Projection & Transference (part 1) - issues of the Emotional I Ching

[lightofreason]

But as the 11th command (or which was it?) says: thou shallt not play intellectual games with thy feelings!
No need to cut your head off, intellectual maps can be helpful (and fun too!), but if it was ever true that the map is not the territory ..
You learn more from 1 minute of real feeling than from 24 hours of thinking about feelings.

you have not been keeping up with the work on emotions and neuroscience. The fight/flight dichotomy is self-referenced and the elements interdigitised across the amygdala. I can open your skull and pass a probe over the interdigitations and put you through a cycle of fight/flight reactions. Exposure to environment can 'distort' the interdigitations where experience means some emotions are over-developed, others under-developed (we can see these using dyes etc)

We can map out the full range of possible emotions by self-referencing fight/flight. THEN comes the experience issues where we can seek-out experiences based on what we know that can push our buttons - IOW we can find a context to 'push' the instincts.

The precision in research these days allows us to 'interdigitise' the elements of theory/practice and so each feeds back on the other.

The Emotional IC material can give you access to feelings censored by consciousness/reason and that material comes out of theoretical analysis of self-referencing etc and so leads to a discovery in experiencing the censored etc etc

Chris.

 

[martin]

you have not been keeping up with the work on emotions and neuroscience. The fight/flight dichotomy is self-referenced and the elements interdigitised across the amygdala. I can open your skull and pass a probe over the interdigitations and put you through a cycle of fight/flight reactions.

This was already well known when we both were toddlers! Apart from the self-referencing stuff, umm, I do know somebody who writes a lot about that though.
Okay, they are more precise nowadays, but it doesn't really matter. A map remains a map, however precise.

Let me put it this way, if I scan your brain (to return the favour, but don't worry, I can do that without opening your skull ) while you are thinking about f/f reactions and XORing and all that and also scan it when your are actually experiencing such reactions, I would expect to see a big difference between these two scans, right?
I leave the conclusion to you ..

 

[lightofreason]

Let me put it this way, if I scan your brain (to return the favour, but don't worry, I can do that without opening your skull ) while you are thinking about f/f reactions and XORing and all that and also scan it when your are actually experiencing such reactions, I would expect to see a big difference between these two scans, right?

no.

(1) the scan is useless in that it only works on actuals and so fails to detect all possibles; to experience true terror you need the input that then elicits the experience then picked-up by the scan. Invasive work covers the full range of possibles by firing each one off. IOW we bypass the actual experience that elicits the response, we just elicit the response without a 'natural' cause (transference does this too!)

(2) The act of thinking about f/f includes XOR as a property - we can see this at work, we can experience it, and the emotions, through experimentation such as 'disabling' one hemisphere. The self-referencing comes out with oscillations across both hemispheres when we deal with the complex/new in that the biases in the hemispheres create a dichotomy of 'yang/yin' and the focusing of attention sets a boundary within which the oscillations act to apply the dichotomy to itself - IOW self-referencing.

See the refs in http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/properties.html - also see them in context of left/right differences in information processing as high/low band filters in http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/general.html

Scanners do not pick up the full range of responses to experiences since to cover all experiences whilst scanning at the same time is currently not possible. Invasive studies CAN cover all responses, can set them off artificially by direct stimulation of the neurology etc.

Self-reference fight/flight and out pops all basic emotions, positive and negative, as a set of POSSIBLES; potentials. LOCAL context will then guide development of such; exaggerating some, marginalising others etc - IOW given the methodology so we can move into theoretical areas grounded in empirical studies. From there we can, for example, map the emotions of f/f to the I Ching hexagrams and in doing so elicit categories of meaning we can experience and so feedback upon our understanding of hexagrams etc. and allow for the creation of the Emotional IC material.

Chris.

 

[martin]

I only brought scanning up to make a point. But, well, it doesn't seem to register. Perhaps because you are a thinking type?
Anyway, have fun with your EIC and XORing, I know other ways that suit me better.

 

[lightofreason]

I only brought scanning up to make a point. But, well, it doesn't seem to register. Perhaps because you are a thinking type?
Anyway, have fun with your EIC and XORing, I know other ways that suit me better.

