Distortions of mind perception in psychopathology.

It has long been known that psychopathology can influence social perception, but a 2D framework of mind perception provides the opportunity for an integrative understanding of some disorders. We examined the covariation of mind perception with three subclinical syndromes--autism-spectrum disorder, schizotypy, and psychopathy--and found that each presents a unique mind-perception profile. Autism-spectrum disorder involves reduced perception of agency in adult humans. Schizotypy involves increased perception of both agency and experience in entities generally thought to lack minds. Psychopathy involves reduced perception of experience in adult humans, children, and animals. Disorders are differentially linked with the over- or underperception of agency and experience in a way that helps explain their real-world consequences.

Spared ability to recognise fear from static and moving whole-body cues following bilateral amygdala damage.

Bilateral amygdala lesions impair the ability to identify certain emotions, especially fear, from facial expressions, and neuroimaging studies have demonstrated differential amygdala activation as a function of the emotional expression of faces, even under conditions of subliminal presentation, and again especially for fear. Yet the amygdala's role in processing emotion from other classes of stimuli remains poorly understood. On the basis of its known connectivity as well as prior studies in humans and animals, we hypothesised that the amygdala would be important also for the recognition of fear from body expressions. To test this hypothesis, we assessed a patient (S.M.) with complete bilateral amygdala lesions who is known to be severely impaired at recognising fear from faces. S.M. completed a battery of tasks involving forced-choice labelling and rating of the emotions in two sets of dynamic body movement stimuli, as well as in a set of static body postures. Unexpectedly, S.M.'s performance was completely normal. We replicated the finding in a second rare subject with bilateral lesions entirely confined to the amygdala. Compared to healthy comparison subjects, neither of the amygdala lesion subjects was impaired in identifying fear from any of these displays. Thus, whatever the role of the amygdala in processing whole-body fear cues, it is apparently not necessary for the normal recognition of fear from either static or dynamic body expressions.

Personhood and neuroscience: naturalizing or nihilating?

Personhood is a foundational concept in ethics, yet defining criteria have been elusive. In this article we summarize attempts to define personhood in psychological and neurological terms and conclude that none manage to be both specific and non-arbitrary. We propose that this is because the concept does not correspond to any real category of objects in the world. Rather, it is the product of an evolved brain system that develops innately and projects itself automatically and irrepressibly onto the world whenever triggered by stimulus features such as a human-like face, body, or contingent patterns of behavior. We review the evidence for the existence of an autonomous person network in the brain and discuss its implications for the field of ethics and for the implicit morality of everyday behavior.

Empathic nonverbal behavior increases ratings of both warmth and competence in a medical context.

In medicine, it is critical that clinicians demonstrate both empathy (perceived as warmth) and competence. Perceptions of these qualities are often intuitive and are based on nonverbal behavior. Emphasizing both warmth and competence may prove problematic, however, because there is evidence that they are inversely related in other settings. We hypothesize that perceptions of physician competence will instead be positively correlated with perceptions of physician warmth and empathy, potentially due to changing conceptions of the physician's role. We test this hypothesis in an analog medical context using a large online sample, manipulating physician nonverbal behaviors suggested to communicate empathy (e.g. eye contact) and competence (the physician's white coat). Participants rated physicians displaying empathic nonverbal behavior as more empathic, warm, and more competent than physicians displaying unempathic nonverbal behavior, adjusting for mood. We found no warmth/competence tradeoff and, additionally, no significant effects of the white coat. Further, compared with male participants, female participants perceived physicians displaying unempathic nonverbal behavior as less empathic. Given the significant consequences of clinician empathy, it is important for clinicians to learn how nonverbal behavior contributes to perceptions of warmth, and use it as another tool to improve their patients' emotional and physical health.

Perception of socially relevant stimuli in schizophrenia.

