Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

Assignment 36: Describe a typical experiment from social or affective neuroscience, and
explain how it informs us about social processes.
Social species create emergent organizations beyond the individual. These emergent
structures evolved hand in hand with neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to
support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive,
reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. Social
neuroscience seeks to specify the neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms
underlying social behavior, and in so doing to understand the associations and influences
between social and biological levels of organization. Affective neuroscience is the study of
the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with
the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The putative existence of 'basic
emotions' and their defining attributes represents a long lasting and yet unsettled issue in
psychology (Cacioppo, Berntson & Decety, 2010). In this assignment, I will describe research
done by Singer et al. (2004b) on empathy, to better understand how research like this can
inform us about social processes.
Simulation theory is not strictly a single theory but a collection of theories. However,
common to all of them is the basic assumption that we understand other people’s behavior by
recreating the mental processes on ourselves that, if carried out, would reproduce their
behavior. The word empathy is relatively modern, being little more than 100 years old. It was
coined by Titchener in 1909, and originally referred to putting oneself in someone else’s
situation. In the broadest sense, empathy is an emotional reaction to (or understanding of)
another person’s feelings (Ward, 2017).
Singer et al. (2004) investigated empathy for pain in humans using fMRI. The brain was
scanned when anticipating and watching a loved-one suffer a mild electric shock. There was
an overlap between regions activated by expectancy of another person’s pain and
experiencing pain oneself, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula. This
provides evidence for a mirror system for pain – a system that responds to pain in self and
other. However, meta-analyses of fMRI studies of empathy have also tended to center around
the simulation or ‘sharing’ of feelings and sensations rather than the classic action-based
mirror neuron system (Ward, 2017). As mentioned, watching someone in pain activates
certain parts of our own pain circuitry- This offers clear support for simulation theories.
However, our beliefs about the person in pain can modulate or override this mechanism.
Singer et al. (2006) had participants in an fMRI scanner play a game with someone who plays
fairly, a “Goodie”, and someone else who plays unfairly, a “Baddie”. Mild electric shocks
were then delivered to the Goodie and Baddie, who were only actors, something the
participant did not know. Participants empathically activated their own pain regions when
watching the Goodie receive the electric shock. However, this response was attenuated when
they saw the Baddie receiving the shock. In fact, male participants often activated their
pleasure and reward circuits when watching the Baddie receive the shock, which is the exact
opposite of simulation theory. This brain activity correlated with their reported desire for
revenge, which suggests that although simulation may tend to operate automatically it is not
protected from our higher order beliefs (Ward, 2017).
The findings of this study have implications for conditions associated with reduced empathy,
such as autism and psychopathy. It suggests that there are multiple reasons why empathy
might fail – because of a failure to simulate the emotions of others or because of personally or
socially constructed beliefs about who is “good” and who is “bad”. The eminent social
psychologist Bandura (2002) argues that simulation has a relatively minor role to play in
empathy, arguing that if it did it would lead to emotional exhaustion, which would debilitate
everyday functioning. Moreover, Bandura (2002) argues that acts of inhumanity, such as
genocide, depend on our ability to self-regulate and dissociate self from other. Although
genocide is an extreme example, displaying lack of empathy towards socially marginalized
groups, like illegal immigrants or welfare cheats, could be regarded as a typical facet of
human behaviour (Ward, 2017). Being aware of these aspects of human behaviour may lead
to a better understanding of how to tackle inhumanity. If recognising these patterns of
negative behaviour when they occur, humans can better regulate their behaviour from a less
empathic behaviour, towards an empathic pattern of reaction.

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Assignment 36: Describe a typical experiment from social or affective neuroscience, and

explain how it informs us about social processes.

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