Training brain patterns of empathy using functional brain imaging

An unprecedented research conducted by a group of neuroscientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to train brain patterns associated with empathic feelings – more specifically, tenderness. The research showed that volunteers who received neurofeedback about their own brain activity patterns whilst being scanned inside a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) machine were able to change brain network function of areas related to tenderness and affection felt toward loved ones. These significant findings could open new possibilities for treatment of clinical situations, such as antisocial personality disorder and postpartum depression.

In Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner”, based on the science fiction book ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ by Philip K. Dick, empathy-detection devices are employed to measure tenderness or affection emotions felt toward others (called “affiliative” emotions). Despite recent advances in neurobiology and neurotechnology, it is unknown whether brain signatures of affiliative emotions can be decoded and voluntarily modulated.

The article entitled “Voluntary enhancement of neural signatures of affiliative emotion using fMRI neurofeedback” published in PLOS ONE is the first study to demonstrate through a neurotechnology tool, real-time neurofeedback using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the possibility to help the induction of empathic brain states.

The authors conducted this research at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education where a sophisticated computational tool was designed and used to allow the participants to modulate their own brain activity related to affiliative emotions and enhance this activity. This method employed pattern-detection algorithms, called “support vector machines” to classify complex activity patterns arising simultaneously from tenths of thousands of voxels (the 3-D equivalent of pixels) inside the participants’ brains.

Volunteers who received real time information of their ongoing neural activity could change brain network function among connected areas related to tenderness and affection felt toward loved ones, while the control group who performed the same fMRI task without neurofeedback did not show such improvement.

Thus, it was demonstrated that those who received a “real” feedback were able to “train” specific brain areas related to the experience of affiliative emotions that are key for empathy. These findings can lead the way to new opportunities to investigate the use of neurofeedback in conditions associated with reduced empathy and affiliative feelings, such as antisocial personality disorders and post-partum depression.

The authors point out that this study may represent a step towards the construction of the ‘empathy box’, an empathy-enhancing machine described by Philip K. Dick’s novel.

How the gut feeling shapes fear

An unlit, deserted car park at night, footsteps in the gloom. The heart beats faster and the stomach ties itself in knots. We often feel threatening situations in our stomachs. While the brain has long been viewed as the centre of all emotions, researchers are increasingly trying to get to the bottom of this proverbial gut instinct.

It is not only the brain that controls processes in our abdominal cavity; our stomach also sends signals back to the brain. At the heart of this dialogue between the brain and abdomen is the vagus nerve, which transmits signals in both directions – from the brain to our internal organs (via the so called efferent nerves) and from the stomach back to our brain (via the afferent nerves). By cutting the afferent nerve fibres in rats, a team of scientists led by Urs Meyer, a researcher in the group of ETH Zurich professor Wolfgang Langhans, turned this two-way communication into a one-way street, enabling the researchers to get to the bottom of the role played by gut instinct. In the test animals, the brain was still able to control processes in the abdomen, but no longer received any signals from the other direction.

Less fear without gut instinct

In the behavioural studies, the researchers determined that the rats were less wary of open spaces and bright lights compared with controlled rats with an intact vagus nerve. “The innate response to fear appears to be influenced significantly by signals sent from the stomach to the brain,” says Meyer.

Nevertheless, the loss of their gut instinct did not make the rats completely fearless: the situation for learned fear behaviour looked different. In a conditioning experiment, the rats learned to link a neutral acoustic stimulus – a sound – to an unpleasant experience. Here, the signal path between the stomach and brain appeared to play no role, with the test animals learning the association as well as the control animals. If, however, the researchers switched from a negative to a neutral stimulus, the rats without gut instinct required significantly longer to associate the sound with the new, neutral situation. This also fits with the results of a recently published study conducted by other researchers, which found that stimulation of the vagus nerve facilitates relearning, says Meyer.

These findings are also of interest to the field of psychiatry, as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, is linked to the association of neutral stimuli with fear triggered by extreme experiences. Stimulation of the vagus nerve could help people with PTSD to once more associate the triggering stimuli with neutral experiences. Vagus nerve stimulation is already used today to treat epilepsy and, in some cases, depression.

