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Room
Gartensaal
Friday, September 14  »  13:00 - 14:15
Invited Symposium 3
New Trends in Affective and Social Sciences
Host
Tania Singer (University of Zurich)
Chair
Klaus Scherer (University of Geneva), Tania Singer (University of Zurich)
Discussant
Klaus Scherer (University of Geneva), Tania Singer (University of Zurich)
In this symposium new conceptual as well as methodological directions in affective science are presented. In four papers, researchers of fields as varied as economics, bio- and emotion-psychology as well as neuroscience present new data on the behavioral, hormonal and neuronal foundations of basic and social emotions. More specifically, one paper will investigate the role of emotions and individual differences for decision making using financial investment tasks developed in economics. In another two papers, empathy will be investigated both from a psychological as well as a neuroscientific perspective. The former focuses on empathic accuracy measures assessed in everyday life with help of computer-assisted diary studies. The latter reports results on the neuronal mechanism underlying interoceptive awareness and empathy in normal and populations with socio-emotional deficits such as in autism or in alexithymia. Finally, a biopsychologically oriented paper summarizes studies on the role of oxytocin –a neuropeptide- for social behavior and mind reading abilities in relation to emotion.
Speakers
Tanja Wranik
Individual differences, emotions, and financial investment decision-making
Authors
Tanja Wranik (University of Geneva)
Astrid Hopfensitz (University of Geneva)
Emotion psychology has made great advances in the last twenty years, shedding light on the importance of individual difference and processes for numerous human behaviors. For example, the notion of appraisal biases - or stable individual differences which systematically influence the cognitive appraisal process underlying emotions - has been well established, and is a useful approach for understanding individual differences in decision-making. Related disciplines, such as finance and economics, are also interested in understanding how people make decisions, and especially how and why some individuals make counterproductive choices when planning their financial futures. Recently, behavioral economists and financial advisors have suggested that personality and affective processes might partially explain these choices, especially given the strong emotions provoked by earning and losing money. Bringing together the advances from both fields therefore becomes an ideal marriage for basic and practical advances in the affective sciences. We will present results from a series of experiments in which we used investment behavior settings to examine affective processes (cognitive appraisals, emotions, personality) and situational conditions (information and feedback frequency) to understand common errors in investment behaviors in relation to risk-taking and actual capital allocation. The benefits of interdisciplinarity in the affective sciences will be discussed.
Peter Wilhelm
Experienced and mutually perceived emotional states in family members' daily lives. What we learn from diary studies.
Authors
Peter Wilhelm (University of Fribourg)
Meinrad Perrez (University of Fribourg)
Do the emotional states of family members become synchronized when they stay together? How well do parents know what their partner or their adolescent child is feeling? How much do they rely on their own feelings when they try to infer their partners or their childs feelings? While these are crucial questions when considering the social context of naturally occurring affective states, they have rarely been systematically addressed and have not been investigated under daily life conditions. We provide answers to these questions, based on two large computer-assisted diary studies in which fathers, mothers, and their adolescent children simultaneously recorded how they were feeling, six times a day, during the course of a week. The parents also recorded how they thought their partner or child was feeling. With this method, we could assess the synchronization of family members feelings and obtain situation-specific indicators of empathic accuracy and projection in their everyday lives. Multilevel analyses of the data show that parents judgments of their partners and their childs feelings relied to a large extent on their own feelings (projection). Despite this they were quite accurate, even when projection was controlled. Synchronizations of feelings and accuracy increased when family members were together compared to situations when they were apart. However, even when they were not in direct contact with each other, accuracy was higher than would have been expected by chance.
Didier Grandjean
Connectivity and dynamic neural networks in decoding of emotion
Authors
Didier Grandjean (University of Geneva)
Patrik Vuilleumier (University of Geneva )
How emotionally salient events are perceived and represented by our central nervous system? How neuronal assemblies interact to allow humans to have appropriate adaptive responses to cope with unexpected situations? The affective neuroscience has recently benefited from the development of new techniques of data analyses for intracranial recordings (local field potentials, LFPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Beyond the classical static techniques, these new methods, such as the quantification of neuronal synchrony of LFPs and dynamic causal modelling, now allow us to measure how the neuronal activity of distant brain regions interact dynamically during the perception of emotionally relevant event, as well as to test more directly some psychological theoretical hypotheses in term of neuronal synchronisation.
Giorgia Silani
The neurophysiological basis of introspection and interoception in alexithymia and autism
Authors
Giorgia Silani (University of Zurich)
In two fMRI studies we explored the ability to understand own emotions and its relation to empathy by focusing on a specific syndrome characterized by a deficit in emotion understanding (alexithymia) in association with autism. In the first study, we compared 15 ASD individuals with and without alexithymia with 15 controls. Participants had to rate emotional pictures according to the degree of pleasantness they felt. We tested whether the inability to identify own feelings was due to: (1) reduced arousal associated with emotion, (2) failure in interoception (the cortical representation of this arousal), or (3) failure in introspection (the ability to reflect upon inner experience). Unpleasant stimuli activated the amygdala-striatal system equally in ASD and controls, ruling out hypothesis 1. Individuals with ASD showed reduced activation in ToM networks, independently of the degree of alexithymia, ruling out hypothesis 2. Only ASD individuals with high alexithymia showed reduced activation in anterior insula when required to assess their feelings to unpleasant pictures confirming hypothesis 3. Overall, activity in anterior insula was negatively correlated with alexithymia and positively with empathy suggesting a relationship between failures in understanding one’s own and others’ emotions. In the second study, we compare participants with ASD and alexithymia during empathy and ToM tasks to test for dissociation between cognitive and emotional perspective taking in pathology.
Markus Heinrichs
Psychoneuroendocrinology of social interaction: New perspectives on social sciences
Authors
Markus Heinrichs (University of Zurich)
Evidence for the key role of oxytocin in prosocial behavior, affiliation, stress, and anxiety has come primarily from studies in animals. Neuropeptides have been shown to cross the blood-brain barrier after intranasal administration, with initial studies reporting direct effects on human behavior. We were recently able to show that oxytocin improves trust and the protective effects of social interaction on neuroendocrine responses to social stress. This talk will present new results regarding the effects of intranasal oxytocin (i) on the ability to infer the internal state of another person, referred to as “mind-reading”, (ii) on amygdala responses to social cues, and (iii) on social fear in patients with social phobia. In particular, we found that oxytocin improves mind-reading in healthy men and attenuates amygdala responses to social cues in general, irrespective of the stimuli valence. In addition, intranasal oxytocin enhances the ability to socially interact in patients with social phobia, thereby reducing anxiety and physical arousal in a socially phobic situation. These findings may have clinical implications for the development of new therapeutic strategies for the treatment of disorders that are associated with deficits in social interactions (autism, social phobia).


Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF 105313-109408; SNSF PP001-114788) and the Research Priority Program “Foundations of Human Social Behavior” of the University of Zurich.
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