;-) thats ok - over time the EIC/XORing benefits will emerge and so you may find you will need to come back to it. Thats the issue with 'new' paradigms, they can take a generation to get recognised in that the familar can block acceptance etc since the focus is 'why not discovered before?'. The answer is in the need to step outside of the traditional IC box and focus on what is 'behind' the IC - as covered in IDM and nowhere else as far as I know. ;-)

27-ness works.
24-ness works
X-ness works - and this is all coming out of IDM focus on self-referencing, here in the form of yin/yang. By not moving into these areas you limit yourself - but you will obviously have to learn that from experience since the Science focus on supplying an algorithm etc seems to be not favoured by you - you obviously prefer to take your own footsteps rather than learn from stepping in those of others. Thats fine but can be a bit ad-hoc in deriving understanding.

the benefits of the singular are in gaining novel insights but this is done upon the work of others rather than on some spiritual/channelling exercise. The solution of problems in dreams comes from the formal, technical, empirical mapping of the problem in the first place. Thus the dream has a context, some history, to give it meaning beyond its literal form of expression... not recognising this can elicit 'issues' in understanding (e.g. passive transference etc)

Does it worry you that some science applied to the IC brings out material existing but not covered in the traditional material? It shouldnt unless your identity is well wrapped-up in the traditional perspective and so requires a complete re-evaluation of what one is dealing with...

Chris.

 

[martin]

you obviously prefer to take your own footsteps rather than learn from stepping in those of others.

.

True! Not so much in this case, though. What I wrote in this thread about contacting emotions is basically the Gestalt therapy approach. I had some training in it as part of my psychology study but I learned it mostly from a teacher (spiritual, kind of, but he hated that word) who used this approach, among other things.
So, I am following the footsteps of others here, although I cannot guarantee that I have not given it a personal slant. I very probably have.

Does it worry you that some science applied to the IC brings out material existing but not covered in the traditional material?

No, not at all, I'm familiar with the work of Nigel Richmond already for more than 20 years (omg, I'm getting old!) and so I have a non-traditional perspective on the IC already for a long time. In fact, without Nigel, I would probably be much less interested in the IC now. I'm not particularly fond of obscure texts in which I cannot find any thread of logic!
Apart from that my interest in the IC is mainly in the philosophy behind it. As an oracle it doesn't have an important place in my life, I rarely consult it (a bit more since I am on the forum though, virus?) and it's not like it is for some others here for whom the IC as an oracle is a kind of teacher or guide. That's fine, but for me - if I want more understanding, teaching, healing, whatever, I have other sources for that.

 

[martin]

Does it worry you that some science applied to the IC brings out material existing but not covered in the traditional material? It shouldnt unless your identity is well wrapped-up in the traditional perspective and so requires a complete re-evaluation of what one is dealing with...

Now that I reread this it sounds a bit strange, didn't notice that yesterday. Why would my identity be wrapped-up?
I guess you assume that the IC is of central importance to me, like a religion or something?
It isn't, not as an oracle (as I already explained) but also not in other ways, philosophically, as a possible map of all-there-is, etcetera. It's just one of my (many) interests.

So, don't worry, if new material comes out that requires a change of perspective on the IC I will not be heartbroken and the effect on my identity will be 0.0000.

 

[lightofreason]

So, don't worry, if new material comes out that requires a change of perspective on the IC I will not be heartbroken and the effect on my identity will be 0.0000.

The XOR material does not just apply to the IC, it applies to all self-referencing, even you as a particular human being.

 

[martin]

So what?

 

[lightofreason]

A feature of transference - a random emotion

In the context of the original post on projection, transference, counter-transference (and mirror neurons) I have been considering the neurological aspects of the methodology where an emotion is transferred but with no history. As such, a transference can elicit a 'random' emotion that can take-over or severely destabilise consciousness due to the lack of history and our brain's 'demand' for such.

This ability to transfer as such seems to stem as an artefact of the dynamics of memory encoding/recall. In this encoding the amygdala encodes emotional content whereas the hippocampus encodes the date and time stamp (sequencing) and so allows for the generation of, and association of the emotional memory with, a history. (recall from a previous post, the hippocampus can phase-lock with, for example, pre-frontal cortex in the running of a maze. There is also research linking the hippocampus to methods of map-making (waypointing (use of locals) vs vectoring (use of globals))

In the case of 'passive' transference, as one projects someone onto someone else (a look-a-like) the emotions associate with that someone appear on the face of the projector. The projectee detects this emotion but the date-stamp dynamics are NOT communicatable in this form - you need to communicate date/time events through a different mechanism (speech etc)

All the projectee has is (a) an intense emotion and (b) a date-time stamp mapping the emotion to the presence of the projector, and no more. (and this can occur 'unconsciously' to leave an apparent emotion with no history at all and so no 'ground' and so in the form of a universal; the emotion is all 'new' and overwhelming to start with - thus one has to workout by recall the point of emergence of the transference and those in the surrounding context at that time to figure out the possible projector - one can see here the roots of, and so continued existence of, psychoanalysis and other methods of focusing on trying to link a destabilising emotion with some history.

