General neuroscience

Cognitive empathy can be learned, but erodes without continuous reinforcement

"Cognitive empathy can be learned [...] but the bad news is that it needs continuous reinforcement."

(Cundell, Diana R. "Culturing the Empathic Health Professional: Challenges and Opportunities." Healthcare Transformation 2.2 (2017): 71-83.)

Neurofeminism

"However, the outcome of research on differences between women and men in terms of linguistic abilities, spatial orientation, or mathematics—that is, of cognitive capacities in general—is by no means conclusive (Schmitz, 1999; Coluccia and Louse, 2004; Spelke, 2005; Mehl et al., 2007; Else-Quest et al., 2010; Lavenex and Lavenex, 2010; Fausto-Sterling et al., 2012a,b); neither are results on emotional or rational processing (Karafyllis, 2008) (...).

(...)

Feminist neuroscientists have uncovered inconsistent findings concerning sex differences and elaborated similarities between or variations within the gender groups, not only on the level of behavior and performance but also concerning their apparently biological sources, i.e., the brain networks and their functions (Frost et al., 1999; Blanch et al., 2004; Ulshöfer, 2008; Wallentin, 2009; Jordan-Young, 2010; Bluhm et al., 2012; Jordan-Young and Rumiati, 2012; Kuria, 2012; Roy, 2012; Vidal, 2012; Dussauge, 2014; Kaiser, 2014; Sommer et al., 2004, 2008).

(...)

 The concept of brain plasticity points out that brain structures and brain functions are not in any shape or form determined by evolution or remain unchanged during a life span. At birth, the brain is not at all branded or defined, and this network of nerve cells, neuronal fibers and their synapses is not ‘completely formed’ by genetic information.

(...)

The brain plasticity concept is important for deconstructing unilinear statements about a supposedly biological determination of behavior, attitudes, etc. In narrating plasticity stories, neurofeminist scholars mainly stress a return of genealogies of cause and effect, arguing that gendered social experiences and power relations impact the forming of the gendered brain’s structure and function more than vice versa (e.g., Vidal, 2012).

(...)

Modern neurodeterminism does not care whether brain structures and functions are innate or formed by experience, considering it to be irrelevant whether the individual brain is formed by nature or nurture.

(...)

There is an interesting ambivalence that is not articulated in current neurocultural discourse: while plasticity concepts are included in modern neurodeterminism up to the moment of measuring, they are dropped again when it comes to predicting future behavior. Although insisting on the forming of biological materiality from ‘outside’, neurocultural discourse is in danger of remaining connected to concepts that presume to predict behavior, thinking, and acting due to biological entities from ‘inside’. The impacts of these normative framings on cultural understandings, social practices, and governmental discourses are already the subject of critical analyses (Choudhury et al., 2009; Choudhury and Slaby, 2011). Neurofeminism must question the gender-based and intersected legitimations that are drawn from neurocultural discourse and practices, in particular because neuroscientific knowledge production can be used for various socio-political in- and exclusions (O’Connell, 2014).

(...)

One example of a critical examination of neurocultures is Höppner and Schmitz (2014) analysis which pursues the question of how the phenomenon of neuropharmacological enhancement is discussed in the German media. The analysis of 21 public media articles (published between 2006 and 2011 in four German online journals) shows that self-optimization of the brain with the help of neuropharmaceuticals is increasingly predicted as a universal strategy for success. Whereas success-oriented males tend to aim for the improvement of their rational skills, success-oriented-women should focus on regulating their self-confidence. Moreover, the articles once again manifest a hierarchized status quo of rational skills over emotional capacities and a different proficiency level that neuro-enhanced subjects could achieve depending on their gender. While women would need a continual consumption of neuro-enhancers in order to achieve a proficiency level similar to male capacities for a limited time, men should take neuro-enhancers only once a while to selectively enhance their supposedly high capacities (a result of their biological setup) to become the best within the group of the best men.

(...)

Since gendered conceptions and connotations shape individual actions, social practices, and social segregation, gender-sensitive analyses can help to assess the entanglements within and the outcomes of neuro-pedagogies in medial discourse, schools, and universities. More precisely, such approaches outline the interdependencies of bodily materiality, social experiences, and cultural norms by underpinning the alterability and interdependencies of brains, behavior, thinking, and acting throughout a person’s lifetime. In doing so, they suggest alternative concepts and settings for individual learning processes (e.g., Vidal, 2012; Just, 2014; Mead Vetter, 2014)."

