Correcting Emotional Misunderstandings
We may make mistakes interpreting the emotions of others, but our brain can corrects us
October 10, 2013—When we are sad, the world seemingly cries with us. On the contrary, when we are happy everything shines and all around people's faces seem to rejoice with us. These mechanisms for projecting one's emotions onto others are well known to scientists, who believe they are at the core of the ability to interpret and relate to others. In some circumstances, however, this may lead to gross mistakes (called egocentricity bias in the emotional domain, or EEB). To avoid them, cerebral mechanisms are activated about which still little is known.
Giorgia Silani, a neuroscientist at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), in collaboration with an international group of researchers, recently identified an area in the brain involved in this process. The results were published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
In their experiments researchers first measured the likeliness of subjects to make these kinds of mistakes. Then, thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging, a cerebral area was identified in which activity is clearly more intense when the subjects are making EEB mistakes.
The responsible area is the right supramarginal gyrus, a relatively unknown location to social neurosciences.
In a third round of experiments, researchers even tried to "sabotage" the activity of this cerebral area, by temporarily shutting it down through transcranial magnetic stimulation, a (harmless) procedure which can temporarily silence the electrical activity of neurons. Silani and colleagues observed that during "shutdowns" the subjects made significantly more EEB mistakes than average, thus confirming the crucial role of this cerebral area.
"The results of our study," Silani explains "show for the first time the physiological markers of highly adaptive social mechanisms, such as the ability to suppress our own emotional states in order to correctly evaluate those of others. Future research will allow us to understand how these abilities develop and decay over time, and how we can train them."
ARTICLE:
“Right Supramarginal Gyrus Is Crucial to Overcome Emotional Egocentricity Bias in Social Judgments,” Giorgia Silani, Claus Lamm, Christian C. Ruff, and Tania Singer. The Journal of Neuroscience, 25 September 2013, 33(39):15466-15476; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1488-13.2013.
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