What is implicit here is there are TWO, semi-autonomous, paths of information encoding/decoding with our emotional path being semi-independent of the temporal/rational path (order, sequence, position focus).

Meaning-as-memory is an entanglement of the hippocampus and amygdala interactions that require dis-entanglement to be communicated- I can get the emotions of a memory to appear on my face and so communicate that, but I cannot get the date/time/sequence data to appear on my face - THAT information needs explicit communication through speech, writing etc.

Thus it is possible for a 'look' to communicate the emotional element of a memory but 'free' of its history - the projectee's emotional system will, if the look is consistent and long enough, resonate where this resonance is a property coming out of our social nature and so allowing for an emotion to trigger a behaviour without detection of the stimulus - and so we can get the herd to turn and run through an alarm from one member of the herd.

The consequence of receiving an emotion with no history by the projectee is the 'need' for history for interpretations such that our consciousness, if it cannot detect a history for some emotion associated with the projector, will create one - and here we find the counter-transference process at work where the projectee thinks the emotion is 'theirs', originating in them, and so projects it, transfers it, back onto the projector.

The essential element here is the lack of a date-time stamp, explicit historic details that come with hippocampus dynamics, in that a situation occurs where the transmission of such information is not possible for psychological or sociological or physiological reasons.

The ability of the "Emotional I Ching" material to do what it does is that it communicates using the amygdala 'path' to extract emotional descriptions of a situation. Any temporal/sequence information comes from consciousness/reason regulating the emotion (and so sequencing events etc - a hippocampus activity) - or the temporal elements present in the hexagram that the emotions identify as 'fitting' the context.

Of note there is that the notion of the 'random' covers something with no history and so no apparent cause. This notion shares space with that of the 'miraculous' such that the differences are in qualitative interpretations.

Chris
-----------------------------
generic categories of meaning:
------------------------------
Objects bias (differentiating):
BLEND - wholeness, whole numbers
BOUND - partness, rational numbers
Relationships bias (integrating):
BOND - share space, irrational numbers
BIND - share time, imaginary numbers

From these come composites as reals, complex, quaternions, octonions. All else follows....
http://members.iimetro.com.au/~lofting/myweb/introIDM.html

 

[lightofreason]

A Look Tells All

By Siri Schubert

We do it automatically. As soon as we observe another person, we try to read his or her face for signs of happiness, sorrow, anxiety, anger.
Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are wrong, and errors can create some sticky personal situations. Yet Paul Ekman is almost always right. The psychology professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has spent 40 years studying human facial expressions. He has catalogued more than 10,000 possible combinations of facial muscle movements that reveal what a person is feeling inside. And he has taught himself how to catch the fleeting involuntary changes, called microexpressions, that flit across even the best liar's face, exposing the truth behind what he or she is trying to hide.

Ekman, 72, lives in Oakland, Calif., in a bright and airy house near the bay. As I talked with him there, he studied me, his eyes peering out from under bushy brows as if they were registering each brief facial tic I unknowingly exhibited. Does his talent make him a mind reader? "No," he says candidly. "The most I can do is tell how you are feeling at the moment but not what you are thinking." He is not being modest or coy; he is simply addressing the psychological bottom line behind facial expressions:
"Anxiety always looks like anxiety," he explains, "regardless of whether a person fears that I'm seeing through their lie or that I don't believe them when they're telling the truth."

The professor calls the ever present risk we all take of misreading a person's visage "Othello's error."

© 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

 

[nicky_p]

Re: Paul Ekman

I bet he'd make a great poker player!!

 

[lightofreason]

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061127/full/061127-5.html

One look says it all

Emma Marris

Women are more attuned to the subtle non-verbal communication made by the direction of a colleague's gaze, according to new research.

Almost like a reflex, people will follow a person's gaze and look towards what the other person is looking at. This phenomenon, known as 'gaze cuing', is deeply entrenched in human behaviour. "We do it without effort, very quickly, and that's quite amazing," says Michael Platt, a neurobiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "We do it from the first hours of being born."

Previous work has indicated that women seem to be more adept at this than men. And now research shows that they're even more attuned to the gaze of others when they are familiar faces.

Thirty-two volunteers were shown images of people looking one way or another, followed by a picture of a box on one side or another of the face.
Subjects were to press a button to indicate which side the box was on, and researchers measured whether they were faster at doing so when the direction of the gaze and the box was the same rather than different. Some of the faces in the experiment were of colleagues of the subjects, to see whether familiarity with the person doing the gazing would enhance the effect.

A brief flash of a unfamiliar face showed that the direction of gaze only improved the speed of identifying the box's location by about 9 milliseconds for volunteers of both genders. But when the researchers looked specifically at the 17 volunteers who came from within the Duke neurobiology department, they found women's scores improved by 26 milliseconds, and men's by 12.