(http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00546/full)

The brain does not work like a computer 

"No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.[...]
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not. [...]
A wealth of brain studies tells us, in fact, that multiple and sometimes large areas of the brain are often involved in even the most mundane memory tasks. When strong emotions are involved, millions of neurons can become more active.[...]
Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary. [...]
For any given experience, orderly change could involve a thousand neurons, a million neurons or even the entire brain, with the pattern of change different in every brain."

(source: "The Empty Brain", by Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, published on Aeon, retrieved 26-7-2016)

Imagine a high fetal testosterone, low 2D:4D ratio brain, which in our hypothesis is highly rigid, interacting with the world. If change would just imply adapting a few data or algorithms, as the to-be-abandoned "the brain is like a computer"-model states, it would be able to handle this. But an extensive change throughout the whole brain, as a more realistic brain model implies, will be outright impossible or at least a painful experience. Maybe easier for such a brain to not adapt to the world, but adapt the world to itself - which at the surface corresponds with dogmatism and radicalism, and the kind of dictatorship we know of low 2D:4D ratio leaders like Mao and Stalin?

Do newborn babies imitate adults? New study says 'no', rekindling long-standing debate

"Professor Slaughter and her colleagues tested infant responses to a wide range of adult gestures at one, three, six and nine weeks of age. (...) 'To our surprise we did not find any evidence that babies imitated any of the gestures at any of the time points,' Professor Slaughter said."

​(source: abc.net.au, retrieved 17-5-2016)

Free will

"Using newer fMRI technology, Soon et al (2008) used a learning algorithm to predict "free will" decisions from brain activity about 7 seconds (and up to 10 seconds) prior to the subject reporting awareness of having made the decision. This experiment has been replicated in other labs: Presenter Marcus du Satoy undergoes it for the BBC documentary The Secret You (2009/2010), and remarks that there is something creepy about the radiologist being aware of his decision several seconds before even he is."

source: Predictive Experiments on Neuroscience of Free Will_, retrieved 18-5-2016)

Perception is constructed by the unconscious mind, then handed to consiousness

"But research shows that every perception we have is actually constructed by the unconscious mind, which then instantly hands it to consciousness. What the unconscious mind uses to do this constructing is largely sensory stimulations. We grasp this information with our senses, we process it with our brains unconsciously, and the product enters our consciousness."

("Spiritual emergency", adjunct professor psychiatrist James Carpenter, in Aeon, retrieved 11/8/2016)

Nucleus basalis, acetylcholine and new connections in the brain

"Our hunch that it’s easier to learn when you’re young isn’t completely wrong, or at least it has a real basis in neurology. However, the pessimistic assumption that learning somehow ‘stops’ when you leave school or university or hit thirty is at odds with the evidence. It appears that a great deal depends on the nucleus basalis, located in the basal forebrain. Among other things, this bit of the brain produces significant amounts of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that regulates the rate at which new connections are made between brain cells. This in turn dictates how readily we form memories of various kinds, and how strongly we retain them. When the nucleus basalisis ‘switched on’, acetylcholine flows and new connections occur. When it is switched off, we make far fewer new connections.
Between birth and the age of ten or eleven, the nucleus basalisis is permanently ‘switched on’. It contains an abundance of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and this means new connections are being made all the time. Typically this means that a child will be learning almost all the time — if they see or hear something once they remember it. But as we progress towards the later teenage years the brain becomes more selective. From research into the way stroke victims recover lost skills it has been observed that the nucleus basalis only switches on when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock, or intense focus, maintained through repetition or continuous application."

