Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Review
Cognitive-emotional interactionsThe role of social cognition in emotion
Cognitive-emotional interactions
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).
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