©2006 Nature Publishing Group

 

[lightofreason]

As covered in this thread, there is a need for history to resolve emotional states where lack of history can elicit an emotion that is overwhelming and apparently 'random' in that the lack of history makes it all 'meaningless'. In the following note the focus on memory and its use in dealing with the future (and issues linked to depression etc)

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Imaging Pinpoints Brain Regions That 'See The Future'


Science Daily <http://www.sciencedaily.com/> — Human memory, the ability to recall vivid mental images of past experiences, has been studied extensively for more than a hundred years. But until recently, there's been surprisingly little research into cognitive processes underlying another form of mental time travel -- the ability to clearly imagine or "see" oneself participating in a future event.

<http://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2007/01/070102092224.jpg>
Comparing images of brain activity in response to the "self-remember" and "self-future" event cues, researchers found a surprisingly complete overlap among regions of the brain used for remembering the past and those used for envisioning the future. (Image courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis)

Now, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions.

"In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we're going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future," says Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."

Scheduled for advance online publication Jan. 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study sheds new light on how the human mind relies on the vivid recollection of past experiences to prepare itself for future challenges, suggesting that envisioning the future may be a critical prerequisite for many higher-level planning processes.

Other study co-authors are Jason M. Watson, a Washington University doctoral graduate now assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah; and Kathleen McDermott, an associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and of radiology in the School of Medicine at Washington University.

McDermott, principal investigator for the University's Memory and Cognition Lab, where the research is based, suggests that the findings are notable for two reasons.

First, the study clearly demonstrates that the neural network underlying future thought is not isolated in the brain's frontal cortex, as some have speculated. Although the frontal lobes play a well-documented role in carrying out future-oriented executive operations, such as anticipation, planning and monitoring, the spark for these activities may well be the very process of envisioning oneself in a specific future event, an activity based within and reliant upon the same neurally distributed network used to retrieve autobiographical memories.

Second, within this neural network, patterns of activity suggest that the visual and spatial context for our imagined future often is pieced together using our past experiences, including memories of specific body movements and visual perspective changes -- data stored as we navigated through similar settings in the past.

These findings, McDermott suggests, offer strong support for a relatively recent theory of memory, which posits that remembering the past and envisioning the future draw upon many of the same neural mechanisms. Previous speculation has been based largely on the anecdotal observation of very young children, cases of severe depression and brain damaged persons with amnesia.

"There's a little known and not that well investigated finding that if you have an amnesic person who can't remember the past, they're also not at all good about thinking about what they might be doing tomorrow or envisioning any kind of personal future," McDermott explains. They comprehend time and can consider the future in the abstract sense (e.g., that global warming is a concern for the future), but they cannot vividly envision themselves in a specific future scenario.

"The same is true with very small children -- they don't remember particularly what happened last month and they can't really tell you much of anything about what they envision happening next week. This is also the case with suicidally depressed people. So, there's this theory that it all goes hand-in-hand, but nobody has looked closely enough to explain exactly how or why this occurs."

In this study, researchers relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture patterns of brain activation as college students were given 10 seconds to develop a vivid mental image of themselves or a famous celebrity participating in a range of common life experiences.

Presented with a series of memory cues, such as getting lost, spending time with a friend or attending a birthday party, participants were asked to recall a related event from their own past; to envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future life; or, to picture a famous celebrity -- specifically former U.S. President Bill Clinton -- participating in such an event.

The "Clinton-Imagine" task was introduced to help researchers establish a baseline level of brain activity for a cognitive event that was in many ways similar to the other two tasks but did not involve the mental projection of oneself through time. Bill Clinton was chosen because pre-testing showed he was easy for participants to visualize in a variety of situations.

Comparing images of brain activity in response to the "self-remember" and "self-future" event cues, researchers found a surprisingly complete overlap among regions of the brain used for remembering the past and those used for envisioning the future -- every region involved in recollecting the past was also used in envisioning the future.

During the experiment, participants were not required to describe details or explain the origin of mental images elicited by the memory cues, but in post-testing questionnaires most indicated that they tended to place future-oriented images in the context of familiar places (e.g. home, school) and familiar people (e.g. family, friends), which would require the reactivation of those images from neural networks responsible for the storage and retrieval of autobiographical memories.

Conversely, the neural networks associated with personal mental time travel showed significantly less activity when participants imagined scenarios involving Bill Clinton. The reason, researchers suggest, is that participants had no personal memories of direct interaction with Clinton, and thus, any images of him had to be derived from neural networks responsible for semantic memory -- our context-free general knowledge of the world. In fact, participants later reported that their mental images of Clinton tended to be less vivid (e.g. "I see Bill Clinton at a party in the White House, alongside several faceless senators").