To examine whether patients with schizophrenia have deficits in the appraisal of socially relevant stimuli, we tested 20 patients and 14 healthy volunteers equated for parental socioeconomic status on recognition of gender stimuli, emotional people stimuli, and emotional scenes. Patients with schizophrenia showed deficits in discrimination of subtle gender differences and in the identification of emotion from human shapes and body motion. Patients showed no impairment on measures of hedonic appraisal of emotional scenes and recognition of emotional expression in human face stimuli. Across tasks, subjects with schizophrenia showed poorer identification of happiness, anger, and fear. The findings point towards circumscribed domains of impaired social cognition in schizophrenia and suggest specific further hypotheses about the neural dysfunction that may underlie them.

The role of forgetting in undermining good intentions.

Evaluating others is a fundamental feature of human social interaction--we like those who help more than those who hinder. In the present research, we examined social evaluation of those who not only intentionally performed good and bad actions but also those to whom good things have happened (the lucky) and those to whom bad things have happened (the unlucky). In Experiment 1a, subjects demonstrated a sympathetic preference for the unlucky. However, under cognitive load (Experiment 1b), no such preference was expressed. Further, in Experiments 2a and 2b, when a time delay between impression formation (learning) and evaluation (memory test) was introduced, results showed that younger (Experiment 2a) and older adults (Experiment 2b) showed a significant preference for the lucky. Together these experiments show that a consciously motivated sympathetic preference for those who are unlucky dissolves when memory is disrupted. The observed dissociation provides evidence for the presence of conscious good intentions (favoring the unlucky) and the cognitive compromising of such intentions when memory fails.

Contrasting roles for lateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in transient and dispositional affective experience.

Prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been implicated in the experience and regulation of emotional states. Emotional experience is a complex construct, encompassing a range of more specific processes. This exploratory study aimed to delineate which (if any) aspects of emotional experience rely critically on either the ventromedial frontal (VMF) or lateral frontal (LF) lobes. The affective experience of individuals with damage to these regions was surveyed in detail using several measures and compared with that of control participants. Dependent measures included subjective and observer ratings of both dispositional affect and transient responses to laboratory mood inductions. VMF damage was associated with greater negative dispositional affect relative to controls and to individuals with LF damage; however, transient responses to emotional stimuli were largely normal. In contrast, LF damage was associated with an exaggerated subjective reactivity to sad emotional stimuli relative to control participants, but normal dispositional affect. Interestingly, neither form of PFC damage affected spontaneous emotion recovery following the mood inductions. These findings suggest a role for VMF in modulating dispositional negative affect; in contrast, LF areas appear to be critical in regulating transient emotional responses while emotional stimuli are present. This study also illustrates the dissociability of different aspects of emotional experience in patients with focal brain injury.

Ventromedial frontal lobe plays a critical role in facial emotion recognition.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been implicated in a variety of emotion processes. However, findings regarding the role of this region specifically in emotion recognition have been mixed. We used a sensitive facial emotion recognition task to compare the emotion recognition performance of 7 subjects with lesions confined to ventromedial prefrontal regions, 8 subjects with lesions elsewhere in prefrontal cortex, and 16 healthy control subjects. We found that emotion recognition was impaired following ventromedial, but not dorsal or lateral, prefrontal damage. This impairment appeared to be quite general, with lower overall ratings or more confusion between all six emotions examined. We also explored the relationship between emotion recognition performance and the ability of the same patients to experience transient happiness and sadness during a laboratory mood induction. We found some support for a relationship between sadness recognition and experience. Taken together, our results indicate that the ventromedial frontal lobe plays a crucial role in facial emotion recognition, and suggest that this deficit may be related to the subjective experience of emotion.

Dissociation between emotion and personality judgments: convergent evidence from functional neuroimaging.

