Karl Hart (2013): High Price

“Not one of them crawled on the floor, picking up random white particles and trying to smoke them. Not one was ranting or raving. No one was begging for more, either—and absolutely none of the cocaine users I studied ever became violent. I was getting similar results with methamphetamine users. They, too, defied stereotypes. The staff on the ward where my drug study participants lived for several weeks of tests couldn't even distinguish them from others who were there for studies on far less stigmatized conditions like heart disease and diabetes. To me, by that point in my career, their myth-busting behavior was no longer a surprise—no matter how odd and unlikely it may seem to many Americans raised on Drug Awareness Resistance Education (DARE) antidrug programs and "This is your brain on drugs" TV commercials. My participants' responses—and those in the dozens of other studies we'd already run, as well as studies by other researchers around the country—had begun to expose important truths. Not just about crack cocaine and about addiction, but about the way the brain works and the way that pleasure affects human behavior.”

Lawrence Ian Reed & Peter DeScioli (2017): “The emotional moves of a rational actor”

“A classic, brilliant analysis by the economist Thomas Schelling explains why a tantrum-throwing hotheaded seller might actually reap more profits than a calm, collected, rational one. The secret is the idea of a strategic commitment, when a person purposely limits their own freedom in order to influence someone else’s decisions. For instance, a clever military general could burn the bridges behind them to convince the enemy they will never retreat, which could persuade the enemy to retreat instead. Or, an enterprising merchant could sign a legal contract with a lender stipulating that failure to repay the loan will be punished by law; by committing to their own punishment in this eventuality, the merchant could win the lender’s trust. Analogously, a seller whose outrage is out of control has committed to mutual destruction if their demands are not met, which in certain circumstances could command a better price. In each case, an actor ties their own hands to a specific course of action, limits their own freedom, and thus, paradoxically, improves their bargaining position. Schelling is a game theorist but he also, accidentally, invented a startling and profound theory about the psychology of human emotions and emotional expressions.”

Dacher Keltner (2009): Born to Be Good

“Exhalation reduces fight/flight physiology, especially heart rate, calming the body down. In fact, a series of studies in the 1970s and 1980s found that simply having individuals engage in deep breathing led to reduced blood pressure, stress, and anxiety, and increased calm. When Robert Provine examined spectograms of different laughs—that is, their acoustic signatures—he took out the staccato bursts that we hear as “ha, ha, ha” or “tee, hee, hee.” These on average last about .75 seconds. In any typical laughter “bout,” there are three to four of these “calls.” What Provine found underlying those bursts was a deep sigh. Laughter is the primordial breathing technique, the first “take a deep breath” exhalation. When chimps and bonobos show the open-mouth play face, they are altering their fight/flight physiology to reduce the chances of aggression and opening up opportunities for play and affiliation.”

Disa Sauter & James Russell (2020): “What do nonverbal expressions tell us about emotion?”

“Consistent with the interaction of nature with nurture, theorists within each program acknowledge a continuum of preparedness and learning. … Laughter in response to tickling likely evolved in the context of rough-and-tumble play across species (Dezecache & Dunbar, 2012; Panksepp, 2007). An early form of this can be seen in humans within the first few months of life, human babies laugh when tickled and in other forms of social play (Sroufe & Waters, 1976). This response is found across cultures (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2015; Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, et al., 2010) and across species (Davila Ross, Owren, & Zimmermann, 2009; Knutson, Burgdorf, & Panksepp, 1998). However, nurture subsequently shapes laughter: Tickling doesn’t always elicit laughter or enjoyment; depending on context, especially the social relationship of those involved, tickling can elicit strong protest. A laugh can be social bonding with one person when directed at another in mockery. The social relationship also shapes the sound of laughter: Listeners can infer whether individuals in brief decontextualized instances of co-laughter are friends or strangers (Bryant et al., 2016). Laughter is also influenced by culture-specific forces, resulting in laughter sounding subtly different across cultural groups (Sauter, 2013; Sauter & Scott, 2007).”

