Dissociable neural substrates for agentic versus conceptual representations of self

The Interprocessual-Self Theory in Support of Human Neuroscience Studies

Rather than occurring abstractly (autonomously), ethical growth occurs in interpersonal relationships (IRs). It requires optimally functioning cognitive processes [attention, working memory (WM), episodic/autobiographical memory (AM), inhibition, flexibility, among others], emotional processes (physical contact, motivation, and empathy), processes surrounding ethical, intimacy, and identity issues, and other psychological processes (self-knowledge, integration, and the capacity for agency). Without intending to be reductionist, we believe that these aspects are essential for optimally engaging in IRs and for the personal constitution. While they are all integrated into our daily life, in research and academic work, it is hard to see how they are integrated. Thus, we need better theoretical frameworks for studying them. That study and integration thereof are undertaken differently depending on different views of what it means to live as a human being. We rely on neuroscientific data to support the chosen theory to offer knowledge to understand human beings and interpersonal relational growth. We should of course note that to describe what makes up the uniqueness of being, acting, and growing as a human person involves something much more profound which requires too, a methodology that opens the way for a theory of the person that responds to the concerns of philosophy and philosophical anthropology from many disciplines and methods (Orón Semper, 2015; Polo, 2015), but this is outside the scope of this study. With these in mind, this article aims to introduce a new explanatory framework, called the Interprocessual-self (IPS), for the neuroscientific findings that allow for a holistic consideration of the previously mentioned processes. Contributing to the knowledge of personal growth and avoiding a reductionist view, we first offer a general description of the research that supports the interrelation between personal virtue in IRs and relevant cognitive, emotional, and ethic-moral processes. This reveals how relationships allow people to relate ethically and grow as persons. We include conceptualizations and descriptions of their neural bases. Secondly, with the IPS model, we explore neuroscientific findings regarding self-knowledge, integration, and agency, all psychological processes that stimulate inner exploration of the self concerning the other. We find that these fundamental conditions can be understood from IPS theory. Finally, we explore situations that involve the integration of two levels, namely the interpersonal one and the social contexts of relationships.

Late frontal positivity effects in Self-referential Memory: Unique to the Self?

The self-reference effect in memory (SRE), in which stimuli related to self are better remembered than other stimuli, has been studied often in the fMRI literature, but much less with EEG. In two experiments, we investigated how self-referencing modulated event-related potential (ERP) markers of the subsequent memory effect, testing whether the same components that reflect memory success are impacted or whether unique components are modulated by self-referencing. Participants were asked to evaluate whether an adjective accurately described either the self or a given other by making a yes/no key press during EEG recording. Then participants were given a surprise recognition memory test where they judged each adjective as old or new. We observed a main effect of self-relevance on a late positivity at right frontal electrodes. A very similar effect was observed when comparing words subsequently remembered to those that were forgotten. However, no interaction was found between self-relevance and subsequent memory, suggesting the frontal positivity is not exclusive to the SRE, but instead a reflection of deeper encoding that leads to better memory. Thus, this frontal positivity may be a marker of a deeper encoding process that is elicited by self-referencing but not exclusive to the SRE.

Neural Responses to Heartbeats in the Default Network Encode the Self in Spontaneous Thoughts

The default network (DN) has been consistently associated with self-related cognition, but also to bodily state monitoring and autonomic regulation. We hypothesized that these two seemingly disparate functional roles of the DN are functionally coupled, in line with theories proposing that selfhood is grounded in the neural monitoring of internal organs, such as the heart. We measured with magnetoencephalograhy neural responses evoked by heartbeats while human participants freely mind-wandered. When interrupted by a visual stimulus at random intervals, participants scored the self-relatedness of the interrupted thought. They evaluated their involvement as the first-person perspective subject or agent in the thought ("I"), and on another scale to what degree they were thinking about themselves ("Me"). During the interrupted thought, neural responses to heartbeats in two regions of the DN, the ventral precuneus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, covaried, respectively, with the "I" and the "Me" dimensions of the self, even at the single-trial level. No covariation between self-relatedness and peripheral autonomic measures (heart rate, heart rate variability, pupil diameter, electrodermal activity, respiration rate, and phase) or alpha power was observed. Our results reveal a direct link between selfhood and neural responses to heartbeats in the DN and thus directly support theories grounding selfhood in the neural monitoring of visceral inputs. More generally, the tight functional coupling between self-related processing and cardiac monitoring observed here implies that, even in the absence of measured changes in peripheral bodily measures, physiological and cognitive functions have to be considered jointly in the DN.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT

