Neural components of social evaluation.

Abstract

Evaluative responses appear to involve 2 seemingly distinct sets of processes: those that are automatically activated and others that are more consciously controlled. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors investigated the brain systems associated with automatic and controlled evaluative processing. Participants made either evaluative (good-bad) or nonevaluative (past-present) judgments about famous names. Greater amygdala activity was observed for names rated as "bad" relative to those rated as "good," regardless of whether the task directly involved an evaluative judgment (good-bad) or not (past-present). Good-bad judgments resulted in greater medial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity than past-present judgments. Furthermore, there was greater ventrolateral PFC activity in good-bad judgments marked by greater ambivalence. Together, these findings indicate a neural distinction between processes engaged for automatic and controlled evaluation. Whereas automatic processes are sensitive to simple valence, controlled processes are sensitive to attitudinal complexity.Arguably, among the most important cognitive processes are those that are involved in people's evaluation of their physical and social environment, including objects, persons, and events. The seemingly ordinary act of assigning valence-good and bad-is crucial for survival, guiding behavior toward or away from a significant object in the immediate environment or in anticipation of future rewards and punishments in goal attainment. It is not surprising then, that the brain systems that underlie these processes have been of considerable interest (see LeDoux, 1996). Nevertheless, there remains much to be done to fully understand how various component processes work independently and together to produce complex and coherent social evaluations.To understand the affective and cognitive processes of evaluation, the present research brought together theory, research, and methods of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to clarify the nature of social evaluation. Using functional neuroimaging to examine variation in brain activity as a function of perceiver intentions, the information processed, and the interaction between intention and information, we can begin to identify the distinct cognitive and affective processes that are involved in social evaluations. In particular, the present study used theoretical ideas and findings about attitude/evaluation and attitudinal ambivalence to investigate the neural mechanisms that give rise to them. Neuroimaging evidence provides convergent validity for theoretical constructs used to characterize social cognition, and also offers suggestions about the constraints on social cognitive models of evaluation. Conversely, the theoretical framework from social cognition is critical for interpreting neuroimaging data regarding social processes and for understanding and generating new hypotheses about brain function. The Social Cognition of EvaluationIn the past 2 decades, the use of indire...

Neural bases for impaired social cognition in schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders

“…Although the VLPFC has not been included in all previous studies of face processing, recent evidence implicates this region in making evaluative judgments (Cunningham et al, 2003), and it has been found to modulate activation of the amygdala while viewing faces and labeling facial expressions (Cunningham et al, 2004;Hariri et al, 2003). As such, this region may play an important role in top-down processing of social stimuli.…”

Affect labeling enhances exposure effectiveness for public speaking anxiety

“…A number of neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that labeling one's emotional experience activates areas of the PFC, and reduces activation in the amygdala (Gorno-Tempini et al, 2001;Hariri, Bookheimer, & Mazziotta, 2000;Hariri, Mattay, Tessitore, Fera, & Weinberger, 2003;Narumoto et al, 2000). The right ventrolateral PFC is consistently activated during affect labeling (Cunningham, Johnson, Chris, Gore, & Banaji, 2003;Lieberman et al, 2007;Narumoto et al, 2000), and it is presumed that this region downregulates amygdala activation. The principle of neural plasticity states that repetition of a process can increase efficiency and efficacy of that process through changes in neuron function, chemical profile, and structure (Anderson, 2010;Kandel & Schwartz, 1982).…”

Principles, processes, and puzzles of social cognition: An introduction for the special issue on social cognitive neuroscience

“…Early imaging studies focused on stereotypes (Hart et al, 2000;Phelps et al, 2000), self-knowledge (Kelley et al, 2002), and theory of mind (Baron-Cohen et al, 1994;Frith and Frith, 1999); however, work has now extended into several areas of social psychological inquiry including self-serving biases (Blackwood et al, 2003), self-awareness (Gusnard et al, 2001;Keenan et al, 2001;Eisenberger et al, in press), judgment and decision-making (De Quervain et al, 2004;Sanfey et al, 2003), cooperation (Kosfeld et al, 2005;Rilling et al, 2004), selfschemas , person knowledge (Mitchell et al, 2004a), social exclusion (Eisenberger et al, 2003), attitudinal evaluation (Cunningham et al, 2003;Wood et al, 2005), regulation of stereotypes (Amodio et al, 2003;Richeson et al, 2003;Wheeler and Fiske, 2005), expectancy effects Petrovic et al, 2002;Wager et al, 2004), relational cognition (Aron et al, 2005;Iacoboni et al, 2004), empathy (Carr et al, 2003;Singer et al, 2004), and emotional reappraisal (Beauregard et al, 2001;Ochsner et al, 2002). This special issue devoted to social cognitive neuroscience brings new light to these existing themes (Cunningham, Espinet, DeYoung, and Zelazo, this issue; Mitchell, Banaji, and Macrae, this issue; Ochsner et al, this issue; Sander et al, this issue) and tackles areas new to social cognitive neuroscience such as attribution (Harris, Todorov, and Fiske, this issue; Heberlein and Saxe, this issue), attachment (Gillath, Bunge, Shaver, Wendelken, and Mikulincer, this issue), self-esteem (Pruessner et al, this issue), and intention planning …”