Martha Nussbaum (2001): Upheavals of Thought

“The understanding of any single emotion is incomplete unless its narrative history is grasped and studied for the light it sheds on the present response. This already suggests a central role for the arts in human self-understanding: for narrative artworks of various kinds (whether musical or visual or literary) give us information about these emotion-histories that we could not easily get otherwise. This is what Proust meant when he claimed that certain truths about the human emotions can be best conveyed, in verbal and textual form, only by a narrative work of art: only such a work will accurately and fully show the interrelated temporal structure of emotional “thoughts,” prominently including the heart’s intermittences between recognition and denial of neediness.”

Michael Gazzaniga (2015): Tales from Both Sides of the Brain

“As I have mentioned earlier, emotional states appear to transfer between the hemispheres subcortically, and this transfer is not affected by severing the corpus callosum. Thus, even though all of the perceptions and experiences leading up to that emotional state may be isolated to the right hemisphere, both hemispheres will feel the emotion. Though the left hemisphere will have no clue why or where the emotion came from, it will always try to explain it away. For example, I showed a scary fire safety video about a guy getting pushed into a fire to the right hemisphere of V.P. When asked what she saw, she said: “I don’t really know what I saw. I think just a white flash.” But when asked if it made her feel any emotion, she said: “I don’t really know why, but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy, I think maybe I don’t like this room, or maybe it’s you, you’re getting me nervous.” She then turned to one of the research assistants and said, “I know I like Dr. Gazzaniga, but right now I’m scared of him for some reason.””

David Chalmers (2013): “How can we construct a science of consciousness?”

“Some aspects of conscious experience (e.g. the experience of music or of emotion) are very difficult to describe; in these cases we may need to develop a more refined language. … The candidates include (i) parametric formalisms, in which various specific features of conscious experience are isolated and parametrized (as in the case of color experience above); (ii) geometric and topological formalisms, in which the overall structure of an experience (such as a visual experience) is formalized in geometric or topological terms; (iii) informational formalisms, in which one characterizes the informational structure of an experience, specifying it as a sort of bit-by-bit state that falls into a larger space of informational states; and (iv) representational formalisms, in which one characterizes an experience by using language for the states of the world that the experience represents (one might characterize an experience as an experience as of a yellow cup, for example).”

Martie Haselton et al. (2016): “The evolution of cognitive bias”

“Many ostensible faults in human judgment and evaluation may reflect the operation of mechanisms designed to make inexpensive, frequent errors rather than occasional disastrous ones (Haselton & Nettle, 2006; Johnson et al., 2013). … Although all objects moved at the same speed, spiders were judged to be moving more quickly than the other objects. … There are asymmetric costs of injury from underestimating the height of a cliff, and perhaps erroneously judging it safe to jump, than from overestimating it and finding a different means of navigation. Consistent with this idea, people tend to judge the height of a vertical surface as greater when looking from the top than from the bottom (Jackson & Cormack, 2007; Stefanucci & Proffitt, 2009). … The significant bias toward false positives in assessing cues of disease threat has far-reaching social and societal implications, and may lie at the root of many forms of stigmatization and prejudice … For men, error management logic predicts a bias toward overestimating a potential mate’s sexual interest.”

Frederic Lord & Melvin Novick (1968): Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores

Ian Eisenberg et al. (2019): “Uncovering the structure of self-regulation through data-driven ontology discovery”

“Of particular note is the lack of alignment of the same putative constructs across measurement categories and the low predictive ability of behavioral tasks. The former has precedent in the literature in a number of domains, which this work expands upon, suggesting that the inappropriate overloading of psychological terms (jingle fallacies) is widespread. The latter shows that psychological constructs associated with tasks lack substantial real-world relevance, and points to a need for greater emphasis of predictive validity.” 

