Social Cognition and Neuroscience

Overview

Broadly, our research questions are about how the brain makes sense of the social world. Particular foci are on the perception of other people - their faces, bodies, voices; understanding the meaning of others' actions; on social learning; on disorders of social cognition; and on emotion and memory. Below we describe some of the research questions that motivate our work in each of these themes.

Person perception

How do specific brain regions contribute to the perception of other individuals? What information is conveyed by people's faces, bodies, movements, and voices, and how do other people respond to this information? How are multiple aspects of our knowledge about other people integrated in the brain.

Understanding actions

How do we use our own motor systems to understand the actions of others? How is this shaped by learning and expertise? What are the brain regions that support cross-modal representations of actions?

Disorders of social cognition

What is the role of serotonin in the altered social cognition and judgements sometimes seen in psychiatric disorders? How do patterns of internet gambling relate to risk factors for psychological problems? What are the mechanisms behind the heightened social drive in Williams Syndrome?

Emotion and motivation

How does emotion influence decision making? How does the motivational context influence the valuation of available choices? How can we measure self-beliefs and motivations?

Social interactions

How are social interactions shaped by the social cues our interaction partners send? How do we use social cues to infer mental states and predict the behaviour of others? Do certain types of social cues, smiles for example, have "intrinsic" meanings or can the information they convey be learned?

Discoveries

Highlights of a few projects from Social Neuroscience at Bangor.

Human Signal Systems: Adaptive Principles

Professor Rob Ward is interested in the valid and deceptive nonverbal signals that we all give out in everyday interactions. This topic is inspired by evolutionary theories of communication, or signalling systems. In biological signalling systems, a signal is an evolved behaviour or trait that alters the behaviour of observers. Signal systems have many interesting properties, and emphasise the co-evolution of the sender and the receiver: the signal must be informative enough that receivers benefit from attending and responding to it. However, signals are not expected to be universally valid or "honest". There is a selective pressure to send out occasional deceptive messages, which benefit the sender at the expense of the receiver. That is, the receiver can be manipulated into acting against their own best interests (e.g. Krebs & Dawkins, 1984).

We are examining:

the different kinds of information conveyed by the face and everyday body motion;
how this information is perceived by observers; and
to what extent this information is reliable or deceptive.

Here is an example:

Two faces with slightly different features

Which of the two faces above would you say is more interested in others' feelings? Most people (80%) correctly say the face on the right. That face is a morph (composite photo) of 15 women who actually report having high interest in others' feelings. The left image is a composite of 15 women who rated themselves as low in interest for others' feelings.

Reappraisal generation after acquired brain damage

Salas, C.E., Gross, J. & Turnbull, O.H. (2014). Reappraisal generation after acquired brain damage: The role of laterality and cognitive control. Frontiers in Emotion Science, 5 (242): 1-9. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00242

A graph showing the reappraisal difficulty, measured in seconds.

Reappraisal is a key skill in psychotherapy, and there has been much interest in its neuroanatomical and neuropsychological basis – though investigations have been limited to functional imaging approaches. Those data suggests that reappraisal tasks activate a set of areas in the left hemisphere, linked to language abilities and verbally mediated cognitive control. This study investigated patients with focal damage to the left hemisphere [LH, n=8], who were more markedly impaired on a reappraisal generation task than individuals with right hemisphere lesions [RH, n=8], and healthy controls [HC, n=14].

The reappraisal generation task consisted of a set of ten pictures from the IAPS, depicting a range of negative events. The patients were asked to quickly generate as many positive reinterpretations as possible for each picture. The patients were also assessed on several measures of cognitive control. Only two cognitive control processes – inhibition and verbal fluency - were inversely associated to reappraisal difficulty. The results of this study are discussed in relation to the neuroanatomical and neuropsychological basis of reappraisal, and its implications for neuro-rehabilitation – suggesting emotion regulation gains especially when patients are offered additional time, and/or offered external sources of regulation.