The default network (DN) has been consistently associated with self-processing but also with autonomic regulation. We hypothesized that these two functions could be functionally coupled in the DN, inspired by theories according to which selfhood is grounded in the neural monitoring of internal organs. Using magnetoencephalography, we show that heartbeat-evoked responses (HERs) in the DN covary with the self-relatedness of ongoing spontaneous thoughts. HER amplitude in the ventral precuneus covaried with the "I" self-dimension, whereas HER amplitude in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex encoded the "Me" self-dimension. Our experimental results directly support theories rooting selfhood in the neural monitoring of internal organs. We propose a novel functional framework for the DN, where self-processing is coupled with physiological monitoring.

Social cognition and the cerebellum: A meta-analytic connectivity analysis

This meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) study explores the functional connectivity of the cerebellum with the cerebrum in social cognitive processes. In a recent meta-analysis, Van Overwalle, Baetens, Mariën, and Vandekerckhove (2014) documented that the cerebellum is implicated in social processes of "body" reading (mirroring; e.g., understanding other persons' intentions from observing their movements) and "mind" reading (mentalizing, e.g., inferring other persons' beliefs, intentions or personality traits, reconstructing persons' past, future, or hypothetical events). In a recent functional connectivity study, Buckner et al. (2011) offered a novel parcellation of cerebellar topography that substantially overlaps with the cerebellar meta-analytic findings of Van Overwalle et al. (2014). This overlap suggests that the involvement of the cerebellum in social reasoning depends on its functional connectivity with the cerebrum. To test this hypothesis, we explored the meta-analytic co-activations as indices of functional connectivity between the cerebellum and the cerebrum during social cognition. The MACM results confirm substantial and distinct connectivity with respect to the functions of (a) action understanding ("body" reading) and (b) mentalizing ("mind" reading). The consistent and strong connectivity findings of this analysis suggest that cerebellar activity during social judgments reflects distinct mirroring and mentalizing functionality, and that these cerebellar functions are connected with corresponding functional networks in the cerebrum.

Reflections of Oneself: Neurocognitive Evidence for Dissociable Forms of Self-Referential Recollection

Research links the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) with a number of social cognitive processes that involve reflecting on oneself and other people. Here, we investigated how mPFC might support the ability to recollect information about oneself and others relating to previous experiences. Participants judged whether they had previously related stimuli conceptually to themselves or someone else, or whether they or another agent had performed actions. We uncovered a functional distinction between dorsal and ventral mPFC subregions based on information retrieved from episodic long-term memory. The dorsal mPFC was generally activated when participants attempted to retrieve social information about themselves and others, regardless of whether this information concerned the conceptual or agentic self or other. In contrast, a role was discerned for ventral mPFC during conceptual but not agentic self-referential recollection, indicating specific involvement in retrieving memories related to self-concept rather than bodily self. A subsequent recognition test for new items that had been presented during the recollection task found that conceptual and agentic recollection attempts resulted in differential incidental encoding of new information. Thus, we reveal converging fMRI and behavioral evidence for distinct neurocognitive forms of self-referential recollection, highlighting that conceptual and bodily aspects of self-reflection can be dissociated.

Acute psychosocial stress and emotion regulation skills modulate empathic reactions to pain in others

Psychosocial stress affects resources for adequate coping with environmental demands. A crucial question in this context is the extent to which acute psychosocial stressors impact empathy and emotion regulation. In the present study, 120 participants were randomly assigned to a control group vs. a group confronted with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), an established paradigm for the induction of acute psychosocial stress. Empathy for pain as a specific subgroup of empathy was assessed via pain intensity ratings during a pain-picture task. Self-reported emotion regulation skills were measured as predictors using an established questionnaire. Stressed individuals scored significantly lower on the appraisal of pain pictures. A regression model was chosen to find variables that further predict the pain ratings. These findings implicate that acute psychosocial stress might impair empathic processes to observed pain in another person and the ability to accept one's emotion additionally predicts the empathic reaction. Furthermore, the ability to tolerate negative emotions modulated the relation between stress and pain judgments, and thus influenced core cognitive-affective functions relevant for coping with environmental challenges. In conclusion, our study emphasizes the necessity of reducing negative emotions in terms of empathic distress when confronted with pain of another person under psychosocial stress, in order to be able to retain pro-social behavior.