John Curtin et al. (2001): “Alcohol affects emotion through cognition”

“The present results indicate that alcohol does not affect fear at a primary subcortical (amygdala) level, but instead influences emotional response via effects on higher cortical systems that participate in the detection and recognition of affective cues embedded within a context. … As a function of their reduced fear response to the threat cue on divided-attention go trials, intoxicated participants showed diminished slowing of reaction time (i.e., reduced response inhibition) to the S2 when a threat word appeared as the S1. This finding coincides with substantial evidence indicating that the capacity of threat or punishment cues to inhibit behavior is reduced under conditions of intoxication. In the present context, this behavioral effect was adaptive—that is, intoxicated subjects outperformed control subjects on the reaction time task under threat conditions.”

June Price Tangney & Jessica Tracy (2012): “Self-conscious emotions”

“Shame is an acutely painful emotion that is typically accompanied by a sense of shrinking or “being small,” and by a sense of worthlessness and powerlessness. Shamed people also feel exposed. Although shame does not necessarily involve an actual observing audience to witness one’s shortcomings, there is often the imagery of how one’s defective self would appear to others. Lewis (1971) described a split in self-functioning in which the self is both agent and object of observation and disapproval. An observing self witnesses and denigrates the observed self as unworthy and reprehensible. Not surprisingly, shame often leads to a desire to escape or to hide—to sink into the floor and disappear. … Guilt, in contrast, is typically a less painful, devastating experience because the object of condemnation is a specific behavior, not the person as a whole.”

Sean Wojcik et al. (2015, Science): “Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness”

“Our research supports those recommending caution about promoting any particular ideology or policy as a road to happiness. Research investigating self-report–based happiness differences between nonrandomized groups (e.g., cultures, nations, and religious groups) may inadvertently capture differences in self-reporting styles rather than actual differences in emotional experience. Both behavioral measures and self-reports of subjective well-being are valuable tools, but any comprehensive assessment of subjective well-being should involve multiple methodological approaches. Reliance on any single methodology is likely to lead to an oversimplified account of not only who is happier than whom but also what it means to be happy at all.”

Nejc Dolensek et al. (2020, Science): “Facial expressions of emotion states and their neuronal correlates in mice”

“These “emotion events” of different types therefore included painful tail shocks, sweet sucrose, bitter quinine, and lithium chloride injections, which induce visceral malaise (14, 18), as well as freezing and escape behaviors (see methods). We video monitored the faces of head-fixed mice (Fig. 1A and fig. S1, A and B). … To test whether the underlying emotion event in any given mouse could be predicted solely from its facial expressions, we trained a random forest classifier (see materials and methods). The decoder could predict each underlying emotion event across different mice reaching accuracies >90%. Performance dropped on average below 15% if the decoder was trained on temporally shuffled data (Fig. 1F, fig. S4, and table S1).”

Changwoo Seo et al. (2019, Science): “Intense threat switches dorsal raphe serotonin neurons to a paradoxical operational mode”

“To probe the causal role of DRN 5-HT neurons in regulating movement in different environments, we optogenetically (21) activated 5-HT neurons (Fig. 3A and fig. S6A) during these behaviors. Optical stimulation of DRN 5-HT neurons reduced speed in the OFT [Fig. 3, B and C; ChR2, 3.67 ± 0.31 cm/s; enhanced yellow fluorescent protein (eYFP), 5.16 ± 0.44 cm/s], as expected (10). Speed decreased upon stimulation in both approach and avoidance tasks (approach: Fig. 3, D and E, and fig. S6, B and C; ChR2, 3.0 ± 0.3 cm/s; eYFP, 7.1 ± 1.0 cm/s; avoidance: Fig. 3, G and H, and fig. S6, D and E; ChR2, 2.2 ± 0.4 cm/s; eYFP, 3.8 ± 0.4 cm/s), and latency to chamber crossing was greater in stimulated animals in both tasks (Fig. 3, F and I). TST stimulation in the same mice produced an increase in movement (Fig. 3, J to L). These data provide causal evidence for a switch in DRN 5-HT neuron function from suppression to facilitation of movement in high-threat escape conditions.” See my thoughts here.