"Results of this study offer a tentative answer to a longstanding question regarding the evolutionary usefulness of memory," McDermott concludes. "It may just be that the reason we can recollect our past in vivid detail is that this set of processes is important for being able to envision ourselves in future scenarios. This ability to envision the future has clear and compelling adaptive significance."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Washington University in St. Louis.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070102092224.htm

 

[lightofreason]

Social transmission of face preferences among humans



Benedict C. Jones AFF1, Lisa M. DeBruine AFF1, Anthony C. Little AFF2, Robert P. Burriss AFF3, David R. Feinberg AFF4

AFF1 Face Research Laboratory, School of Psychology, William Guild Building, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 2UB, UK
AFF2 School of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK
AFF3 School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK
AFF4 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA


Abstract:

Previous studies demonstrating mate choice copying effects among females in non-human species have led many researchers to propose that social transmission of mate preferences may influence sexual selection for male traits. Although it has been suggested that social transmission may also influence mate preferences in humans, there is little empirical support for such effects. Here, we show that observing other women with smiling (i.e. positive) expressions looking at male faces increased women's preferences for those men to a greater extent than did observing women with neutral (i.e. relatively negative) expressions looking at male faces. By contrast, the reverse was true for male participants (i.e. observing women with neutral expressions looking at male faces increased male participant's preferences for those men to a greater extent than did observing women smiling at male faces). This latter finding suggests that within-sex competition promotes negative attitudes among men towards other men who are the target of positive social interest from women. Our findings demonstrate that social transmission of face preferences influences judgments of men's attractiveness, potentially demonstrating a mechanism for social transmission of mate preferences.

<http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/(f3qrqzjwbgccrb553juzdvfw)/app/home/contribution.asp>

Source: The Royal Society (Open access Paper)

 

[pakua]

What about if men smile at a woman - do other women exhibit positive or negative reactions to that ... do they have the same competitiveness as men?

 

[lightofreason]

To cite this article: Richard N. Aslin (2007) What's in a look?
Developmental Science 10 (1), 48–53.
doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00563.x


What's in a look?

Richard N. Aslin
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, USA
Address for correspondence: Richard N. Aslin, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Meliora Hall, River Campus, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA; e-mail: aslin@cvs.rochester.edu

Abstract


The most common behavioral technique used to study infant perception, cognition, language, and social development is some variant of looking time. Since its inception as a reliable method in the late 1950s, a tremendous increase in knowledge about infant competencies has been gained by inferences made from measures of looking time. Here we examine the logic, utility, and future prospects for further gains in our understanding of infant cognition from the use of looking time measures.


Introduction


Consider the following scenario. Three adults enter a crowded room filled with volunteers and paid staff members who are waiting for a political candidate to emerge from behind a curtain and make either a victory or a concession speech. Person A is a security guard assigned to protect the candidate. Person B is the candidate's spouse. Person C is a member of the opposition party. In the interests of science, all three of these people are wearing head-mounted eye-trackers that provide a moment-by-moment record of their patterns of gaze over the next 10 minutes as the candidate approaches the podium and speaks to the audience.

As the candidate appears and walks toward the microphone, persons A, B and C immediately fixate and follow the candidate's face as she prepares to speak, exhibiting no differences in the duration of fixation across the three viewers. Then person A, the security guard, begins to rapidly scan the faces and hands of the entourage surrounding the candidate. Person B, the candidate's husband, continues to look directly at the newly elected governor's face as she explains her landslide victory, only occasionally glancing to the faces of other people on stage who were closely involved in the campaign. Person C, the member of the opposition party, exhibits the same general pattern of fixations as the candidate's spouse.

The point of this example is that, after an initial phase of sustained fixation that was identical among the three people, A and B showed dramatically different patterns of fixation, and B and C showed very similar patterns of fixation. Yet, knowing the relationship of each person to the candidate on stage, we would readily interpret A's diverse scanning as a search for potential threats rather than disinterest in the candidate (or the presence of an attentional deficiency), B's focal scanning as seeking confirmation of the candidate's joy at winning the election, and C's overtly similar focal scanning as an attempt to glean reactions from the candidate that might be used strategically in future elections to return the governorship to the opposition party. In sum, differences in looking times typically reflect different underlying cognitive processes, but the same duration of looking may also reflect quite different underlying cognitive processes (e.g. orienting, search for discrepancy, sustained attention with positive affect, sustained attention with null or negative affect).