But do you think I'm cool? Developmental differences in striatal recruitment during direct and reflected social self-evaluations

The current fMRI study investigates the neural foundations of evaluating oneself and others during early adolescence and young adulthood. Eighteen early adolescents (ages 11-14, M=12.6) and 19 young adults (ages 22-31, M=25.6) evaluated whether academic, physical, and social traits described themselves directly (direct self-evaluations), described their best friend directly (direct other-evaluations), described themselves from their best friend's perspective (reflected self-evaluations), or in general could change over time (control malleability-evaluations). Compared to control evaluations, both adolescents and adults recruited cortical midline structures during direct and reflected self-evaluations, as well as during direct other-evaluations, converging with previous research. However, unique to this study was a significant three-way interaction between age group, evaluative perspective, and domain within bilateral ventral striatum. Region of interest analyses demonstrated a significant evaluative perspective by domain interaction within the adolescent sample only. Adolescents recruited greatest bilateral ventral striatum during reflected social self-evaluations, which was positively correlated with age and pubertal development. These findings suggest that reflected social self-evaluations, made from the inferred perspective of a close peer, may be especially self-relevant, salient, or rewarding to adolescent self-processing--particularly during the progression through adolescence - and this feature persists into adulthood.

Social cognition and the cerebellum: a meta-analysis of over 350 fMRI studies

This meta-analysis explores the role of the cerebellum in social cognition. Recent meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies since 2008 demonstrate that the cerebellum is only marginally involved in social cognition and emotionality, with a few meta-analyses pointing to an involvement of at most 54% of the individual studies. In this study, novel meta-analyses of over 350 fMRI studies, dividing up the domain of social cognition in homogeneous subdomains, confirmed this low involvement of the cerebellum in conditions that trigger the mirror network (e.g., when familiar movements of body parts are observed) and the mentalizing network (when no moving body parts or unfamiliar movements are present). There is, however, one set of mentalizing conditions that strongly involve the cerebellum in 50-100% of the individual studies. In particular, when the level of abstraction is high, such as when behaviors are described in terms of traits or permanent characteristics, in terms of groups rather than individuals, in terms of the past (episodic autobiographic memory) or the future rather than the present, or in terms of hypothetical events that may happen. An activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis conducted in this study reveals that the cerebellum is critically implicated in social cognition and that the areas of the cerebellum which are consistently involved in social cognitive processes show extensive overlap with the areas involved in sensorimotor (during mirror and self-judgments tasks) as well as in executive functioning (across all tasks). We discuss the role of the cerebellum in social cognition in general and in higher abstraction mentalizing in particular. We also point out a number of methodological limitations of some available studies on the social brain that hamper the detection of cerebellar activity.

Cortical midline structures and autobiographical-self processes: an activation-likelihood estimation meta-analysis

The autobiographical-self refers to a mental state derived from the retrieval and assembly of memories regarding one’s biography. The process of retrieval and assembly, which can focus on biographical facts or personality traits or some combination thereof, is likely to vary according to the domain chosen for an experiment. To date, the investigation of the neural basis of this process has largely focused on the domain of personality traits using paradigms that contrasted the evaluation of one’s traits (self-traits) with those of another person’s (other-traits). This has led to the suggestion that cortical midline structures (CMSs) are specifically related to self states. Here, with the goal of testing this suggestion, we conducted activation-likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses based on data from 28 neuroimaging studies. The ALE results show that both self-traits and other-traits engage CMSs; however, the engagement of medial prefrontal cortex is greater for self-traits than for other-traits, while the posteromedial cortex is more engaged for other-traits than for self-traits. These findings suggest that the involvement CMSs is not specific to the evaluation of one’s own traits, but also occurs during the evaluation of another person’s traits.

The neurobiology of empathy in borderline personality disorder

We present a neurobiological model of empathic dysfunction in borderline personality disorder (BPD) to guide future empirical research. Empathy is a necessary component of interpersonal functioning, involving two distinct, parallel neural networks. One form of empathic processing relies on shared representations (SR) of others' mental states, while the other is associated with explicit mental state attribution (MSA). SR processing is visceral and automatic, contributing to attunement, but also emotional contagion. MSA processing contributes to deliberate, perspectival forms of empathic understanding. Empathic dysfunction in BPD may involve hyper-reactivity of SR networks and impairment of MSA networks. Nevertheless, this empathic dysfunction is subtle, but contributes to interpersonal difficulties. Interaction between genetic factors and traumatic attachment stressors may contribute to development of BPD, with painful attachment insecurity and disorganization affecting SR and MSA network functioning. Future avenues for BPD research will include developmental assessment of attachment and neurobiological functioning under varying conditions.