Luc Arnal et al. (2015): “Human screams occupy a privileged niche in the communication soundscape”

“In this series of acoustic, behavioral and neuroimaging experiments we characterized the spectral modulation of various natural and artificial sounds and demonstrated the ecological, behavioral, and neural relevance of roughness, a well-known perceptual attribute hitherto unrelated to any specific communicative function. The findings support the view that roughness, as featured in screams, improves the efficiency of warning signals, possibly by targeting sub-cortical neural circuits that promote the survival of the individual and speed up reaction to danger.”

Lisa Parr et al. (2005): “Influence of social context on the use of blended and graded facial displays in chimpanzees”

“We describe the facial and vocal communicative repertoire of chimpanzees and examine how they use graded and blended signals in different social contexts. Data from behavioral observations revealed that they used facial displays differently depending on the social context. Specifically, the variability can be explained by 7 factors representing nervousness and distress, agonism, contact reassurance, excitement, greetings, play, and vigilance.”

Shimpei Ishiyama & Michael Brecht (2016, Science): “Neural correlates of ticklishness in the rat somatosensory cortex”

“Rats emit ultrasonic vocalizations in response to tickling by humans. Tickling is rewarding through dopaminergic mechanisms, but the function and neural correlates of ticklishness are unknown. We confirmed that tickling of rats evoked vocalizations, approach, and unsolicited jumps (Freudensprünge). Recordings in the trunk region of the rat somatosensory cortex showed intense tickling-evoked activity in most neurons, whereas a minority of cells were suppressed by tickling. Tickling responses predicted non-tactile neural responses to play behaviors, which suggests a neuronal link between tickling and play.”

Jessica Tracy & David Matsumoto (2008): “The spontaneous expression of pride and shame: Evidence for biologically innate nonverbal displays”

“Results showed that sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals from >30 nations displayed the behaviors associated with the prototypical pride expression in response to success. Sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals from most cultures also displayed behaviors associated with shame in response to failure. However, culture moderated the shame response among sighted athletes: it was less pronounced among individuals from highly individualistic, self-expression-valuing cultures, primarily in North America and West Eurasia.”

Stuart Russell (2019): Human Compatible

“Robbie [the robot], observing the action, should (typically, although not in all cases) attribute the action to anger and frustration and a lack of self-control rather than deliberate sadism for its own sake. For this to work, Robbie has to have some understanding of human emotional states, including their causes, how they evolve over time in response to external stimuli, and the effects they have on action. … Again, machines are at a disadvantage when it comes to emotions: they cannot generate an internal simulation of an experience to see what emotional state it would engender.“

David Hume (1740): A Treatise of Human Nature

“Since reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition, I infer, that the same faculty is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion. This consequence is necessary. It is impossible reason coued have the latter effect of preventing volition, but by giving an impulse in a contrary direction to our passion; and that impulse, had it operated alone, would have been able to produce volition. Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but a contrary impulse; and if this contrary impulse ever arises from reason, that latter faculty must have an original influence on the will, and must be able to cause, as well as hinder any act of volition. But if reason has no original influence, it is impossible it can withstand any principle, which has such an efficacy, or ever keep the mind in suspence a moment. Thus it appears, that the principle, which opposes our passion, cannot be the same with reason, and is only called so in an improper sense. We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason.”

Hillary Elfenbein & Nalini Ambady (2003): “When familiarity breeds accuracy: Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition”

“These findings reveal that the effects of cultural familiarity can begin to occur within a relatively short time period. Chinese students residing in the United States for an average of 2.4 years could better recognize facial expressions of members of their host culture than the expressions of their fellow in-group members. However, these results also provide evidence that the effects of cultural familiarity extend over a long period of time, across generations in the case of Americans of Chinese ancestry. The large decrease across generations in Chinese American participants’ accuracy in understanding Chinese emotional expressions is especially strong evidence for the impact of cultural familiarity on the understanding of emotion.”