Cognitive neuroscientists widely agree on the importance of providing convergent evidence from neuroimaging and lesion studies to establish structure-function relationships. However, such convergent evidence is, in practice, rarely provided. A previous lesion study found a striking double dissociation between two superficially similar social judgment processes, emotion recognition and personality attribution, based on the same body movement stimuli (point-light walkers). Damage to left frontal opercular (LFO) cortices was associated with impairments in personality trait attribution, whereas damage to right postcentral/supramarginal cortices was associated with impairments in emotional state attribution. Here, we present convergent evidence from fMRI in support of this double dissociation, with regions of interest (ROIs) defined by the regions of maximal lesion overlap from the previous study. Subjects learned four emotion words and four trait words, then watched a series of short point-light walker body movement stimuli. After each stimulus, subjects saw either an emotion word or a trait word and rated how well the word described the stimulus. The LFO ROI exhibited greater activity during personality judgments than during emotion judgments. In contrast, the right postcentral/supramarginal ROI exhibited greater activity during emotion judgments than during personality judgments. Follow-up experiments ruled out the possibility that the LFO activation difference was due to word frequency differences. Additionally, we found greater activity in a region of the medial prefrontal cortex previously associated with "theory of mind" tasks when subjects made personality, as compared to emotion judgments.

Method matters: an empirical study of impact in cognitive neuroscience.

A major thrust of cognitive neuroscience is the elucidation of structure-function relationships in the human brain. Over the last several years, functional neuroimaging has risen in prominence relative to the lesion studies that formed the historical core of work in this field. These two methods have different strengths and weaknesses. Among these is a crucial difference in the nature of evidence each can provide. Lesion studies can provide evidence for necessity claims, whereas functional neuroimaging studies do not. We hypothesized that lesion studies will continue to have greater scientific impact even as the relative proportion of such studies in the cognitive neuroscience literature declines. Using methods drawn from systematic literature review, we identified a set of original cognitive neuroscience articles that employed either functional imaging or lesion techniques, published at one of two time points in the 1990s, and assessed the effect of the method used on each article's impact across the decade. Functional neuroimaging studies were cited three times more often than lesion studies throughout the time span we examined. This effect was in large part due to differences in the influence of the journals publishing the two methods; functional neuroimaging studies appeared disproportionately more often in higher impact journals. There were also differences in the degree to which articles using one method cited articles using the other method. Functional neuroimaging articles were less likely to include such cross-method citations.

Impaired spontaneous anthropomorphizing despite intact perception and social knowledge.

Humans spontaneously imbue the world with social meaning: we see not only emotions and intentional behaviors in humans and other animals, but also anger in the movements of thunderstorms and willful sabotage in crashing computers. Converging evidence supports a role for the amygdala, a collection of nuclei in the temporal lobe, in processing emotionally and socially relevant information. Here, we report that a patient with bilateral amygdala damage described a film of animated shapes (normally seen as full of social content) in entirely asocial, geometric terms, despite otherwise normal visual perception. Control tasks showed that the impairment did not result from a global inability to describe social stimuli or a bias in language use, nor was a similar impairment observed in eight comparison subjects with damage to orbitofrontal cortex. This finding extends the role of the amygdala to the social attributions we make even to stimuli that are not explicitly social and, in so doing, suggests that the human capacity for anthropomorphizing draws on some of the same neural systems as do basic emotional responses.

Cortical regions for judgments of emotions and personality traits from point-light walkers.

Humans are able to use nonverbal behavior to make fast, reliable judgments of both emotional states and personality traits. Whereas a sizeable body of research has identified neural structures critical for emotion recognition, the neural substrates of personality trait attribution have not been explored in detail. In the present study, we investigated the neural systems involved in emotion and personality trait judgments. We used a type of visual stimulus that is known to convey both emotion and personality information, namely, point-light walkers. We compared the emotion and personality trait judgments made by subjects with brain damage to those made by neurologically normal subjects and then conducted a lesion overlap analysis to identify neural regions critical for these two tasks. Impairments on the two tasks dissociated: Some subjects were impaired at emotion recognition, but judged personality normally; other subjects were impaired on the personality task, but normal at emotion recognition. Moreover, these dissociations in performance were associated with damage to specific neural regions: Right somatosensory cortices were a primary focus of lesion overlap in subjects impaired on the emotion task, whereas left frontal opercular cortices were a primary focus of lesion overlap in subjects impaired on the personality task. These findings suggest that attributions of emotional states and personality traits are accomplished by partially dissociable neural systems.