Ambiguity in social cognition
Petra Zemánková
16/11/2018
Overview
• Social cognition in the brain
• Ambiguity in social cognition and cognitive
bias
• Social-cognitive bias in mental disorders
• Processing of ambiguous stimuli in EDs –
pilot fMRI study
Social cognition
• Social Cognition (SC) is an umbrella term for cognitive and affective
processes and abilities involved in social interaction
Perception -> interpretation -> response
Social cognition in the brain
(Green et al., 2015)
Ambiguity in social contact
Situational and dispositional
factors influence the decision
making process
We are „meaning making machines“
• Judgement under uncertainty (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974)
• Better understanding of heuristics and biases (reprezentativeness, availibilaty,
adjustment from an anchor)
Two step processing model
Bottom-up
implicit
Top-down
cognitive control
Examples of cognitive bias in social cognition
• Attentional bias
• Negativity bias/mood congruent bias
• Projection bias/egocentricity bias
Attentional bias
• Bias in selective attention – towards either
positive or negative stimuli (e.g. facial
expressions)
• Increased attention towards information
representing person‘s concerns or any recurring
thoughts
Example: People who often think about the shoes they
wear, pay more attention to shoes of others
Attentional Biases toward Face-Related
Stimuli among Face Dissatisfied Women
(Kou et al., 2016)
• Face-dot probe paradigm, eye tracking, women with high and low face
dissatisfaction (HFD/LFD)
• First fixation, duration of fixation, reaction times for probes after stimuli
• Under the condition of faces-neutral stimuli (vases) pairs, HFD women directed
their first fixations more often toward faces, directed their first fixations toward
unattractive faces more quickly, and had longer first fixation duration on such
faces
• All participants had longer overall gaze duration on attractive faces than on
unattractive ones
Negativity bias
• propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far
more than positive information
• May prevent psychological well-being
• Tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as negative
• Evolutionary adaptive functions
Negativity bias neural mechanism
(Takehito et al., 2017)
• Perceptual decision making
• Negativity bias (ambiguous seen as sad) associated
with bilateral ACC activation
• Increased connectivity – correlated with
hopelessness
Emotional Egocentricity Bias (EEB)
• Humans often project their
own beliefs, desires and
emotions onto others,
indicating an inherent
egocentrism
• Can result in interpersonal
misunderstandings
• In case of incongruent
emotional states between
ourselves and the others, our
judgments can be biased
(Riva et al., 2016)
EEB neurocognitive mechanisms
(Silani et al., 2013)
• rSMG crucial to overcome EEB
EEB neurocognitive mechanisms
(Steinbeis and Singer, 2014)
• What mechanisms give rise to the EEB?
• EEB – strong correlation between first hand
experience and the attribution of such
emotions to others
• When time pressure is high we are more
egocentric
• We use the same neural representations for others feelings
like for our own experience (aInsula, mPFC)
Social-cognitive bias in mental disorders
An overly exaggerated or extremely low
demonstration of cognitive bias could be
an indicator of mental illness
• Major depression (MD)
• Anxiety disorder (AD)
• Eating disorders (ED)
Major depression and cognitive bias
• MD characterized by presence of negative schemas,
defined as mental representations of past experiences,
containing dysfunctional attitudes about the self (Beck
theory)
• important influence on the way information is
processed, guiding one’s attention, memory and
interpretation for personally relevant negative
experiences (Koster et al., 2011)
• CB contributes to the development and maintenance of
the symptoms (Feng at al., 2015)
MD and neural basis of cognitive bias
• In normal individuals, the anterior cingulate regulates the attention–
emotion balance by signaling to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
• pgACC – depressive affect, hopelessness
• depressed individuals show less activation in these regions, which
might relate to their inability to gain attentional control over
emotional interference (Feng et al., 2015)
• deficient inhibition for attention to negative stimuli, needs further
exploration
Negativity social bias and MD
• Depressed individuals display a negative bias in the perception of
others' facial emotional expressions, linked with poor outcome in
depression.
• Self-focused depressive rumination as a possibly important causal
mechanism (Raes et al., 2006)
• High negativity bias evokes a distinctive pattern of brain activation in
the frontal cortex of depressed participants, specifically increased
activation in the left IFG, associated with language and semantic
processing, response inhibition, and cognitive reappraisal, ambiguous
social stimuli processing (Gollan et al., 2015).
