Spring 2018 - Wednesdays - 12:00 to 1:00 pm - Elliott Hall S204
January 17
We chose topics and/or themes for articles to be discussed for the spring semester.
January 24
"The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise" by Zaki and Ochsner.
"Spontaneous but not explicit processing of positive sentences impaired in Asperger's syndrom: Pupillometric evidence" by Kuchinke et al.
January 31
"Responding to the emotions of others: Dissociating forms of empathy through the study of typical and psychiatric populations" by R.J.R. Blair
"Self-projection and the brain" by Buckner and Carroll.
February 7
The recommended reading is the Wikipedia entry for "empathy".
February 14
"The influence of racial embodiment on racial bias in immersive virtual environments" by Groom et al.
Increasingly, people interact with others via digital representations, or avatars, that feature indicators of race. Nonetheless, little is known about the effects of avatar race on attitudes and behaviors. We conducted a study to determine how people’s implicit racial bias is affected by the race of their avatar in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). Our results indicate that the effects of avatar race extend beyond digital spaces. People embodied by Black avatars in an IVE demonstrated greater implicit racial bias outside the IVE than people embodied by White avatars. These findings have important implications for strategies to reduce racial prejudice and provide new insights into the flexibility of racial identity and racial attitudes afforded by virtual technologies.
"An fMRI study of affective perspective taking in individuals with psychopathy: imagining another in pain does not evoke empathy" by Decety et al.
While it is well established that individuals with psychopathy have a marked deficit in affective arousal, emotional empathy, and caring for the well-being of others, the extent to which perspective taking can elicit an emotional response has not yet been studied despite its potential application in rehabilitation. In healthy individuals, affective perspective taking has proven to be an effective means to elicit empathy and concern for others. To examine neural responses in individuals who vary in psychopathy during affective perspective taking, 121 incarcerated males, classified as high (n = 37; Hare psychopathy checklist-revised, PCL-R ≥ 30), intermediate (n = 44; PCL-R between 21 and 29), and low (n = 40; PCL-R ≤ 20) psychopaths, were scanned while viewing stimuli depicting bodily injuries and adopting an imagine-self and an imagine-other perspective. During the imagine-self perspective, participants with high psychopathy showed a typical response within the network involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula (aINS), anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC), supplementary motor area (SMA), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), somatosensory cortex, and right amygdala. Conversely, during the imagine-other perspective, psychopaths exhibited an atypical pattern of brain activation and effective connectivity seeded in the anterior insula and amygdala with the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). The response in the amygdala and insula was inversely correlated with PCL-R Factor 1 (interpersonal/affective) during the imagine-other perspective. In high psychopaths, scores on PCL-R Factor 1 predicted the neural response in ventral striatum when imagining others in pain. These patterns of brain activation and effective connectivity associated with differential perspective-taking provide a better understanding of empathy dysfunction in psychopathy, and have the potential to inform intervention programs for this complex clinical problem.
February 21
"The role of psychedelics in palliative care reconsidered: A case for psilocybin" by B. Kelmendi et al.
February 28
"Unifying Theories of Psychedelic Drug Effects?" by Swanson.
March 7
"The associations of naturalistic classic psychedelic use, mystical experience, and creative problem solving" by Sweat et al.
March 21
"An Architecture-Oriented Design Method for Human-Computer Interaction Systems" by Yang et al.
"Design-oriented Human-Computer Interaction" by Fallman.
March 28 - "The entropic brain - Revisited" by Carhart-Harris.
The entropic brain hypothesis proposes that within upper and lower limits, after which consciousness may be lost, the entropy of spontaneous brain activity indexes the informational richness of conscious states. Here the hypothesis is revisited four years on from its original publication. It is shown that the principle that the entropy of brain activity is elevated in the psychedelic state is increasingly well supported by separate and independent studies and analyses, and evidence for greater brain criticality under psychedelics is also highlighted. It is argued that heightened brain criticality enables the brain to be more sensitive to intrinsic and extrinsic perturbations which may translate as a heightened susceptibility to “set” and “setting”. This updated version of the original entropic brain hypothesis now offers more concrete information on specific measures of brain entropy and suggests new studies to scrutinise it further, as well as examine its utility for describing and informing the treatment of psychiatric and neurological conditions such as depression and disorders of consciousness.
April 18
"Tripping up addiction: the use of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of problematic drug and alcohol use" by Morgan et al.
April 25
"Tactile information improves visual object discrimination in kea, Nestor notabilis, and capuchin monkeys, Sapajus spp." by Carducci et al.