The influence of valence and decision difficulty on self-referential processing

Self-referential processing is defined as the process by which a person becomes aware that specific contents are related to his or her own self. Cortical midline structures (CMS), such as dorsal and medial prefrontal cortex, and regions such as inferior frontal cortex, insula, and temporal pole have been implicated in self-referential processing. However, the specific contribution of each of these areas is still largely unknown. More particularly, not many studies have examined the influence of valence and decision making difficulty on regions involved in self-referential processing. In this study, participants evaluated how well personality traits, differing in valence and decision difficulty, described themselves or the current US President. In line with predictions, ventral, rostral, and dorsal parts of medial prefrontal cortex showed greater activity when participants judged traits about themselves relative to judging traits about the current US President. However, none of these regions showed significant modulation by trait valence. Increasing trait decision difficulty was associated with increased activity within dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and bilateral anterior insula. However, there was very minimal overlap (6/119 voxels, i.e., 5%) of the regions of dorsal medial prefrontal cortex implicated in self-referential processing and those implicated in trait decision difficulty. The results are interpreted within current accounts of self-referential processing.

Functional imaging studies of emotion regulation: a synthetic review and evolving model of the cognitive control of emotion

This paper reviews and synthesizes functional imaging research that over the past decade has begun to offer new insights into the brain mechanisms underlying emotion regulation. Toward that end, the first section of the paper outlines a model of the processes and neural systems involved in emotion generation and regulation. The second section surveys recent research supporting and elaborating the model, focusing primarily on studies of the most commonly investigated strategy, which is known as reappraisal. At its core, the model specifies how prefrontal and cingulate control systems modulate activity in perceptual, semantic, and affect systems as a function of one's regulatory goals, tactics, and the nature of the stimuli and emotions being regulated. This section also shows how the model can be generalized to understand the brain mechanisms underlying other emotion regulation strategies as well as a range of other allied phenomena. The third and last section considers directions for future research, including how basic models of emotion regulation can be translated to understand changes in emotion across the life span and in clinical disorders.

Self-reflection and the inner voice: activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus during perceptual and conceptual self-referential thinking

Inner speech involvement in self-reflection was examined by reviewing 130 studies assessing brain activation during self-referential processing in key self-domains: agency, self-recognition, emotions, personality traits, autobiographical memory, and miscellaneous (e.g., prospection, judgments). The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) has been shown to be reliably recruited during inner speech production. The percentage of studies reporting LIFG activity for each self-dimension was calculated. Fifty five percent of all studies reviewed indicated LIFG (and presumably inner speech) activity during self-reflection tasks; on average LIFG activation is observed 16% of the time during completion of non-self tasks (e.g., attention, perception). The highest LIFG activation rate was observed during retrieval of autobiographical information. The LIFG was significantly more recruited during conceptual tasks (e.g., prospection, traits) than during perceptual tasks (agency and self-recognition). This constitutes additional evidence supporting the idea of a participation of inner speech in self-related thinking.

The neural substrates of person perception: spontaneous use of financial and moral status knowledge

The current study examines the effect of status information on the neural substrates of person perception. In an event-related fMRI experiment, participants were presented with photographs of faces preceded with information denoting either: low or high financial status (e.g., "earns $25,000" or "earns $350,000"), or low or high moral status (e.g., "is a tobacco executive" or "does cancer research"). Participants were asked to form an impression of the targets, but were not instructed to explicitly evaluate their social status. Building on previous brain-imaging investigations, regions of interest analyses were performed for brain regions expected to support either cognitive (i.e., intraparietal sulcus) or emotional (i.e., ventromedial prefrontal cortex) components of social status perception. Activation of the intraparietal sulcus was found to be sensitive to the financial status of individuals while activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was sensitive to the moral status of individuals. The implications of these results towards uncovering the neural substrates of status perception and, more broadly, the extended network of brain regions involved in person perception are discussed.