Since the pioneering studies of looking behavior in young infants by Robert Fantz in the late 1950s, there have been dozens of fixation paradigms developed to test various aspects of infants' detection, discrimination, preference, categorization, learning, and expectations of both visual and auditory stimuli. It is no exaggeration to say that without looking time measures, we would know very little about nearly any aspect of infant development. In the early 1960s, mainstream ophthalmology textbooks claimed that newborns were blind, audiology textbooks claimed that newborns were deaf, and researchers who relied on more sophisticated motor responses like reaching claimed that cognitive abilities were extremely rudimentary until the end of the first postnatal year. But despite tremendous advances over the past 50 years in what we have learned about infant development, caution must be exercised in what conclusions are drawn from looking time data. Like the introductory example, duration of looking to a stimulus, in comparison to some 'control' stimulus, serves as the dependent measure of some putative (i.e. experimenter defined) cognitive state. Clearly, this is a many-to-one mapping problem: many potential 'hidden' variables contribute to a single dependent measure. How then do we make sense of looking time data?

Source: Developmental Science [Open Access Issue]
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00563.x

 

[getojack]

Richard N. Aslin
<snip>
In the early 1960s, mainstream ophthalmology textbooks claimed that newborns were blind, audiology textbooks claimed that newborns were deaf, and researchers who relied on more sophisticated motor responses like reaching claimed that cognitive abilities were extremely rudimentary until the end of the first postnatal year.

Hmm, babies are stupid.

 

[Sparhawk]

Hmm, babies are stupid.

Ah, but most wise up as they grow up and yet, many get even stupider...


L

 

[getojack]

The question you should be asking is "Who's stupider... babies or the psychologists studying the stupidity of babies?" I'm not sure I have an answer to that one.

 

[lightofreason]

Novartis Found Symp. 2007;278:20-30; discussion 30-40, 89-96, 216-21.

The neuronal basis of empathy and fairness.

Singer T.

Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College of London, WC1N 3AR London, UK.

The emerging fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have started to investigate the neural foundations of empathy and fairness. Even though not frequently linked, both concepts point to humans as altruistic beings who care for others. Recently social neuroscientists have measured brain activity associated with different empathic processes and revealed common neural responses when feeling sensations such as disgust, touch or pain in ourselves, and when perceiving someone else being disgusted, touched or in pain. At the same time, research in neuroeconomics has used game theoretical paradigms to study our sense of fairness. Several functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) studies show involvement of anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex in response to unfair compared with fair offers during such monetary exchange games. Interestingly, the same brain regions are also involved in empathy for pain or disgust of others. More generally, anterior insula cortex is suggested to subserve neural representations of feeling and bodily states in the self and may play a crucial role for the emergence of social emotions related to others.

Publication Types:
Review

PMID: 17214308 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=17214308&dopt=Abstract <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?tmpl=NoSidebarfile&db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=17214308&dopt=Abstract>

 

[Sparhawk]

The question you should be asking is "Who's stupider... babies or the psychologists studying the stupidity of babies?" I'm not sure I have an answer to that one.

That one goes in the "Mystery Bin"...

L

 

[lightofreason]

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070611/full/070611-14.html

Ouch, I saw that

Alison Abbott

'Mirror touch' synaesthesia is a strange but real condition, and it might be wide-spread, psychologists have found. So-called mirror-touch synaesthetes actually feel a touch on their own skin when they watch someone else being touched.
Perhaps as a consequence, they also show more emotional empathy than normal people.

Synaesthesia refers to the merging of senses that are normally experienced separately: 'seeing'
music, for example, or experiencing different colours as tastes. Jamie Ward of University College London (UCL) coined the term mirror-touch synaesthesia to describe a different type of sensory mix-up * when people confuse the brain's signal for sensing touch with the 'mirror system'
signal that is triggered when watching others being touched.

It is known that when we observe others moving, or hear them speak, the same neural circuits are activated in our brains as would be activated if we were moving or speaking ourselves. Scientists suspect that this mirror system may be important in empathy * understanding why others behave as they do.

But this is the first time it has been shown that a 'mirror' response can get mistaken for a real one.

©2007 Nature Publishing Group

 

[RindaR]

...and this is interesting to me:

http://mirrorboxtherapy.com/phantom-limb-pain.htm

Rinda

 

[lightofreason]

Gets into consciousness and its role in suppression/repression as covered in the Emotional I Ching work. What is NOT covered below are the issues with precision.

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Research reveals anatomy of suppressed memories: study

US researchers have identified the parts of the brain that are involved with suppressing unpleasant memories, a finding that could have implications for treating depression or post traumatic stress disorder, according to a study released Thursday.