Mark Thornton & Diana Tamir (2017): “Mental models accurately predict emotion transitions”

“People naturally understand that emotions predict actions: angry people aggress, tired people rest, and so forth. Emotions also predict future emotions: for example, tired people become frustrated and guilty people become ashamed. … Across five studies, we observed consistent evidence that people have highly accurate mental models of others’ emotion transitions. … Almost all participants reported models that were positively correlated with experienced emotion transitions, suggesting that typical adults almost universally have an accurate mental model of others’ emotion transitions. Together, these results suggest that people have considerable insight into how emotions change from one to another over time.”

James Burkett et al. (2016, Science): “Oxytocin-dependent consolation behavior in rodents”

“Here, we provide empirical evidence that a rodent species, the highly social and monogamous prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster), greatly increases partner-directed grooming toward familiar conspecifics (but not strangers) that have experienced an unobserved stressor, providing social buffering. Prairie voles also match the fear response, anxiety-related behaviors, and corticosterone increase of the stressed cagemate, suggesting an empathy mechanism. Exposure to the stressed cagemate increases activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, and oxytocin receptor antagonist infused into this region abolishes the partner-directed response, showing conserved neural mechanisms between prairie vole and human.”

Jeanne Tsai et al. (2006): “Cultural variation in affect valuation”

“The authors propose that how people want to feel (“ideal affect”) differs from how they actually feel (“actual affect”) and that cultural factors influence ideal more than actual affect. In 2 studies, controlling for actual affect, the authors found that European American (EA) and Asian American (AA) individuals value high-arousal positive affect (e.g., excitement) more than do Hong Kong Chinese (CH). On the other hand, CH and AA individuals value low-arousal positive affect (e.g., calm) more than do EA individuals. For all groups, the discrepancy between ideal and actual affect correlates with depression. These findings illustrate the distinctiveness of ideal and actual affect, show that culture influences ideal affect more than actual affect, and indicate that both play a role in mental health.”

Jennifer Bartz et al. (2011): “Social effects of oxytocin in humans: context and person matter”

“We propose that the [social] salience hypothesis is best positioned to account for the existing data. First, the social salience hypothesis can explain why the social context is so crucial in shaping the effects of oxytocin on social cognition and prosociality. Increasing the salience of social cues should have widely varying effects on ‘downstream’ cognition and behavior that depend on the specific social information that is attended to (e.g. positive or negative facial expressions) and the situation in which social salience is increased (e.g. cooperative or competitive interactions). Second, the social salience hypothesis can simultaneously account for both the socially desirable and socially undesirable effects of oxytocin. Specifically, increasing people’s attention to social cues can be expected to magnify prosociality when dealing with familiar, close or reliable others but diminish prosociality under situations of competition, uncertainty, or when interacting with out-group members. Third, the social salience hypothesis sheds light on the individual- and population-specific effects of oxytocin. If oxytocin increases people’s attention to social cues, then it should be especially helpful for those who are less attuned to such cues at baseline, such as the less socially proficient individuals in the study of empathic accuracy. By the same token, increasing people’s attention to social cues could be detrimental to individuals who are generally hypersensitive to social cues and have a bias towards interpreting them negatively.”