The representation of self and person knowledge in the medial prefrontal cortex

Nearly 40 years ago, social psychologists began applying the information processing framework of cognitive psychology to the question of how humans understand and represent knowledge about themselves and others. This approach gave rise to the immensely successful field of social cognition and fundamentally changed the way in which social psychological phenomena are studied. More recently, social scientists of many stripes have turned to the methods of cognitive neuroscience to understand the neural basis of social cognition. A pervasive finding from this research is that social knowledge, be it about one's self or of others, is represented in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This review focuses on the social cognitive neuroscience of self and person knowledge in the MPFC. We begin with a brief historical overview of social cognition, followed by a review of recent and influential research on the brain basis of self and person knowledge. In the latter half of this review, we discuss the role of familiarity and similarity in person perception and of spontaneous processes in self and other-referential cognition. Throughout, we discuss the myriad ways in which the social cognitive neuroscience approach has provided new insights into the nature and structure of self and person knowledge. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:451-470. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1183 This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition.

Neural correlates of people's hypercorrection of their false beliefs

Despite the intuition that strongly held beliefs are particularly difficult to change, the data on error correction indicate that general information errors that people commit with a high degree of belief are especially easy to correct. This finding is called the hypercorrection effect. The hypothesis was tested that the reason for hypercorrection stems from enhanced attention and encoding that results from a metacognitive mismatch between the person's confidence in their responses and the true answer. This experiment, which is the first to use imaging to investigate the hypercorrection effect, provided support for this hypothesis, showing that both metacognitive mismatch conditions-that in which high confidence accompanies a wrong answer and that in which low confidence accompanies a correct answer-revealed anterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus activations. Only in the high confidence error condition, however, was an error that conflicted with the true answer mentally present. And only the high confidence error condition yielded activations in the right TPJ and the right dorsolateral pFC. These activations suggested that, during the correction process after error commission, people (1) were entertaining both the false belief as well as the true belief (as in theory of mind tasks, which also manifest the right TPJ activation) and (2) may have been suppressing the unwanted, incorrect information that they had, themselves, produced (as in think/no-think tasks, which also manifest dorsolateral pFC activation). These error-specific processes as well as enhanced attention because of metacognitive mismatch appear to be implicated.

Self-development: integrating cognitive, socioemotional, and neuroimaging perspectives

This review integrates cognitive, socioemotional, and neuroimaging perspectives on self-development. Neural correlates of key processes implicated in personal and social identity are reported from studies of children, adolescents, and adults, including autobiographical memory, direct and reflected self-appraisals, and social exclusion. While cortical midline structures of medial prefrontal cortex and medial posterior parietal cortex are consistently identified in neuroimaging studies considering personal identity from a primarily cognitive perspective ("who am I?"), additional regions are implicated by studies considering personal and social identity from a more socioemotional perspective ("what do others think about me, where do I fit in?"), especially in child or adolescent samples. The involvement of these additional regions (including tempo-parietal junction and posterior superior temporal sulcus, temporal poles, anterior insula, ventral striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, middle cingulate cortex, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) suggests mentalizing, emotion, and emotion regulation are central to self-development. In addition, these regions appear to function atypically during personal and social identity tasks in autism and depression, exhibiting a broad pattern of hypoactivation and hyperactivation, respectively.

Dissociating neural correlates of action monitoring and metacognition of agency

Judgments of agency refer to people's self-reflective assessments concerning their own control: their assessments of the extent to which they themselves are responsible for an action. These self-reflective metacognitive judgments can be distinguished from action monitoring, which involves the detection of the divergence (or lack of divergence) between observed states and expected states. Presumably, people form judgments of agency by metacognitively reflecting on the output of their action monitoring and then consciously inferring the extent to which they caused the action in question. Although a number of previous imaging studies have been directed at action monitoring, none have assessed judgments of agency as a potentially separate process. The present fMRI study used an agency paradigm that not only allowed us to examine the brain activity associated with action monitoring but that also enabled us to investigate those regions associated with metacognition of agency. Regarding action monitoring, we found that being "out of control" during the task (i.e., detection of a discrepancy between observed and expected states) was associated with increased brain activity in the right TPJ, whereas being "in control" was associated with increased activity in the pre-SMA, rostral cingulate zone, and dorsal striatum (regions linked to self-initiated action). In contrast, when participants made self-reflective metacognitive judgments about the extent of their own control (i.e., judgments of agency) compared with when they made judgments that were not about control (i.e., judgments of performance), increased activity was observed in the anterior PFC, a region associated with self-reflective processing. These results indicate that action monitoring is dissociable from people's conscious self-attributions of control.