersonal contexts in which people ...
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Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the... more
Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morphology, we collected longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data throughout a 9-month mental training intervention from a large sample of adults between 20 and 55 years of age. By means of various daily mental exercises and weekly instructed group sessions, training protocols specifically addressed three functional domains: (i) mindfulness-based attention and interoception, (ii) socio-affective skills (compassion, dealing with difficult emotions, and prosocial motivation), and (iii) socio-cognitive skills (cognitive perspective-taking on self and others and metacognition). MRI-based cortical thickness analyses, contrasting the different ...
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Most instances of social interaction provide a wealth of information about the states of other people, be it sensations, feelings, thoughts, or convictions. How we represent these states has been a major question in social neuroscience,... more
Most instances of social interaction provide a wealth of information about the states of other people, be it sensations, feelings, thoughts, or convictions. How we represent these states has been a major question in social neuroscience, leading to the identification of two routes to understanding others: an affective route for the direct sharing of others' emotions (empathy) that involves, among others, anterior insula and middle anterior cingulate cortex and a cognitive route for representing and reasoning about others' states (Theory of Mind) that entails, among others, ventral temporoparietal junction and anterior and posterior midline regions. Additionally, research has revealed a number of situational and personal factors that shape the functioning of empathy and Theory of Mind. Concerning situational modulators, it has been shown, for instance, that ingroup membership enhances empathic responding and that Theory of Mind performance seems to be susceptible to stress. Personal modulators include psychopathological conditions, for which alterations in empathy and mentalizing have consistently been demonstrated; people on the autism spectrum, for instance, are impaired specifically in mentalizing, while spontaneous empathic responding seems selectively reduced in psychopathy. Given the multifaceted evidence for separability of the two routes, current research endeavors aiming at fostering interpersonal cooperation explore the differential malleability of affective and cognitive understanding of others.
Research Interests:
Despite the ubiquity of endogenous emotions and their role in both resilience and pathology, the processes supporting their generation are largely unknown. We propose a neural component process model of endogenous generation of emotion... more
Despite the ubiquity of endogenous emotions and their role in both resilience and pathology, the processes supporting their generation are largely unknown. We propose a neural component process model of endogenous generation of emotion (EGE) and test it in two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments (N ¼ 32/293) where participants generated and regulated positive and negative emotions based on internal representations, usin self-chosen generation methods. EGE activated nodes of salience (SN), default mode (DMN) and frontoparietal control (FPCN) networks. Component processes implemented by these networks were established by investigating their functional associations, activation dynamics and integration. SN activation correlated with subjective affect, with midbrain nodes exclusively distinguishing between positive and negative affect intensity, showing dynamics consistent generation of core affect. Dorsomedial DMN, together with ventral anterior insula, formed a pathway supporting multiple generation methods, with activation dynamics suggesting it is involved in the generation of elaborated experiential representations. SN and DMN both coupled to left frontal FPCN which in turn was associated with both subjective affect and representation formation, consistent with FPCN supporting the executive coordination of the generation process. These results provide a foundation for research into endogenous emotion in normal, pathological and optimal function.