Stomach influences signalling in the brain

“A lower level of innate fear, but a longer retention of learned fear – this may sound contradictory,” says Meyer. However, innate and conditioned fear are two different behavioural domains in which different signalling systems in the brain are involved. On closer investigation of the rats’ brains, the researchers found that the loss of signals from the abdomen changes the production of certain signalling substances, so called neurotransmitters, in the brain.

“We were able to show for the first time that the selective interruption of the signal path from the stomach to the brain changed complex behavioural patterns. This has traditionally been attributed to the brain alone,” says Meyer. The study shows clearly that the stomach also has a say in how we respond to fear; however, what it says, i.e. precisely what it signals, is not yet clear. The researchers hope, however, that they will be able to further clarify the role of the vagus nerve and the dialogue between brain and body in future studies.

Researchers examine how touch can trigger our emotions

While touch always involves awareness, it also sometimes involves emotion. For example, picking up a spoon triggers no real emotion, while feeling a gentle caress often does. Now, scientists in the Cell Press journal Neuron describe a system of slowly conducting nerves in the skin that respond to such gentle touch. Using a range of scientific techniques, investigators are beginning to characterize these nerves and to describe the fundamental role they play in our lives as a social species—from a nurturing touch to an infant to a reassuring pat on the back. Their work also suggests that this soft touch wiring may go awry in disorders such as autism.

The nerves that respond to gentle touch, called c-tactile afferents (CTs), are similar to those that detect pain, but they serve an opposite function: they relay events that are neither threatening nor tissue-damaging but are instead rewarding and pleasant.

"The evolutionary significance of such a system for a social species is yet to be fully determined," says first author Francis McGlone, PhD, of Liverpool John Moores University in England. "But recent research is finding that people on the autistic spectrum do not process emotional touch normally, leading us to hypothesize that a failure of the CT system during neurodevelopment may impact adversely on the functioning of the social brain and the sense of self."

For some individuals with autism, the light touch of certain fabrics in clothing can cause distress. Temple Grandin, an activist and assistant professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University who has written extensively on her experiences as an individual with autism, has remarked that her lack of empathy in social situations may be partially due to a lack of “comforting tactual input.” Professor McGlone also notes that deficits in nurturing touch during early life could have negative effects on a range of behaviors and psychological states later in life.

Further research on CTs may help investigators develop therapies for autistic patients and individuals who lacked adequate nurturing touch as children. Also, a better understanding of how nerves that relay rewarding sensations interact with those that signal pain could provide insights into new treatments for certain types of pain.

Professor McGlone believes that possessing an emotional touch system in the skin is as important to well-being and survival as having a system of nerves that protect us from harm. “In a world where human touch is becoming more and more of a rarity with the ubiquitous increase in social media leading to non-touch-based communication, and the decreasing opportunity for infants to experience enough nurturing touch from a carer or parent due to the economic pressures of modern living, it is becoming more important to recognize just how vital emotional touch is to all humankind.”

Temper trap: the genetics of aggression and self-control

Everyone knows someone with a quick temper – it might even be you. And while scientists have known for decades that aggression is hereditary, there is another biological layer to those angry flare-ups: self-control.

In a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, my colleagues and I found that people who are genetically predisposed toward aggression try hard to control their anger, but have inefficient functioning in brain regions that control emotions.

In other words, self-control is, in part, biological.

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Positive, negative thinkers’ brains revealed

The ability to stay positive when times get tough – and, conversely, of being negative – may be hardwired in the brain, finds new research led by a Michigan State University psychologist.

The study, which appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, is the first to provide biological evidence validating the idea that there are, in fact, positive and negative people in the world.

“It’s the first time we’ve been able to find a brain marker that really distinguishes negative thinkers from positive thinkers,” said Jason Moser, lead investigator and assistant professor of psychology.

For the study, 71 female participants were shown graphic images and asked to put a positive spin on them while their brain activity was recorded. Participants were shown a masked man holding a knife to a woman’s throat, for example, and told one potential outcome was the woman breaking free and escaping.

The participants were surveyed beforehand to establish who tended to think positively and who thought negatively or worried. Sure enough, the brain reading of the positive thinkers was much less active than that of the worriers during the experiment.

