Suchergebnisse

Marino & Merskin's valuable review of the literature on sheep cognition shows how entrenched common views of these animals' mental lives are disputed by the research literature. Yet the evidence they muster faces three challenges that their target article does not discuss: (1) the behavioral tasks are strongly anthropocentric; (2) neuroscientific data are absent; and (3) applications are not discussed. I touch on all three of these here.

Using fMRI to study emotions in animals is important, fascinating, and fraught with methodological and conceptual problems. Cook et al. are doing it, and there is no question that they and others will be doing it better and better as time goes on. Where will this lead us? What could fMRI in principle tell us about the minds of nonhuman animals?

I discuss three themes related to Kujala's target article. First, the wealth of emerging data on cognitive studies in dogs will surely show that dogs have a very rich repertoire of cognitive processes, for most of which we find homologues in humans. Second, understanding the internal states that mediate social behaviors, such as emotions, requires us to consider both a dog's behaviors with other dogs, and the emergence of new behavioral patterns in interaction with humans. Third, all of this will certainly narrow the range of justifications for denying that dogs have subjective experiences of emotions.

Beauchamp's target article raises important questions about the features that often accompany fear. How reliable an indicator of fear is vigilance? Is it constitutive, cause, or consequence of fear? These questions force us towards a clearer definition of "fear."

While inferences of traits from unfamiliar faces prominently reveal stereotypes, some facial inferences also correlate with real-world outcomes. We investigated whether facial inferences are associated with an important real-world outcome closely linked to the face bearer's behavior: political corruption. In four preregistered studies (N = 325), participants made trait judgments of unfamiliar government officials on the basis of their photos. Relative to peers with clean records, federal and state officials convicted of political corruption (Study 1) and local officials who violated campaign finance laws (Study 2) were perceived as more corruptible, dishonest, selfish, and aggressive but similarly competent, ambitious, and masculine (Study 3). Mediation analyses and experiments in which the photos were digitally manipulated showed that participants' judgments of how corruptible an official looked were causally influenced by the face width of the stimuli (Study 4). The findings shed new light on the complex causal mechanisms linking facial appearances with social behavior.

Recent work in cognitive and social neuroscience has focused on the neural substrates of social judgment. The present study explores the effects of damage to the right‐hemisphere somatosensory cortices (RSS), a region known for its role in emotion recognition. Seven subjects with RSS damage were shown a short movie depicting objects that move in socially suggestive ways, a stimulus that typically elicits spontaneous social and emotional attributions from normal subjects. The spontaneous verbal responses of RSS‐damaged subjects to this movie were compared to those of normal subjects as well as brain‐damaged control subjects; the data were derived using a word count and categorization computer program. This method measures spontaneous social and emotional judgments rather than the more typical rating and labeling measures used in neuropsychological studies of social judgment. As predicted, relative to brain‐damaged and normal controls, subjects with RSS damage reacted to the stimulus movie with fewer words in categories describing emotional and social processes, despite using a similar total number of words (and slightly more words describing movement, a control category). These results provide further evidence for the role of the RSS in social/emotional processing and identify a role for the RSS in automatic representation in ourselves of body states of others to foster emotion recognition and social cognition.

Recent work in cognitive & social neuroscience has focused on the neural substrates of social judgment. The present study explores the effects of damage to the right-hemisphere somatosensory cortices (RSS), a region known for its role in emotion recognition. Seven subjects with RSS damage were shown a short movie depicting objects that move in socially suggestive ways, a stimulus that typically elicits spontaneous social & emotional attributions from normal subjects. The spontaneous verbal responses of RSS-damaged subjects to this movie were compared to those of normal subjects as well as brain-damaged control subjects; the data were derived using a word count & categorization computer program. This method measures spontaneous social & emotional judgments rather than the more typical rating & labeling measures used in neuropsychological studies of social judgment. As predicted, relative to brain-damaged & normal controls, subjects with RSS damage reacted to the stimulus movie with fewer words in categories describing emotional & social processes, despite using a similar total number of words (& slightly more words describing movement, a control category). These results provide further evidence for the role of the RSS in social/emotional processing & identify a role for the RSS in automatic representation in ourselves of body states of others to foster emotion recognition & social cognition. 2 Tables, 3 Figures, 48 References. Adapted from the source document.

Recent work in cognitive and social neuroscience has focused on the neural substrates of social judgment. The present study explores the effects of damage to the right-hemisphere somatosensory cortices (RSS), a region known for its role in emotion recognition. Seven subjects with RSS damage were shown a short movie depicting objects that move in socially suggestive ways, a stimulus that typically elicits spontaneous social and emotional attributions from normal subjects. The spontaneous verbal responses of RSS-damaged subjects to this movie were compared to those of normal subjects as well as brain-damaged control subjects; the data were derived using a word count and categorization computer program. This method measures spontaneous social and emotional judgments rather than the more typical rating and labeling measures used in neuropsychological studies of social judgment. As predicted, relative to brain-damaged and normal controls, subjects with RSS damage reacted to the stimulus movie with fewer words in categories describing emotional and social processes, despite using a similar total number of words (and slightly more words describing movement, a control category). These results provide further evidence for the role of the RSS in social/emotional processing and identify a role for the RSS in automatic representation in ourselves of body states of others to foster emotion recognition and social cognition. (Original abstract)

A distinct aspect of the sense of fairness in humans is that we care not only about equality in material rewards but also about equality in non-material values. One such value is the opportunity to choose freely among many options, often regarded as a fundamental right to economic freedom. In modern developed societies, equal opportunities in work, living, and lifestyle are enforced by anti-discrimination laws. Despite the widespread endorsement of equal opportunity, no studies have explored how people assign value to it. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural substrates for subjective valuation of equality in choice opportunity. Participants performed a two-person choice task in which the number of choices available was varied across trials independently of choice outcomes. By using this procedure, we manipulated the degree of equality in choice opportunity between players and dissociated it from the value of reward outcomes and their equality. We found that activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex tracked the degree to which the number of options between the two players was equal. In contrast, activation in the ventral striatum tracked the number of options available to participants themselves but not the equality between players. Our results demonstrate that the vmPFC, a key brain region previously implicated in the processing of social values, is also involved in valuation of equality in choice opportunity between individuals. These findings may provide valuable insight into the human ability to value equal opportunity, a characteristic long emphasized in politics, economics, and philosophy.