The concept of memory suppression has been a controversial one among psychologists for a century, but in this study neuroscientists used brain scans to show that volunteers who have been asked to banish disturbing memories show very specific patterns of brain activity.

The scans showed that two specific regions of the prefrontal cortex -- what neuroscientists call the seat of cognitive control -- appear to work in tandem to modulate posterior brain regions like the visual cortex, the hippocampus and amygdala. These areas are involved in tasks such as visual recall, memory encoding and retrieval and emotional expression.

"These results indicate memory suppression does occur, and, at least in nonpsychiatric populations, is under the control of the prefrontal cortex," the investigators reported in the journal Science.

For the purpose of the experiment, the 16 volunteers were given 40 pairs of photographs to study. In each case, an image of a neutral human face was paired with an emotionally disturbing image such as a car crash, a wounded soldier, an electric chair or a violent crime scene.

After memorizing each pair, the volunteers were placed in an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner. Once inside the machine, they were shown only the neutral face images and instructed to either actively recall the associated image or to actively suppress it.

The results of the scans or fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) indicated that the volunteers were able to "exert some control over their emotional memories," said Brendan Depue, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and lead author of the study.

"By essentially shutting down specific portions of the brain, they were able to stop the retrieval process of particular memories," Depue said.

The authors of the paper said they hope that their work will promote further research into better therapies and possibly even drug treatments for people suffering from conditions such as PTSD, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive syndrome. The symptoms of these disorders include flashbacks to disturbing events, and intrusive or obsessive thoughts.

"The first step is to understand how memory suppression works in healthy individuals, and what neural mechanisms are at work," said Depue. "Then you need to look at those same mechanisms in a clinical population and figure out why they aren't functioning properly."

© 2007 AFP
http://www.physorg.com/news103471796.html

 

[lightofreason]

Culture Influences Brain Cells: Brain's Mirror Neurons Swayed By Ethnicity And Culture


Science Daily <http://www.sciencedaily.com/> — The brain's mirror neuron network responds differently depending on whether we are looking at someone who shares our culture, or someone who doesn't.

Examples of experimental stimuli:
A) Euro-American actor performs the classic American 'hang loose' gesture.
B) Nicaraguan actor performs a typical Nicaraguan gesture 'I swear (promise)' and
C) one of the control gestures modified from the ASL sign for 'berries'.
D) Euro-American actor in the 'static' condition.
Credit: Courtesy of PLoS ONE (10.1371/journal.pone.0000626)

A thumb's up for "I'm good." The rubbing of a pointed forefinger at another for "shame on you." The infamous and ubiquitous middle finger salute for--well, you know. Such gestures that convey meaning without speech are used and recognized by nearly everyone in our society, but to someone from a foreign country, they may be incomprehensible.

The opposite is true as well. Plop an American in a foreign land and he or she may be clueless to the common gestures of that particular culture. This raises a provocative question--does culture influence the brain?

The answer is yes, reports Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, a researcher in the UCLA Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity, and Marco Iacoboni, director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center of UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Their research appears in the journal PLoS ONE.

In their study, the researchers wanted to investigate the imprint of culture on the so-called mirror neuron network. Mirror neurons fire when an individual performs an action, but they also fire when someone watches another individual perform that same action. Neuroscientists believe this "mirroring" is the neural mechanism by which we can read the minds of other people and empathize with them.

When it comes to the influence of culture, they found that indeed, the mirror neuron network responds differently depending on whether we are looking at someone who shares our culture, or someone who doesn't.

The researcher's used two actors, one an American, the other a Nicaraguan, to perform a series of gestures--American, Nicaraguan, and meaningless hand gestures, to a group of American subjects. A procedure called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to measure the levels of so-called "corticospinal excitability" (CSE)--which scientists use to probe the activity of mirror neurons.

They found that the American participants demonstrated higher mirror neuron activity while observing the American making gestures compared to the Nicaraguan. And when the Nicaraguan actor performed American gestures, the mirror neuron activation of the observers dropped.

"We believe these are some of the first data to show neurobiological responses to culture-specific stimuli," said Molnar-Szakacs. "Our data show that both ethnicity and culture interact to influence activity in the brain, specifically within the mirror neuron network involved in social communication and interaction."

"We are the heirs of communal but local traditions," said Iacoboni. "Mirror neurons are the brain cells that help us in shaping our own culture. However, the neural mechanisms of mirroring that shape our assimilation of local traditions could also reveal other cultures, as long as such cross-cultural encounters are truly possible. All in all, our research suggests that with mirror neurons our brain mirrors people, not simply actions."