Rob Voigt et al. (2017): “Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect”

“Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop.“

Thomas Naselaris et al. (2011): “Encoding and decoding in fMRI”

(Note: This is about fMRI, but applies to behavioral models.) “The experimental stimuli exist in an input space whose axes correspond the stimulus dimensions. … The [responses] exist in an activity space … Interposed between the input space and the activity space is an abstract feature space. … The mapping between the input space and the feature space is nonlinear, while the mapping between the feature space and the activity space is linear. The feature space is called linearizing, because the nonlinear mapping into feature space linearizes the relationship between the stimulus and the response. … any linearizing feature space reflects some specific hypothesis about the features that might be represented … If the feature space provides an accurate description of the mapping between stimuli and responses, then the linearizing model based on that feature space will accurately predict responses … the best that a model can do is predict the most likely pattern of activity … The main hypothesis determines the feature space … the stimuli or task conditions should admit multiple feature spaces.”

David Freedberg & Vittorio Gallese (2007): “Motion, emotion and empathy in aesthetic experience”

“The historic theories of physiognomic expression, such as those of Charles Le Brun from 1688 onwards, suggested correlations between specific facial expressions and specific emotions. They have generally not been taken as seriously as they merit. Despite the work of Paul Ekman on the correlations between emotion and physiognomic expression, the earlier claims continue to be regarded as having no empirical foundation. Yet current neuroscientific research has begun to unveil the bases for such correlations. For example, electromyographic responses in the facial muscles of observers are congruent with those involved in the observed person’s facial expressions. The integrity of the sensorimotor system is crucial for the recognition of emotions displayed by others because it supports the reconstruction of what it would feel like to be in a particular emotion, by means of simulation of the related body state. The implication of this process for empathy should be obvious.”

Lucie Laplane et al. (2019): “Why science needs philosophy”

“Philosophy has also helped the field of cognitive science winnow problematic or outdated assumptions, helping drive scientific change. The concepts of mind, intelligence, consciousness, and emotion are used ubiquitously across different fields with often little agreement on their meaning. Engineering artificial intelligence, constructing psychological theories of mental state variables, and using neuroscience tools to investigate consciousness and emotion require the conceptual tools for self-critique and cross-disciplinary dialogue—precisely the tools that philosophy can supply.”

Leanne ten Brinke & Stephen Porter (2012): “Cry me a river: Identifying the behavioral consequences of extremely high-stakes interpersonal deception”

“We conducted the most comprehensive study to date of the behavioral consequences of extremely high-stakes, real-life deception—relative to comparable real-life sincere displays—via 3 communication channels: speech, body language, and emotional facial expressions. Televised footage of a large international sample of individuals (N=78) emotionally pleading to the public for the return of a missing relative was meticulously coded frame-by-frame (30 frames/s for a total of 74,731 frames). About half of the pleaders eventually were convicted of killing the missing person on the basis of overwhelming evidence. Failed attempts to simulate sadness and leakage of happiness revealed deceptive pleaders’ covert emotions.”

Jennifer Lerner et al. (2004): “Heart strings and purse strings: Carryover effects of emotions on economic decisions”

“Although economists often posit a strong role of emotion in economics (Krugman, 2001; Loewenstein, 1996) and even find significant correlations between weather (used as a proxy for mood) and stock market returns (Hirshleifer & Shumway, 2003; Kamstra, Kramer, & Levi, 2003), this study demonstrates that emotions of the same valence can have opposing causal effects. Overall, the pattern of results supports the hypotheses that disgust triggers goals to expel, reducing buying and selling prices, whereas sadness triggers the goal of changing one's circumstances, increasing buying prices but reducing selling prices. The effects are sufficiently strong that in one case (disgust) they eliminate the endowment effect, and in the other case (sadness) they actually reverse it.” (Effects have been replicated.)

Philippe Verduyn et al. (2017): “Do social network sites enhance or undermine subjective well‐being? A critical review”

“This research reveals: (a) negative relationships between passively using social network sites and subjective well-being, and (b) positive relationships between actively using social network sites and subjective well-being, with the former relationship being more robust than the latter. Specifically, passively using social network sites provokes social comparisons and envy, which have negative downstream consequences for subjective well-being. In contrast, when active usage of social network sites predicts subjective well-being, it seems to do so by creating social capital and stimulating feelings of social connectedness.“ (This interview is a relevant but more qualitative analysis.)