“The worriers actually showed a paradoxical backfiring effect in their brains when asked to decrease their negative emotions,” Moser said. “This suggests they have a really hard time putting a positive spin on difficult situations and actually make their negative emotions worse even when they are asked to think positively.”

The study focused on women because they are twice as likely as men to suffer from anxiety related problems and previously reported sex differences in brain structure and function could have obscured the results.

Moser said the findings have implications in the way negative thinkers approach difficult situations.

“You can’t just tell your friend to think positively or to not worry – that’s probably not going to help them,” he said. “So you need to take another tack and perhaps ask them to think about the problem in a different way, to use different strategies.”

Negative thinkers could also practice thinking positively, although Moser suspects it would take a lot of time and effort to even start to make a difference.

Study Examines the Development of Children’s Prelife Reasoning

Most people, regardless of race, religion or culture, believe they are immortal. That is, people believe that part of themselves–some indelible core, soul or essence–will transcend the body’s death and live forever.  But what is this essence?  Why do we believe it survives?  And why is this belief so unshakable?

A new Boston University study led by postdoctoral fellow Natalie Emmons and published in the January 16, 2014 online edition of Child Development sheds light on these profound questions by examining children’s ideas about “prelife,” the time before conception. By interviewing 283 children from two distinct cultures in Ecuador, Emmons’s research suggests that our bias toward immortality is a part of human intuition that naturally emerges early in life. And the part of us that is eternal, we believe, is not our skills or ability to reason, but rather our hopes, desires and emotions. We are, in fact, what we feel.

Emmons’ study fits into a growing body of work examining the cognitive roots of religion. Although religion is a dominant force across cultures, science has made little headway in examining whether religious belief–such as the human tendency to believe in a creator–may actually be hard-wired into our brains.

“This work shows that it’s possible for science to study religious belief,” said Deborah Kelemen, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Boston University and co-author of the paper. “At the same time, it helps us understand some universal aspects of human cognition and the structure of the mind.”

Most studies on immortality or “eternalist” beliefs have focused on people’s views of the afterlife. Studies have found that both children and adults believe that bodily needs, such as hunger and thirst, end when people die, but mental capacities, such as thinking or feeling sad, continue in some form.  But these afterlife studies leave one critical question unanswered: where do these beliefs come from? Researchers have long suspected that people develop ideas about the afterlife through cultural exposure, like television or movies, or through religious instruction. But perhaps, thought Emmons, these ideas of immortality actually emerge from our intuition.  Just as children learn to talk without formal instruction, maybe they also intuit that part of their mind could exist apart from their body.

Emmons tackled this question by focusing on “prelife,” the period before conception, since few cultures have beliefs or views on the subject. “By focusing on prelife, we could see if culture causes these beliefs to appear, or if they appear spontaneously,” said Emmons.

“I think it’s a brilliant idea,” said Paul Bloom, a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale who was not involved with the study. “One persistent belief is that children learn these ideas through school or church. That’s what makes the prelife research so cool. It’s a very clever way to get at children’s beliefs on a topic where they aren’t given answers ahead of time.”

Emmons interviewed children from an indigenous Shuar village in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador. She chose the group because they have no cultural prelife beliefs, and she suspected that indigenous children, who have regular exposure to birth and death through hunting and farming, would have a more rational, biologically-based view of the time before they were conceived. For comparison, she also interviewed children from an urban area near Quito, Ecuador. Most of the urban children were Roman Catholic, a religion that teaches that life begins only at conception. If cultural influences were paramount, reasoned Emmons, both urban and indigenous children should reject the idea of life before birth.

Emmons showed the children drawings of a baby, a young woman, and the same woman while pregnant, then asked a series of questions about the child’s abilities, thoughts and emotions during each period: as babies, in the womb, and before conception.

The results were surprising.  Both groups gave remarkably similar answers, despite their radically different cultures. The children reasoned that their bodies didn’t exist before birth, and that they didn’t have the ability to think or remember. However, both groups also said that their emotions and desires existed before they were born. For example, while children generally reported that they didn’t have eyes and couldn’t see things before birth, they often reported being happy that they would soon meet their mother, or sad that they were apart from their family.