(Source: "Master of many trades", Robert Twigger, Aeon, 2016)

Ways to study intuitive (automatic, unintentional) empathy without relying on self-reports

"[W]e define intentional empathy as experience sharing that is consistent with a target person’s (i.e., the empathizer’s) focal intention, whatever that may be. By contrast, we conceptually define unintentional empathy as experience sharing that is inconsistent with a target person’s focal intention. Drawing upon conceptual analysis of intentionality within social cognition (Moors & De Houwer, 2006), we distinguish between weak and strong forms of unintentionality. Whereas weak unintentionality describes a process that starts spontaneously without any intention, here, we focus on a strong form of unintentional empathy: empathy that occurs despite intentions to the contrary. To date, no research has defined unintentional empathy with this conceptual precision nor examined unintentional empathy in this strong form.
[...]
To examine the distinction between intentional and unintentional empathy, we use implicit measurement and multinomial modeling. Implicit measures capture spontaneous evaluations while bypassing self-report (for review, see Wentura & Degner, 2010) and are useful for studying empathy, particularly given that people may be motivated to report being highly empathic (Paulhus & Reid, 1991).
[...]
To understand variation in empathy for pain, we created a new sequential priming task: the pain identification task (PIT). This task is modeled on similar sequential priming tasks used in social cognition research, such as the weapon identification task (Payne, 2001). Participants view successive prime and target images, each of which depicts experiences that are painful (i.e., hand pierced with needle) or non-painful (i.e., hand brushed with Q-tip). The task uses well-validated stimuli that people clearly judge as painful or non-painful (Lamm et al., 2007, 2010; Perry et al., 2010). Participants’ focal task is to judge the target experience as painful or non-painful while avoiding any influence of the primes (cf. Payne, 2001); responses are coded for accuracy. Thus, participants’ intentions are set in direct opposition to the influence of the primes."

(Cameron, C. Daryl, Victoria L. Spring, and Andrew R. Todd. "The empathy impulse: A multinomial model of intentional and unintentional empathy for pain." Emotion 17.3 (2017): 395.)

Neural synchronization between individuals

"Indeed, speaker–listener neural synchronization is associated with successful comprehension of a verbal message [...].
(...)
Finally, we assessed whether a self-reported tendency for empathy, that is, the disposition to catch others’ emotional states, would be associated with intersubject synchronization of brain activity. [Our findings suggest (...)] that activity within [the posterior middle temporal gyrus region] was most similar in participants who considered themselves as highly empathetic.
(...)
Catching emotions that other humans express—here in dynamic scenes resembling everyday life—is associated with intersubject synchronization of brain circuitries related to emotional, attentional, and mentalizing processes."

(Nummenmaa, Lauri, et al. "Emotions promote social interaction by synchronizing brain activity across individuals." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.24 (2012): 9599-9604.)

"Brain-to-brain synchrony also reflected how much students liked the teacher and how much they liked each other."

(When Students Pay Attention in Class, Their Brains Are in Sync, Neuroscience News, Apr 27, 2017)

The psychopath's brain

"Many psychopaths show a distinctive pattern of brain activity, according to James Fallon, a UC Irvine School of Medicine neuroscientist who accidentally found out he may be one himself.
(...)
Here's a scan of a normal brain (top) and Fallon's brain (bottom). Notice that the normal scan shows much more activity (yellow and red) in the lower frontal lobe than Fallon's (mostly blue).

James Fallon

The scans showed reduced activity in an area towards the center of the brain called the orbital cortex thought to play a role in regulating our emotions and impulses as well as morality and aggression.

Here's a set of brain scans of Fallon's family members. Again, you can see that Fallon's brain has large gaps in activity (black sections) in areas where his wife and children show normal (yellow and green) activity."

James Fallon
(Here's what a psychopath's brain looks like, Business Insider UK, jul.22, 2015)

"Scientists who scanned the brains of men convicted of murder, rape and violent assaults have found the strongest evidence yet that psychopaths have structural abnormalities in their brains. (...) 

The results showed that the psychopaths' brains had significantly less grey matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles than the brains of the non-psychopathic offenders and non-offenders. 

These areas of the brain are important for understanding other people's emotions and intentions, and are activated when people think about moral behavior, the researchers said. 

Damage to these areas is linked with a lack of empathy, a poor response to fear and distress and a lack of self-conscious emotions such as guilt or embarrassment. 