William Brady et al. (2017): “Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks”

”Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. … Our analysis of the moral and emotional language used on Twitter may help to explain why certain political messages “go viral” on social media. … This finding highlights the need for an analysis of how specific emotions are functionally linked to moral outcomes, especially when it comes to the transmission of moral ideas.”

Soroush Vosoughi et al. (2018, Science): “The spread of true and false news online”

“It took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1500 people. … We found that false rumors inspired replies expressing greater surprise (K-S test = 0.205, P ~ 0.0), corroborating the novelty hypothesis, and greater disgust (K-S test = 0.102, P ~ 0.0), whereas the truth inspired replies that expressed greater sadness (K-S test = 0.037, P ~ 0.0), anticipation (K-S test = 0.038, P ~ 0.0), joy (K-S test = 0.061, P ~ 0.0), and trust (K-S test = 0.060, P ~ 0.0). … The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.”

Yoshihisa Kashima et al. (2019): “Emotion in cultural dynamics”

“…individuals’ mutual recognition that they share similar psychological responses to the target can establish their shared reality about the target by socially verifying their understandings of the emotion-triggering event… Mutual knowledge is a critical condition for coordinated action (Lewis, 1969). Without mutually knowing that they share a certain understanding of the situation, people would not be able to count on each other to act on this shared understanding. Indeed, mutual knowledge has been shown to enhance efficient social coordination (e.g., Thomas et al., 2014). Thus, emotion sharing predisposes those who share their emotions to categorize themselves as members of a group that can coordinate their actions and cooperate with each other to pursue their emotion-relevant objectives (e.g., Livingstone et al., 2016; Peters & Kashima, 2015; Thomas et al., 2009).”

Michelle N. Meyer et al. (2019): “Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments”

“Randomized experiments have enormous potential to improve human welfare in many domains, including healthcare, education, finance, and public policy. However, such “A/B tests” are often criticized on ethical grounds even as similar, untested interventions are implemented without objection. We find robust evidence across 16 studies of 5,873 participants from three diverse populations spanning nine domains—from healthcare to autonomous vehicle design to poverty reduction—that people frequently rate A/B tests designed to establish the comparative effectiveness of two policies or treatments as inappropriate even when universally implementing either A or B, untested, is seen as appropriate. This “A/B effect” is as strong among those with higher educational attainment and science literacy and among relevant professionals.”

Mayank Agrawal et al. (2020): “Scaling up psychology via Scientific Regret Minimization”

“We suggest that researchers should leverage the size of large datasets to train theoretically unconstrained machine learning models to identify the amount of variance in the dataset that can be explained. Next, because these models do not necessarily give insight to the underlying cognitive processes, a simple and interpretable psychological model should be fit on the same dataset. Researchers should then critique the psychological model with respect to the black box model rather than the data. The intuition here is that the psychological model should only be penalized for incorrectly predicting phenomena that are predictable (i.e., we should pay close attention to those errors that result in regret). This critiquing process should continue until the predictions of both models converge, thereby ending with a model that jointly maximizes predictive and explanatory power.”

Monique Smith et al. (2021, Science): “Anterior cingulate inputs to nucleus accumbens control the social transfer of pain and analgesia”

“Empathy is an essential component of social communication that involves experiencing others' sensory and emotional states. We observed that a brief social interaction with a mouse experiencing pain or morphine analgesia resulted in the transfer of these experiences to its social partner. Optogenetic manipulations demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and its projections to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) were selectively involved in the social transfer of both pain and analgesia. By contrast, the ACC→NAc circuit was not necessary for the social transfer of fear, which instead depended on ACC projections to the basolateral amygdala. These findings reveal that the ACC, a brain area strongly implicated in human empathic responses, mediates distinct forms of empathy in mice by influencing different downstream targets.”