“They didn’t even realize they were contradicting themselves,” said Emmons. “Even kids who had biological knowledge about reproduction still seemed to think that they had existed in some sort of eternal form.  And that form really seemed to be about emotions and desires.”

Why would humans have evolved this seemingly universal belief in the eternal existence of our emotions? Emmons said that this human trait might be a by-product of our highly developed social reasoning. “We’re really good at figuring out what people are thinking, what their emotions are, what their desires are,” she said. We tend to see people as the sum of their mental states, and desires and emotions may be particularly helpful when predicting their behavior. Because this ability is so useful and so powerful, it flows over into other parts of our thinking. We sometimes see connections where potentially none exist, we hope there’s a master plan for the universe, we see purpose when there is none, and we imagine that a soul survives without a body.

These ideas, while nonscientific, are natural and deep-seated. “I study these things for a living but even find myself defaulting to them. I know that my mind is a product of my brain but I still like to think of myself as something independent of my body,” said Emmons.

“We have the ability to reflect and reason scientifically, and we have the ability to reason based on our gut and intuition,” she added. “And depending on the situation, one may be more useful than the other.”

‘Love hormone’ oxytocin carries unexpected side effect

The love hormone, the monogamy hormone, the cuddle hormone, the trust-me drug: oxytocin has many nicknames. That’s because this naturally occurring human hormone has recently been shown to help people with autism and schizophrenia overcome social deficits.

As a result, certain psychologists prescribe oxytocin off-label, to treat mild social unease in patients who don’t suffer from a diagnosed disorder. But that’s not such a good idea, according to researchers at Concordia’s Centre for Research in Human Development. Their recent study — published in Emotion, a journal of the American Psychological Association — shows that in healthy young adults, too much oxytocin can actually result in oversensitivity to the emotions of others.

With the help of psychology professor Mark Ellenbogen, PhD candidates Christopher Cardoso and Anne-Marie Linnen recruited 82 healthy young adults who showed no signs of schizophrenia, autism or related disorders. Half of the participants were given measured doses of oxytocin, while the rest were offered a placebo.

The participants then completed an emotion identification accuracy test in which they compared different facial expressions showing various emotional states. As expected, the test subjects who had taken oxytocin saw greater emotional intensity in the faces they were rating.

“For some, typical situations like dinner parties or job interviews can be a source of major social anxiety,” says Cardoso, the study’s lead author. “Many psychologists initially thought that oxytocin could be an easy fix in overcoming these worries. Our study proves that the hormone ramps up innate social reasoning skills, resulting in an emotional oversensitivity that can be detrimental in those who don’t have any serious social deficiencies.”

As Cardoso explains, “If your potential boss grimaces because she’s uncomfortable in her chair and you think she’s reacting negatively to what you’re saying, or if the guy you’re talking to at a party smiles to be friendly and you think he’s coming on to you, it can lead you to overreact — and that can be a real problem. That’s why we’re cautioning against giving oxytocin to people who don’t really need it.”

Ultimately, however, oxytocin does have the potential to help people with diagnosed disorders like autism to overcome social deficits.

But, says Cardoso, “The potential social benefits of oxytocin in most people may be countered by unintended negative consequences, like being too sensitive to emotional cues in everyday life.”

People worldwide may feel mind-body connections in same way

Many phrases reflect how emotions affect the body: Loss makes you feel “heartbroken,” you suffer from “butterflies” in the stomach when nervous, and disgusting things make you “sick to your stomach.”

Now, a new study from Finland suggests connections between emotions and body parts may be standard across cultures.

The researchers coaxed Finnish, Swedish and Taiwanese participants into feeling various emotions and then asked them to link their feelings to body parts. They connected anger to the head, chest, arms and hands; disgust to the head, hands and lower chest; pride to the upper body; and love to the whole body except the legs. As for anxiety, participants heavily linked it to the mid-chest.

"The most surprising thing was the consistency of the ratings, both across individuals and across all the tested language groups and cultures," said study lead author Lauri Nummenmaa, an assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Finland’s Aalto University School of Science.

