Review
Cognitive-emotional interactions
The role of social cognition in emotion

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.11.010Get rights and content

Although recent research has shown that social cognition and emotion engage overlapping regions of the brain, few accounts of this overlap have been offered. What systems might be commonly or distinctively involved in each? The close functional relationship between social cognition and emotion might be understood in terms of a central role for mental state attribution in the understanding, learning and regulation of emotion. In each of these cases, mental state attributions might be supported by either stimulus-driven or more reflective processes.

Section snippets

Exploring the role of mental state attribution in emotion

Whether viewed from a phyologenetic or an ontogenetic perspective, it is clear that the abilities to understand, learn from and behave appropriately towards one another were as essential for our homonid ancestors as they are for a developing child [1]. In the past decade, insight into the neural mechanisms supporting these abilities has been provided by two burgeoning fields of research: social cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience. Although these fields developed largely

Understanding emotions in self and others

The ability to understand both another person's and one's own emotional states is essential for virtually all aspects of social behavior and crucially depends upon MSA. Indeed, emotion understanding – by definition – requires a causal attribution about the intentions behind an action. Evidence suggests that MSA contributes to emotion understanding through the operation of both rapid stimulus-driven processes 4, 5 and more deliberative, reflective and conceptually driven processes 6, 7, 8.

Emotional learning

The role of MSA in emotion is not limited to understanding emotions in the present moment but additionally helps us to learn about emotion-eliciting events and also to form lasting impressions of others’ emotionally relevant dispositions. For example, watching another's fear expression to an unfamiliar dog could provide valuable information about potential danger, that individual's anxious disposition or both. These abilities to learn from and about others crucially depend on understanding

Regulation of emotional responses

The MSA processes used for emotion understanding and learning also enable us adaptively to regulate our own emotional responses. To date, studies have investigated primarily the use of higher-level MSAs to regulate emotion in two ways.

The first ‘situation focused’ or ‘other focused’ strategy involves reinterpreting the situational meaning of others’ intentions or feelings, as when, for example, thinking positively or negatively about the dispositions (she is hearty or weak) and future emotions

A neural framework for the role of social cognition in emotion

One way to understand the relationship between social cognition and emotion is to delineate the way in which the processes and mental representations underlying them are distributed along general functional axes in the brain 30, 68. Based on the preceding review, we propose that the role of social cognition – and MSA in particular – in emotion can be understood in terms of three related but distinct dimensions of functional–anatomic organization. The proposed framework should be viewed as

Future directions

This survey of research on the neural bases of MSA in emotion understanding, learning and regulation provides a framework for understanding current work but also highlights how much there remains to be clarified in future research. At least four types of question will be important to address.

The first concerns the fact that research has focused on how the average person perceives emotions in static social stimuli, but less is known about how dispositional or situational motivations (e.g. to

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants MH076137 from NIH and DA022541 from NIDA, and a Margaret and Herman Sokol Postdoctoral Fellowship (AO).

References (83)

  • K.L. Phan

    Functional neuroanatomy of emotion: a meta-analysis of emotion activation studies in PET and fMRI

    Neuroimage

    (2002)
  • H.L. Gallagher

    Imaging the intentional stance in a competitive game

    Neuroimage

    (2002)
  • K.L. Phan

    Neural substrates for voluntary suppression of negative affect: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

    Biol. Psychiatry

    (2005)
  • K.N. Ochsner

    For better or for worse: neural systems supporting the cognitive down- and up-regulation of negative emotion

    Neuroimage

    (2004)
  • M. Beauregard

    Mind does really matter: evidence from neuroimaging studies of emotional self-regulation, psychotherapy, and placebo effect

    Prog. Neurobiol.

    (2007)
  • P.W. Burgess

    The gateway hypothesis of rostral prefrontal cortex (area 10) function

    Trends Cogn. Sci.

    (2007)
  • M.D. Lieberman

    Reflection and reflexion: a social cognitive neuroscience approach to attributional inference

    Adv. Exp. Soc. Psychol.

    (2002)
  • M. Tomasello

    The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

    (1999)
  • Ochsner, K.N. Social cognitive neuroscience: historical development, core principles, and future promise. In Social...
  • S.D. Preston et al.

    Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases

    Behav. Brain Sci.

    (2002)
  • K.N. Ochsner

    Reflecting upon feelings: an fMRI study of neural systems supporting the attribution of emotion to self and other

    J. Cogn. Neurosci.

    (2004)
  • J. Decety et al.

    The functional architecture of human empathy

    Behav. Cogn. Neurosci. Rev.

    (2004)
  • C. Lamm

    The neural substrate of human empathy: effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal

    J. Cogn. Neurosci.

    (2007)
  • S.J. Blakemore et al.

    From the perception of action to the understanding of intention

    Nat. Rev. Neurosci.

    (2001)
  • L. Carr

    Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: a relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas

    Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A.

    (2003)
  • M. Iacoboni et al.

    The mirror neuron system and the consequences of its dysfunction

    Nat. Rev. Neurosci.

    (2006)
  • I. Morrison

    Vicarious responses to pain in anterior cingulate cortex: is empathy a multisensory issue?

    Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci.

    (2004)
  • T. Singer

    Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain

    Science

    (2004)
  • J. Zaki

    Different circuits for different pain: patterns of functional connectivity reveal distinct networks for processing pain in self and others

    Soc. Neurosci.

    (2007)
  • A.D. Craig

    How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body

    Nat. Rev. Neurosci.

    (2002)
  • N.I. Eisenberger

    Does rejection hurt? An FMRI study of social exclusion

    Science

    (2003)
  • W.D. Hutchison

    Pain-related neurons in the human cingulate cortex

    Nat. Neurosci.

    (1999)
  • T.D. Wager

    Placebo-induced changes in FMRI in the anticipation and experience of pain

    Science

    (2004)
  • H. Kim

    Contextual modulation of amygdala responsivity to surprised faces

    J. Cogn. Neurosci.

    (2004)
  • J.T. Lanzetta et al.

    Expectations of cooperation and competition and their effects on observers’ vicarious emotional responses

    J. Pers. Soc. Psychol.

    (1989)
  • T. Singer

    Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others

    Nature

    (2006)
  • C.D. Batson

    Moral hypocrisy: addressing some alternatives

    J. Pers. Soc. Psychol.

    (2002)
  • R. Saxe

    Overlapping and non-overlapping brain regions for theory of mind and self reflection in individual subjects

    Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci.

    (2006)
  • S.J. Gilbert

    Functional specialization within rostral prefrontal cortex (area 10): a meta-analysis

    J. Cogn. Neurosci.

    (2006)
  • D.M. Amodio et al.

    Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition

    Nat. Rev. Neurosci.

    (2006)
  • J.P. Mitchell

    Activity in right temporo-parietal junction is not selective for theory-of-mind

    Cereb. Cortex

    (2007)
  • Cited by (225)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text