Thus, it appears that neural systems supporting memory, empathy and general cognition encodes information differently depending on who's giving the information--a member of one's own cultural/ethnic in-group, or a member of an out-group, and that ethnic in-group membership and a culturally learned motor repertoire more strongly influence the brain's responses to observed actions, specifically actions used in social communication.

"An important conclusion from these results is that culture has a measurable influence on our brain and, as a result, our behavior. Researchers need to take this into consideration when drawing conclusions about brain function and human behavior," said Molnar-Szakacs. The findings, the researchers note, may also have implications for motor skill and language learning, intergroup communication, as well as the study of intergroup attitudes toward other cultures.

Other author's of the study included Allan D. Wu and Francisco J. Robles. Both Molnar-Szakacs and Iacoboni are members of UCLA's Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR) Center for Culture, Brain and Development, which provided funding for the study.

Source: University of California - Los Angeles http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070718002115.htm

 

[lightofreason]

The essential, subtle, point here is on the unconscious dynamics of emotion processing and eliciting changes in behavour out of awareness of such. In the context of the Emotional I Ching the emphasis is on the assessment skills of the unconscious (emotions) and those skills manifest in the Emotional I Ching....

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Reading a face is tricky business

Reading the face of a person who is trying to conceal fear or other emotions is tricky business, according to a new Northwestern University study of electrical activity in the brain.

Though such “microexpressions” as a brief flash of fear are unlikely to be consciously noticed, they still get picked up by the brain and make their way through the visual system. The effect can alter perception and the way other people are treated or judged, the study concludes.

”Even though our study subjects were not aware that they were viewing subliminal emotional expressions, their brain activity was altered within 200 milliseconds,” said Ken Paller, co-investigator of the study and professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. “As a result, the ratings of facial expressions they did see were biased.”

In other words, sometimes when it seems like you are acting on the vagaries of instinct, your brain is actually responding to real information about others that bubbles just beneath your consciousness.

The study included tests to determine whether study volunteers had a tendency to experience anxiety, particularly in social situations. Those who tended to be socially anxious had the strongest brain response to subliminal expressions of fear.

”The findings have direct implications for understanding psychiatric disorders such as phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder,” said Wen Li, lead author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“Neural and Behavioral Evidence for Affective Priming from Unconsciously Perceived Emotional Facial Expressions and the Influence of Trait Anxiety,” will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Besides Li and Paller, the study’s co-authors include Stephan Boehm, currently at the University of Wales at Bangor, and Richard Zinbarg, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern.

The study utilized neuroelectrical activity recorded from 64 EEG electrodes placed on the scalps of the volunteers to monitor their brains’ analyses of sensory input. Volunteers evaluated 70 different surprise faces. Half of the faces were primed by fearful expressions and half by happy expressions. The prime faces -- with happy or fearful expressions -- were shown for 30 milliseconds immediately prior to each surprise face.

The expressions of surprise could be interpreted as positive (the sudden arrival of a friend) or as negative (a sudden violent act). Each was rated as “extremely positive,” “moderately positive,” “mildly positive,” “mildly negative,” “moderately negative” or “extremely negative.”

The volunteers rated the surprise faces primed by fear more negatively on average than those primed by happiness.

Results of the study revealed that the visual system differentially processed the fearful and happy faces, even though this processing did not lead to conscious experiences.

”Environmental events that signal danger, such as someone’s facial expression of fear, may be preferentially detected so as to alert the individual to make an appropriate response,” Paller said.

Yet participants only noticed the surprise faces. When asked about the stimuli, volunteers were surprised to learn that prime faces with other expressions briefly appeared prior to the surprise faces.

“Our results show that an unconsciously perceived signal of threat, such as a brief facial expression of fear, can still bubble up and unwittingly influence social judgments and how we act,” said Li.

Those with a more anxious personality exhibited more biased negative evaluations of fear-primed surprise faces and also greater brain-wave indications of threat processing. Greater brain responses to threat in those prone to anxiety may thus lead to larger influences on social evaluation.

”Although people can do their best to avoid situations that they perceive as threatening, their brains may still be highly attuned to subtle environmental signals of threat,” Paller said. “A heightened sensitivity to subliminal threat may thus cause excessive anxiety.”

Microexpressions that people make may differ from voluntary expressions of emotion. But in either case, fear can be signaled by contraction of muscles that raise the inner brow, the outer brow, the upper lid, plus stretching the lips, parting the lips and dropping the jaw.

“The ability to detect microexpressions may allow an observer to be more empathetic and sense someone’s true intentions or motivation,” said Paller. “Valuable as this ability may be, when someone is paying you a compliment it is sometimes better to take it at face value rather than read more into it.”

Source: Northwestern University
http://www.physorg.com/news105118816.html