Changes in brain activity following the voluntary control of empathy.

In neuroscience, empathy is often conceived as relatively automatic. The voluntary control that people can exert on brain mechanisms that map the emotions of others onto our own emotions has received comparatively less attention. Here, we therefore measured brain activity while participants watched emotional Hollywood movies under two different instructions: to rate the main characters' emotions by empathizing with them, or to do so while keeping a detached perspective. We found that participants yielded highly consistent and similar ratings of emotions under both conditions. Using intersubject correlation-based analyses we found that, when encouraged to empathize, participants' brain activity in limbic (including cingulate and putamen) and somatomotor regions (including premotor, SI and SII) synchronized more during the movie than when encouraged to detach. Using intersubject functional connectivity we found that comparing the empathic and detached perspectives revealed widespread increases in functional connectivity between large scale networks. Our findings contribute to the increasing awareness that we have voluntary control over the neural mechanisms through which we process the emotions of others.

Where and how our brain represents the temporal structure of observed action.

Reacting faster to the behaviour of others provides evolutionary advantages. Reacting to unpredictable events takes hundreds of milliseconds. Understanding where and how the brain represents what actions are likely to follow one another is, therefore, important. Everyday actions occur in predictable sequences, yet neuroscientists focus on how brains respond to unexpected, individual motor acts. Using fMRI, we show the brain encodes sequence-related information in the motor system. Using EEG, we show visual responses are faster and smaller for predictable sequences. We hope this paradigm encourages the field to shift its focus from single acts to motor sequences. It sheds light on how we adapt to the actions of others and suggests that the motor system may implement perceptual predictive coding.

Neural pathways of embarrassment and their modulation by social anxiety.

While being in the center of attention and exposed to other's evaluations humans are prone to experience embarrassment. To characterize the neural underpinnings of such aversive moments, we induced genuine experiences of embarrassment during person-group interactions in a functional neuroimaging study. Using a mock-up scenario with three confederates, we examined how the presence of an audience affected physiological and neural responses and the reported emotional experiences of failures and achievements. The results indicated that publicity induced activations in mentalizing areas and failures led to activations in arousal processing systems. Mentalizing activity as well as attention towards the audience were increased in socially anxious participants. The converging integration of information from mentalizing areas and arousal processing systems within the ventral anterior insula and amygdala forms the neural pathways of embarrassment. Targeting these neural markers of embarrassment in the (para-)limbic system provides new perspectives for developing treatment strategies for social anxiety disorders.

The anthropomorphic brain: the mirror neuron system responds to human and robotic actions.

In humans and monkeys the mirror neuron system transforms seen actions into our inner representation of these actions. Here we asked if this system responds also if we see an industrial robot perform similar actions. We localised the motor areas involved in the execution of hand actions, presented the same subjects blocks of movies of humans or robots perform a variety of actions. The mirror system was activated strongly by the sight of both human and robotic actions, with no significant differences between these two agents. Finally we observed that seeing a robot perform a single action repeatedly within a block failed to activate the mirror system. This latter finding suggests that previous studies may have failed to find mirror activations to robotic actions because of the repetitiveness of the presented actions. Our findings suggest that the mirror neuron system could contribute to the understanding of a wider range of actions than previously assumed, and that the goal of an action might be more important for mirror activations than the way in which the action is performed.