research at wellcome

Primates (and people) are remarkably good at ranking each other within social hierarchies, a survival technique that helps us to avoid conflict and select advantageous 

Primates (and people) are remarkably good at ranking each other within social hierarchies, a survival technique that helps us to avoid conflict and select advantageous 

allies. However, we know surprisingly little about how the brain does this.

The team at the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience used brain imaging techniques to investigate this in 26 healthy volunteers.

Participants were asked to play a simple science fiction computer game in which they acted as future investors. In the first phase, they needed to learn which individuals have most power within a fictitious space mining company (the social hierarchy) and then which galaxies have most precious minerals (non-social information).

While the participants were doing the experiment, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor activity in their brains, and another MRI scan was also taken to look at their brain structure. The findings reveal a striking dissociation between the neural circuits used to learn social and non-social hierarchies.

The researchers observed increased neural activity in both the amygdala and the hippocampus when participants were learning about the hierarchy of executives within the fictitious space mining company. By contrast, when they were learning about the non-social hierarchy (i.e. which galaxies had more minerals), only the hippocampus was used.

The researchers also found that participants who were better at learning the social hierarchy had a larger volume of grey matter in the amygdala than those who were less able.

Dr Dharshan Kumaran at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who led the study, explains: "These findings are telling us that the amygdala is specifically involved in learning information about social rank based on experience and suggest that separate neural circuits are involved than for learning hierarchy information of a non-social nature."

This is the first time that researchers have looked at how rank within a social hierarchy is judged based on knowledge acquired through experience, rather than perceptual cues (like visual appearance), which are typically unreliable predictors of rank. In a second phase of the experiment, the team also looked at how we recall information about social rank when we meet somebody again, and their study reveals how this information is represented in the brain.

They asked participants to place bids on investment projects based on the knowledge about rank they had acquired during the first phase of the experiment. This was played out in the game as a particular executive leading a mission to harvest minerals from a galaxy.

They found evidence that social rank, but not non-social rank, is translated into neural activity in the amygdala in a linear fashion: the level of activity in the amygdala was observed to increase according to the social rank of the person being encountered. This signal provides a potential mechanism by which individuals select coalition partners in the real world based on their rank.

Being able to interpret social rank is important for us to meet the challenging pressures of living in large social groups. Knowing where we fit into a social group determines how we behave towards different people.

As well as giving new understanding of which brain circuits are involved in learning and storing this information, the findings reported in this study help to explain why some people are better at it than others. The researchers are now keen to look at people with brain and developmental disorders to see how their ability to learn social hierarchies is affected.

The study has been published in the journal 'Neuron'.

Image: An fMRI scan reveals that brain activity in the amygdala tracks participants’ knowledge about a social, but not a non-social, hierarchy. Credit: D Kumaran et al. (Neuron, 2012).

Parkinson 2008 emotions direct and indirect interaction

Parkinson, B. (2008)

Emotions in direct and remote social interaction:  Getting through the spaces between us

Computers in Human Behavior, 24, 1510-1529

 

Mostly a theoretical paper whose overall intention p1512 ‘to clarify the ways in which emotion interlock with other psychological and social processes in ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ distributed social arrangements’.

Authors’ s view of emotion –p1512 ‘ emotions are episodic modes of evaluative engagement with the social and practical world rather than simply responses to events’ As defined it differs from an attitude in the way that it lacks the durability of the latter.

 

(Parkinson, 2005) p1518 ‘emotion expressions achieve their communicative meaning in the dynamic context of their use and have no one to one correspondence to underlying emotional states’ and supports this by the following argument p1518 ‘ For example, faces thought to be direct expressions of one emotion may be interpreted as indications of another when presented in other contexts (Carroll & Russell, 1996) – KRO need to follow this up and question it

 

Phrases

P1510 ‘calibrating their presentation with other people’s responses’

P1511in online environments ‘ context-based interpretations may become miscalibrated and ineffective’

P1511 ‘ information loss opens up the opportunity for selective emphasis or concealment’ 

 

Theoretical background – Emotion as relational alignment

Relation-alignment perspective  (Parkinson, Fischer & Manstead (2005)– p1511 ‘which formulates emotions as modes of engagement with the social (and practical) world’   and has the underlying assumption ‘ many of our emotions are intrinsically attuned to the actual, anticipated, or imagined reactions of others’ rather than as an essentially private experience. Parkinson argues that the emotional experience gains meaning because of with interactions with others. P1515 ‘ emotions serve to influence others……. By inducing moment-by-moment adjustments in relational stances’ ‘ emotion exerts an effect because interactants know how the emotional episode is meant to unfold’

Uses anger as an example emotion ‘ the course of anger episodes depends on the dynamic availability of different kinds of interpersonal feedback’ but context is relevant ‘ real time anger episodes encourage direct non verbal adjustment whereas remote context rely on ‘shared and negotiable emotion scripts’