However, one U.S. expert, Paul Zak, chairman of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California, was unimpressed by the findings. He discounted the study, saying it was weakly designed, failed to understand how emotions work and “doesn’t prove a thing.”

But for his part, Nummenmaa said the research is useful because it sheds light on how emotions and the body are interconnected.

"We wanted to understand how the body and the mind work together for generating emotions," Nummenmaa said. "By mapping the bodily changes associated with emotions, we also aimed to comprehend how different emotions such as disgust or sadness actually govern bodily functions."

For the study, published online Dec. 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers showed two silhouettes of bodies to about 700 people. Depending on the experiment, they tried to coax feelings out of the participants by showing them emotional words, stories, clips from movies and facial expressions. Then the participants colored the silhouettes to reflect the body areas they felt were becoming most or least active.

The idea was to not mention emotions directly to the participants but instead to make them “feel different emotions,” Nummenmaa said.

The researchers noted that some of the emotions may cause activity in specific areas of the body. For example, most basic emotions were linked to sensations in the upper chest, which may have to do with breathing and heart rate. And people linked all the emotions to the head, suggesting a possible link to brain activity.

But Zak said the study failed to consider that people often feel more than one emotion at a time. Or that a person’s own comprehension of emotion can be misleading since the “areas in the brain that process emotions tend to be largely outside of our conscious awareness,” he said.

It would make more sense, Zak said, to directly measure activity in the body, such as sweat and temperature, to make sure people’s perceptions have some basis in reality. Nummenmaa said he expects future research to go in that direction.

How might the current research be useful? Zak is skeptical that it could be, but the study lead author is hopeful.

"Many mental disorders are associated with altered functioning of the emotional system, so unraveling how emotions coordinate with the minds and bodies of healthy individuals is important for developing treatments for such disorders,” Nummenmaa said.

Next, the researchers want to see if these emotion-body connections change in people who are anxious or depressed. “Also, we are interested in how children and adolescents experience their emotions in their bodies,” Nummenmaa said.

Calming fear during sleep

First evidence that fear memories can be reduced during sleep

A fear memory was reduced in people by exposing them to the memory over and over again while they slept. It’s the first time that emotional memory has been manipulated in humans during sleep, report Northwestern Medicine® scientists.

The finding potentially offers a new way to enhance the typical daytime treatment of phobias through exposure therapy by adding a nighttime component. Exposure therapy is a common treatment for phobia and involves a gradual exposure to the feared object or situation until the fear is extinguished.

"It’s a novel finding," said Katherina Hauner, a postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We showed a small but significant decrease in fear. If it can be extended to pre-existing fear, the bigger picture is that, perhaps, the treatment of phobias can be enhanced during sleep."

Hauner did the research in the lab of Jay Gottfried, associate professor of neurology at Feinberg and senior author of the paper.

The study will be published Sept. 22 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Previous projects have shown that spatial learning and motor sequence learning can be enhanced during sleep. It wasn’t previously known that emotions could be manipulated during sleep, Northwestern investigators said.

In the study, 15 healthy human subjects received mild electric shocks while seeing two different faces. They also smelled a specific odorant while viewing each face and being shocked, so the face and the odorant both were associated with fear. Subjects received different odorants to smell with each face such as woody, clove, new sneaker, lemon or mint.

Then, when a subject was asleep, one of the two odorants was re-presented, but in the absence of the associated faces and shocks. This occurred during slow wave sleep when memory consolidation is thought to occur. Sleep is very important for strengthening new memories, noted Hauner, also a research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

"While this particular odorant was being presented during sleep, it was reactivating the memory of that face over and over again which is similar to the process of fear extinction during exposure therapy," Hauner said.

When the subjects woke up, they were exposed to both faces. When they saw the face linked to the smell they had been exposed to during sleep, their fear reactions were lower than their fear reactions to the other face.

Fear was measured in two ways: through small amounts of sweat in the skin, similar to a lie detector test, and through neuroimaging with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). The fMRI results showed changes in regions associated with memory, such as the hippocampus, and changes in patterns of brain activity in regions associated with emotion, such as the amygdala. These brain changes reflected a decrease in reactivity that was specific to the targeted face image associated with the odorant presented during sleep.