Anxiety disorder
• associated functional impairment in social or occupational area
• ADs are characterized by processing selectivity such as attentional or
interpretation bias
• Misinterpreting neutral signals as negative or threatening
• impact on person‘s emotional state, may lead to maladaptive behavior (e.g.
social withdrawal)
• evidence that the uncertainty accompanying anxiety can increase reliance on
egocentric self-knowledge when trying to understand others’ – EEB (Todd et
al., 2015)
Neural basis of cognitive bias in AD –
Uncertainty and anticipation
• Research on orienting in anxiety
strongly implicates biased
processing of threats in the
maintenance of anxiety - these
biases arise from perturbations in
underlying neural circuitry
• Research less strongly implicates
biased orienting away from rewards
in anxiety, though brain imaging
studies suggest that some form of
reward-attention perturbation likely
occurs in anxiety
• UAMA - propose aMCC to have an
adaptive control
(Grupe and Nitschke, 2013)
Intervention for AD and MD: Modification of
attentional bias
• Computerized procedures aim to implicitly retrain biased attentional patterns
• ABM was associated with reduced amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)
activation
• Response within the insular cortex was associated with the induction of positive
affective bias following ABM and with improvement in symptoms
• ABM methods which encourage active goal-focused attention-search for
positive/nonthreat information and flexible cognitive control across multiple
processes may prove more effective in reducing anxiety than ABM-threatavoidance
training which targets a specific bias in spatial orienting to threat
(Mogg et al., 2016)
Eating disorders (ED) and social cognition
• Abnormalities in emotional functioning
belongs to key features in ED (anorexia
nervosa, bulimia nervosa)
• Increased levels of anxiety
• Increased levels of alexithymia
• Decreased activation of regions related
to mentalization (Grynberg et al., 2012)
Is anxiety gender specific?
• Both AD and ED significantly more
prevalent in women and have more
disabling consequences
• Gender differences in emotion
processing (e.g. women more sensitive
to negative stimuli)
• UAMA model doesn‘t consider gender
differences, neither treatment
approaches (Grupe and Nitschke, 2013)
ED and attentional bias
• Poorer performance with respect to angry faces for both AN and BN
patients compared to healthy controls (Harrison, Sullivan, Tchanturia,
& Treasure, 2010)
• Social stimuli often ambiguous - Intolerance towards uncertainty has
been proposed to be a vulnerability factors across various mental
disorders including anxiety and depressive disorders
• Lack of studies on ED population - evidence supporting it might be a
vulnerability factor even for ED pathology, especially for the
emotional symptoms (Renjakn et al. 2016; Kesby et al. 2017)
We are the first to investigate the underlying mechanisms and
neural correlates of emotionally ambiguous social stimuli
processing in ED patients
• Using Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) pictures as a visual stimuli
TAT
• projective psychological test – complex ambiguous stimuli
• subjects' responses, in the narratives they make up about ambiguous
pictures of people, reveal their underlying motives, concerns, and the
way they see the social world (Schacter et al., 2009)
• Widely used method in research and clinical settings
• Criticized over its reliability and validity
• No neuroimaging study published yet
Challenge accepted!
TAT fMRI study
• 40 healthy participants:
Experimental conditions:
1) Mental state judgement
2) Self-refferential judgement
3) Age judgement
Task effect
N=40
Contrast: emotion judgement> age judgement
p<0.05, FWE correction
Task effect
N=40
Contrast:
my emotions > others emotions
p<0.01, FWE corrected
ED - Pilot fMRI study
• 28 subjects:
ED (n=14), HC (n=14)
Age, sex, education - matched
• Siemens Prisma, 3T
• Modified TAT
Are there differences in the
behavioral responses or brain
activation during TAT task
between the two groups?
Results
Group differences
HC > ED
contrast:
emotions vs. age
p<0.001, uncorr.
Left Insula
Results
Group differences ED > HC
Contrast:
emotions vs. age
p<0.001, uncorr.
rSMG
mPFC
Discussion
• Task activated regions which has been consistently associated in literature
with social cognition (Overwalle, 2009).
• Group differences analysis revealed that HC group showed greater
activations in insula, region involved in emotion formation and processing
(Phillips et al., 2003).
• In contrast ED patients group showed higher activations in rSMG,
compared to HC group. This structure is critical to overcome egocentricity
bias in social judgement (Silani et al., 2013).
• We hypothesize that ED patients tend to suppress their own perspective
while thinking about emotional states of others more strongly than HC,
probably due to alexithymia and the lack of awareness of their mental
states.
Discussion
• HC recruit rather affective paralimbic insular cortex (bottom-up
processing), while EDs rely rather on functionally cognitive structures, such
as MPFC and rSMG, involved for instance in regulatory processes and
cognitive control (top-down processing)
• Anterior insula function goes beyond emotion processing related to self, it
can serve as reference for other-related affective states as well, especially
in decision making in complex and ambiguous environments (Lamm &
Singer, 2010). Smaller engagement of anterior insular cortex in EDs during
emotion processing could be a sign of alexithymic features often present in
this clinical population and simultaneously would explain the preference of
cognitive strategy over affective one.
• At this moment we have no behavioural or self-report evidence confirming
our inferences
Take home message
• Biased decision making plays important role in the dynamics of number of mental
diorders
• Cognitive bias manipulation training might help in treatment, targeting individual
biases independently
Thank you for your attention!
Time for questions…