Social neuroscience

• Amygdala can respond to “Crude” representations of stimuli 

  • Wide eyed fear and surprise, especially 
• people react to amount of eye white – not the shape of the eye overall or the amount of eye black (pupils) seen
• eye back of white were shown subconsciously, brain activtios measured therefore

  No subjekcts claimed to have “seen” the 17ms flashing image 
• “Backward masking”: 

  Subcionsciously - diminished competing cognitive functions/interpreting meaning, connection-making, etc
• Being” - emotional state

  “Wanting” - motivation tate
• • Lesions of the amygdala disrupt fear conditioning 
  • Lesions of amygdala after the conditioning disrupts response
  • Lesions do not disrupt fear response to the shock: amygdala interested in activation and storage of fearful responses
• Fronto-striatal-thalamic loops

  • Addiction, reward
  • Dopamine + other neutotransmitters 
• • Limbic system (hippocampus, hypothalmus, amygdala, cingulate cortex: relating to enviornment via context and memory; pain, empathy, social exclusion, memory, learning, emotion)
• • Basal gangalia (collection of midbrain structures; evolutionarily old; modulating action and thoughts, reward association/learning; addiction; decision making; victim of neurodegenerative diseases; motivation, social motivation)
• • Temporal poles: semantics, social concepts, retrieval of schemas
  • Implicated in dementia patients with semantic forgetting, but not socie
• • Medial prefrontal cortex: thoughts about mental states, thoughts of self, reopresenting information “decoupled from reality” (ie predicting sally in theory of mind)
  • Lesions do not neccesarily disrupt ToM performnace
• • rTPJ: stronger responses to others’ states, interested in false beliefs (versys false photos), lesions can lead to impairments in ToM task
  • Proposed ToM domain-specificity controversial, but mostly points here
• • Anterior singulate cortex, insula, somatosensory cortex (places involved in our own experiencing of pain
• • Overlap in brain activation when personally experiencing pain and when others are 
  • Overlaps correlated with different indices of “empathic concern” as determined bia questionnaire (questionairres like this also might be flawed/biased)Mitchell et al paper
• Ventral medial cortex more responsive to self and similar others

  • We draw on self-representation/knowledge to understand them

  Dorsal more responsive to dissimilar others

  (use of liberal/conservative reporting and labeling paradigm)