Lindsay Thomson, a professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in this study, said Blackwood's findings add to evidence that psychopathy is a distinct neurodevelopmental brain disorder. Research shows that most violent crimes are committed by a small group of persistent male offenders with ASPD." (Anti-Social Personality Disorder)

(Study finds psychopaths have distinct brain structure, Reuters.com, may 7, 2012)

Neuromarketing adopts approach where behavior is rooted in genes and phsyiological processes

"Researchers of this approach consider our behaviors to be results of psychological processes embodied physiologically in the brain and nervous system. Thus, the biological influences may be rooted in our genes and shape the activities in our brain, and thus behaviors through actions on hormones and neurotransmitters. In this paradigm, our genotypes may be interpreted as a measure of individual differences, while brain activities may be observed and taken as more direct measures of the underlying psychological process."

(Chark R. (2018) Neuromarketing. In: Moutinho L., Sokele M. (eds) Innovative Research Methodologies in Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham)

Prenatal maternal anger stress causes neurobiological changes in offspring (with enhanced aggressive behaviors, reduced anxiety)

"Anger stressed maternal rats showed a significant increase in locomotion and aggression but a reduction in sucrose preference. Offspring subjected to pre-gestational anger stress displayed enhanced aggressive behaviors, reduced anxiety, and sucrose preference. Further, offspring subjected to pre-gestational stress showed significant impairments in the recognition index (RI) on the object recognition test and the number of platform crossings in the Morris water maze test. The monoaminergic system was significantly altered in pre-gestationally stressed offspring, and the expression of phosphorylated cyclic adenosine monophosphate response element binding protein (P-CREB), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and serotonin transporter (SERT) levels in pre-gestational stressed offspring were altered in some brain regions. (...) These findings suggest that anger stress before pregnancy could induce aggressive behaviors, cognitive deficits, and neurobiological alterations in offspring."

(Wei, Sheng, et al. "Impact of anger emotional stress before pregnancy on adult male offspring." Oncotarget 8.58 (2017): 98837.)

"Friends" are people with similar neural activity

"The researchers found that you can predict who people are friends with just by looking at how their brains respond to video clips. Friends had the most similar neural activity patterns, followed by friends-of-friends who, in turn, had more similar neural activity than people three degrees removed (friends-of-friends-of-friends).
(...)
The findings revealed that neural response similarity was strongest among friends, and this pattern appeared to manifest across brain regions involved in emotional responding, directing one's attention and high-level reasoning. Even when the researchers controlled for variables, including left-handed- or right-handedness, age, gender, ethnicity, and nationality, the similarity in neural activity among friends was still evident. The team also found that fMRI response similarities could be used to predict not only if a pair were friends but also the social distance between the two."

(Dartmouth College. "Your brain reveals who your friends are: Study illustrates how similar neural responses predict friendships." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 January 2018.
Study: Carolyn Parkinson, Adam M. Kleinbaum, Thalia Wheatley. Similar neural responses predict friendship. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02722-7)

Meditation does not significantly augment people's compassion or social connectedness, nor does it lower prejudice or agression

"Initial analysis indicated that meditation did have an overall positive impact. The researchers said meditation made people feel moderately more compassionate or empathic, compared to if they had done no other new emotionally-engaging activity.
However further analysis revealed that it played no significant role in reducing aggression or prejudice or improving how socially-connected someone was. The most unexpected result of this study, though, was that the more positive results found for compassion had important methodological flaws -- compassion levels in some studies only increased if the meditation teacher was also an author of the published report.
Overall, these results suggest that the moderate improvements reported by psychologists in previous studies may be the result of methodological weaknesses and biases, said the researchers."

(Coventry University. "Meditation has limited role in making you a better person, says study: For decades many people have claimed meditation can change how we behave towards others and make us more compassionate -- but new research suggests this is not the case.." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 February 2018. )

‘Left-cradling bias’ linked to better social cognitive abilities in children

"Children who cradle dolls on the left show higher social cognitive abilities than those who do not, according to new research from City, University of London.
(...)
The study builds on previous knowledge of a 'left-cradling bias' -- the phenomenon that humans will typically cradle a baby on their left side, enabling both parent and child to keep the other in their left visual field -- which is unrelated to dominance of the use of right or left hand. Information from the left visual field is processed by the right hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with emotion and the perception of facial expression.
(...)
[Children] who showed this bias had a significantly higher social ability score compared with those who held the doll on the right."

(City, University of London. "‘Left-cradling bias’ linked to better social cognitive abilities in children." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 July 2018. )