Sees development of emotion from the unconscious response to a triggers in childhood (prereflective) to one orientated to an emotional script as determined by society/culture (articulated).  In this way p1513 ‘ the implicit ( prereflective) and explicit (articulated) modes of anger often interpenetrate during adult interaction, but the balance between them varies’

 

Emotion reciprocation as part of relational alignment

P1514 ‘the other person’s interlocking role in the relational process also needs to be considered’ the other will adopt a relational position.  p1514 -1515 it may be that ‘interactants approach the emotion’s object from different angles and end up in discrepant emotional stances however there are also many circumstances in which interpersonal emotions converge to arrive at a shared mode of engagement’ e.g. social referencing between carer and child

 

P1515

‘one of the advantages of prereflective non verbal communication is that it is not always susceptible to the turn taking conventions of verbal dialogue.  Two or more people’s emotions may influence each other continually over time, rather than there being a back-and-forth exchange of emotional information’ – ‘ mediated communication may disallow this mode of operation’

 

Effect of mode of contact – channel constraints

 

Note: table on p1517 as an orientating framework

P1516 considers ‘ the emotional implications of signals and actions that are misinterpreted because differences in perspectives are not adequately factored in’

Influential factors include,

1. medium (modality availability, sequentiality, temporal resolution) note effects of uncertainty of reception, absence of immediate feedback
2. relational (calibration of contexts, relationship)
3. task

 

context  and illusions of transparency

Gilovich et al (1998) argue p1519 ‘ that people suffer from an illusion of transparency leading them to believe that there emotions are more detectable than they really are’ ‘ the illusion operates most strongly when there is increasing remoteness between the interactants’ therefore ‘ a general sense may develop that others are not appropriately acknowledging and responding to one’s own emotional state’ i.e. miscommunication or miscalibration due to the limitation on prereflective adjustment

 

Uses anger while driving to illustrate the points made in this paragraph

‘ the apparent intensification of anger presentations that take place when interactions take place between drivers arise partly because a remote medium of calibration and communication is treated as transparent and directly analogous to the kinds of face to face interactions that occur when people are in close proximity to each other’

 

Timing

Parkinson & Lea work on effects of timing lags.

P1522 ‘ Chartrand & Bargh (1999)  ‘demonstrated that mirroring another person’s movement results in smoother interaction and liking for the other person.  Furthermore precisely matching the timing of the other can contribute to the development of shared effect’ Bernieri & Law (1991) ‘have suggested that people engaged in face-to-face interaction may establish rapport by implicitly synchronising their gestures and expression with one another’

 

Channel constraints and compensating or even exploiting them for them

Constraints:

-  Reduction in social cues ( Rutter, 1987)

-  Perceptions of interpersonal contact (social presence) Short et al, 1976 leads to flaming -  Keisler et al, 84, Sroull & Keisler, 1986) p1523 ‘ it has been suggested that the omission of nonverbal cues that might otherwise disambiguate senders’ intentions may lead to misinterpretations and extreme reactions.’ 

 

Compensations:  disadvantage is not an inevitable consequence of reduced channels because what has gone missing for senders has also gone missing for receivers and p1524 ‘so might be exploited as an advantage’

‘ reworking articulated representations of how emotion is communicated in different communicative contexts helps to alleviate negative effects’

Parkinson suggests emoticons (‘an explicit signal to substitute for prereflective emotion’’ to disambiguate and therefore avoid miscalibration and therefore behaviours like flaming. KRO- but that assumes that it has the same influence which of course stems from his approach to emotion.

 

illusion of transparency   Satvitsky & Gilovich (2003) suggest raising awareness of this illusion in online contexts p1523 ‘ allowed them to appreciate the possibilities for concealing their anxieties from others’

 

also p1523 research from a social identity perspective suggests that a relative lack of social cues can also lead to more than less normative behaviour when the salience of personal identity is low (personally anonymous communication) but the salience of social identity ( group membership) is high ( Lea & Spears, 1991)’

 

Strategic presentation of emotion

 

P1525 ‘ is it real  (KRO – hasn’t really addressed what he means by real in this article )or simulated emotion that is being presented by the strategist?’ “One answer is that its dynamic attunement to other people’s responses may make it more real over time.  An idea supported by evidence from emotional labour research

 

Strategic presentation and emotional labour

Hochschild (1983) and effects on air craft crew ‘ If I pretend I’m feeling really up, sometimes I actually cheer up and feel friendly’ Instructing air hostesses to pretend that they are in their own living room p1525 ‘ in terms of relation alignment approach, this kind of emotion work means deliberately applying an articulated emotion-relevant script to a situation that would normally have other emotional implications’ Without  ‘real’ context and social cues it may be easier to reformulate our relations with others (imaginative projection)  and may explain how it is possible to be a debt collector or military person.