Jennifer S. Beer

Prefrontal involvement in the regulation of emotion : Convergence of rat and human studies

Emotion regulation is a process by which we control when and where emotions are expressed. Paradigms used to study the regulation of emotion in humans examine controlled responses to emotional stimuli and/or the inhibition of emotional influences on subsequent behavior. These processes of regulation of emotion trigger activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and inhibition of the amygdala. A similar pattern of activation is seen in rodents during recall of fear extinction, an example of emotional regulation. The overlap in circuitry is consistent with a common mechanism, and points toward future experiments designed to bridge human and rodent models of emotion regulation.

Neural mechanisms of the testosterone-aggression relation: The role of orbitofrontal cortex

Testosterone plays a role in aggressive behavior, but the mechanisms remain unclear. The present study tested the hypothesis that testosterone influences aggression through the OFC, a region implicated in self-regulation and impulse control. In a decision-making paradigm in which people chose between aggression and monetary reward (the ultimatum game), testosterone was associated with increased aggression following social provocation (rejecting unfair offers). The effect of testosterone on aggression was explained by reduced activity in the medial OFC. The findings suggest that testosterone increases the propensity toward aggression because of reduced activation of the neural circuitry of impulse control and self-regulation.

Social cognition: A multi level analysis

This paper investigates the construct of social cognition from an interdisciplinary perspective blending social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This perspective argues for the inclusion of processes used to decode and encode the self, other people and interpersonal knowledge in the definition of social cognition. The neural modularity of social cognition is considered. The paper concludes by considering a number of challenges for social cognition research including questions of accuracy and the influence of motivation and bias in social cognitive processing.

Hemispheric Dominance for Emotions, Empathy and Social Behaviour: Evidence from Right and Left Handers with Frontotemporal Dementia.

Although evidence from primates suggests an important role for the anterior temporal cortex in social behaviour, human research has to date concentrated almost solely on the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala. By describing four cases of the temporal variant of frontotemporal dementia we show how this degenerative condition provides an excellent model for investigating the role of the anterior temporal lobe, especially the right, in emotions, empathy and social behaviour. Assessments of semantic memory, processing of emotional facial expression and emotional prosody were made, empathy was measured, and facial expressions of emotion were coded. Of the two right handers described, one subject with predominantly left temporal lobe atrophy had severe semantic impairment but normal performance on all emotional tasks. In contrast, the subject with right temporal lobe atrophy showed severely impaired recognition of emotion from faces and voices that was not due to semantic or perceptual difficulties. Empathy was lost, interpersonal skills were severely affected and facial expression of emotion was characterized by a fixed expression that was unresponsive to situations. Additionally, two left handers with right temporal lobe atrophy are described. One demonstrated the same pattern of hemispheric lateralization as the right handers and had emotional impairment. The other left hander showed the opposite pattern of deficits, suggesting a novel presentation of anomalous dominance with reversed hemispheric specialization of semantic memory and emotional processing.

Deciding Versus Reacting: Conceptions of Moral Judgment and the Reason-Affect Debate

Recent approaches to moral judgment have typically pitted emotion against reason. In an effort to move beyond this debate, we propose that authors presenting diverging models are considering quite different prototypical situations: those focusing on the resolution of complex dilemmas conclude that morality involves sophisticated reasoning, whereas those studying reactions to shocking moral violations find that morality involves quick, affect-laden processes. We articulate these diverging dominant approaches and consider three directions for future research (moral temptation, moral self-image, and lay understandings of morality) that we propose have not received sufficient attention as a result of the focus on these two prototypical situations within moral psychology.

Controlling the integration of emotion and cognition: the role of frontal cortex in distinguishing helpful from hurtful emotional information.

Emotion has been both lauded and vilified for its role in decision making. How are people able to ensure that helpful emotions guide decision making and irrelevant emotions are kept out of decision making? The orbitofrontal cortex has been identified as a neural area involved in incorporating emotion into decision making. Is this areas function specific to the integration of emotion and cognition, or does it more broadly govern whether emotional information should be integrated into cognition? The present research examined the role of orbitofrontal cortex when it was appropriate to control (i.e., prevent) the influence of emotion in decision making (Experiment 1) and to incorporate the influence of emotion in decision making (Experiment 2). Together, the two studies suggest that activity in lateral orbitofrontal cortex is associated with evaluating the contextual relevance of emotional information for decision making.

Implicit self-theories of shyness.

Three studies examined implicit self-theories in relation to shy peoples goals, responses, and consequences within social situations. Shy incremental theorists were more likely than shy entity theorists to view social situations as a learning opportunity and to approach social settings (Study 1). Shy incremental theorists were less likely to use strategies aimed at avoiding social interaction (Studies 2 and 3) and suffered fewer negative consequences of their shyness (Study 3). These findings generalized across both hypothetical and actual social situations as well as both self-reports and observer reports and could not be attributed to individual differences in level of shyness. Together, these studies indicate that implicit self-theories of shyness are important for understanding individual differences among shy people and suggest new avenues for implicit self-theories research.

The Quadruple Process model approach to examining the neural underpinnings of prejudice

In order to investigate the systems underlying the automatic and controlled processes that support social attitudes, we conducted an fMRI study that combined an implicit measure of race attitudes with the Quadruple Process model (Quad model). A number of previous neural investigations have adopted the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine the automatic processes that contribute to social attitudes. Application of the Quad model builds on this previous research by permitting measures of distinct automatic and controlled processes that contribute to performance on the IAT. The present research found that prejudiced attitudes of ingroup favoritism were associated with amygdala, medial and right lateral orbitofrontal cortex. In contrast, prejudiced attitudes of outgroup negativity were associated with caudate and left lateral orbitofrontal cortex. Frontal regions found in previous neural research on the IAT, such as anterior cingulate, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and operculum were associated with detecting appropriate responses in situations in which they conflict with automatic associations. Insula activity was associated with attitudes towards ingroup and outgroup members, as well as detecting appropriate behavior.

Roles of medial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex in self-evaluation

Empirical investigations of the relation of frontal lobe function to self-evaluation have mostly examined the evaluation of abstract qualities in relation to self versus other people. The present research furthers our understanding of frontal lobe involvement in self-evaluation by examining two processes that have not been widely studied by neuroscientists: on-line self-evaluations and correction of systematic judgment errors that influence self-evaluation. Although people evaluate their abstract qualities, it is equally important that perform on-line evaluations to assess the success of their behavior in a particular situation. In addition, self-evaluations of task performance are sometimes overconfident because of systematic judgment errors. What role do the neural regions associated with abstract self-evaluations and decision bias play in on-line evaluation and self-evaluation bias? In this fMRI study, self-evaluation in two reasoning tasks was examined; one elicited overconfident self-evaluations of performance because of salient but misleading aspects of the task and the other was free from misleading aspects. Medial PFC (mPFC), a region associated with self-referential processing, was generally involved in on-line self-evaluations but not specific to accurate or overconfident evaluation. Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activity, a region associated with accurate nonsocial judgment, negatively predicted individual differences in overconfidence and was negatively associated with confidence level for incorrect trials.

The default self: feeling good or being right?

The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits a higher resting metabolic rate than many other brain regions. This physiological default mode might support a psychological default state of chronic self-evaluation that helps people consider their strengths and weaknesses when planning future actions. However, a recent imaging study that relates medial prefrontal cortex activity to self-evaluation raises new questions about whether the psychological default mode of self-evaluation is best characterized by accurate self-evaluations or by feeling good about yourself.